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It’s fun to imagine the vast potential of a new product that is attempting to create a brand new market. Space exploration, nanotechnology, virtual reality, breakthrough cures for diseases, etc. This type of innovation has enormous potential to change people’s lives and with that, huge potential investment returns. Many early-stage investors focus on companies developing cutting-edge products or technology.

It’s easy to be seduced by these sexy new ideas. These investors easily envision a world (or at least a target market) positively impacted by these innovations and they project outsized returns by investing in the first-movers. While this investment approach is helpful in terms of serving as a catalyst for important, technological advanc...

All entrepreneurs launch with the hope that their businesses will live forever – or at least survive the next hundred years. They develop long-term business plans, chart growth paths, and seek advice from veteran business owners. Those words of wisdom likely don’t advise them to find a way to “cannibalize” their own companies.

But even if your company hits the hundred-year mark, you should always be looking for ways to revolutionize your initial idea before someone else does. No cautionary tale better illustrates this point than Kodak.

Most people would be surprised to discover that Kodak invented the digital camera, but it didn’t commercialize it for fear of jeopardizing its film business. By the time Kodak realized its digital camera prot...

Your potential customers live in a noisy world, so your company needs to build a concise story that will penetrate all of the clamor and actually reachyour consumer base. This means condensing the major points of your company into two consumable bits: your company story and your founder story. Having both and keeping them distinguishable from one another is really important for ensuring that neither overshadows the other, but together will create leverage for a great brand story.

The 2 components of an effective company story:

1. The myth of your brand. Describe what it is about your brand that is spectacular and illuminate the ideal long-term impact of your brand on the market.
2. The literal description. What your company is tangibly offering...

The traditional media is stuck in a toxic love affair with social media platforms. Nowadays, 62 percent of adults in the US use social media to get news. At the same time, 50 percent of social media users report having shared news stories, images or videos on their social media feeds, and 46 percent have discussed a news issue or event.

On one hand traditional media companies are struggling to monetize, as readers flock to social media and other new digital media platforms. On the other hand, social media accounts for a huge amount of their traffic and shares, and offers access to younger demographic audience, who have grown up reading media online rather than in print.

In the beginning, news and media sites were quick to jump on the bandw...

The horse and buggy was interrupted by the car. Television interrupted radio. Malls interrupted the town square and of course the internet interrupted, well, everything.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford

The greatest advances in life seem to come when someone interrupts the status quo and dares to challenge traditional thinking.

God bless those who dare to interrupt!

But sometimes, some of us entrepreneurial types watch those Interrupters and think to ourselves, “Hey! That interruption stopped short of its potential!”. We see the possibilities extending beyond the sight of the original Interrupter. We watch the disruption as it unfolds and make note of the many changes the disruption ...

Remember when clouds were just for sifting snow, and “the Cloud” was just for storage?

A lot has happened since those days. A lot. But the Cloud’s out-of-sight and out-of-mind nature makes it easy to miss the benefits of the latest developments.

Why Cloud computing matters

Recently I sat down with my colleague Eric Schmidt, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) certified Cloud Systems Architect, to talk about his perspective on the future of Cloud computing. Our aim was to exchange ideas as we create products and services our customers value.

Cloud computing is a key strategic compon...

It’s a key buzzword of our time. What worrying over ‘The Age of Distraction’ really reveals is our great anxiety about maintaining focus and meaningful interactions, when we’re saturated with opportunities for immediate and trivial communications.

In 2017, we commonly understand that this ‘saturation anxiety’ is inextricable from our modern relationship to smartphones. One recent study shows that the average 18–33 year old checks their smartphone a shocking 85 times a day, while another reveals that the average attention span has fallen a third since 2000 (or around the time of the mobile revolution.) Clearly, any present-day solution to these problems has to take into account the smartphone question.

But distraction anxieties have been on...

We built our company, Sidebench, without funding because we wanted to and because we could. Our focus from day one was on building a fundamentally sound, multimillion-dollar business.

Giving ourselves a pile of unearned cash and putting ourselves in a hole up front seemed like a bad way to do that. We knew that, for a technology services company, all you truly need when starting a business is a client, a computer, and internet access.

We saw a market opportunity that aligned with our skill set, obtained paying clients on day one, and spent time understanding and refining our business model to ensure that it was indeed viable.

Instead of looking for funding and spending time worrying about investors, we spent all of our time on growing a pro...

We aim to make it easy for you to do everything you want to do yourself, with expert tips and advice. We believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, with just a bit of common sense, some smart strategies and step-by-step guides. After all, short of brain surgery and rocket science, how hard can it be? With our guides, you can fix every problem you encounter, make anything you want to make or build, and keep your home, career and business on track. We’ll even show you how to wash the cat — and live to tell the tale. Think there’s a topic we should be covering? Or maybe you have some expert DIY advice to give? Email me at editor@howtodiyeverything.com ... And happy DIYing!

Passion

Passion may be a startup buzzword, but it is the trait shared by most successful founders and entrepreneurs. It’s what keeps you going, fuels your team, and leads to personal satisfaction. “If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, you will be successful,” says Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and chairman.

But, what kind of passion is at the root of your company? I’ve noticed most founders fall into one of two camps: being passionate about the problem you want to fix, or passionate about the solution to that problem. Both are about solving problems—the real nuance is in how you get there.

What Motivates Me

Finding the right solution to a problem is what motivates me. It’s what a friend of mine endearingly calls a “hate f...