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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...

How many startups launched last year? How many of them succeeded? While some of them fail simply because they didn’t create something people want. A bigger chunk vanished due to the wrong execution of their growth and marketing.

Growth is key, yet growing a startup is really hard.

Many founders struggle to figure it out. What makes it even harder is the overwhelming amount of tactics and the “one size fits all” hacks that dictate how we should be running our own growth & marketing efforts.

While these pieces of advice are supposed to be an inspiration, a lot of founders take them as a prescription and apply them them regardless of the context of their product or customers.

I think this happens because many founders love “short-cuts” and...

Virtual machines powered the original revolution in the cloud. However, the serverless revolution will be even bigger.

Remember when it used to take weeks to deploy a new application? You had to requisition new hardware, wait for its arrival, install an OS, setup a Rack, and plug it into your data center. In most cases this meant waiting for your IT team and getting approval from several layers of management. You could put in a request for hardware, go on an extended vacation, and come back to find nothing was done.

Much of this tedium was done away with Virtual Machine technology. Now, with a single click you can provision and launch a “machine” that was preconfigured with all the necessary software and settings. New applications could be ...

I have a startup and I know my model will be suitable for both the urban market and the B2B market, do I launch during MVP and after to only 1 market or can I do both eg. run different campaigns etc...? Think Airbnb like model - very related to both.

Don’t miss out! Check out the previous chapters here:

–Chapter One
–Chapter Two
–Chapter Three
–Chapter Four

CHAPTER FIVE: Build Priority Folders

In This Chapter:

• Easily access the most important emails first with priority folders
• Build a response system based off importance—not time.

So, one of our biggest goals is to get rid of all of the time sucking aspects of email. Email drains our time because we don’t process it properly.

For example—take a quick peek at your inbox.

Are you back? Cool.

Well, you’ll note that there is typically only one factor that sorts all of those wonderful and random messages—and that is Time.

While this will help you figure out who’s emailing you at 3am, and who emailed you a few seconds ago—it really doesn...

When you’re a startup founder, there are certain materials you’re going to work with again and again. Balance sheets, term sheets, customer journey maps – get comfortable with these. You’re going to be seeing a lot of them.

Another startup stalwart you’ll definitely want to have down cold: the landing page.

Landing pages are the ultimate utility players of startup marketing. Want to validate an idea? You need a landing page. Need to build an email list? You need a landing page. Got a new product you need to tell people about? Seems like maybe you should think about creating a landing page.

You get the picture: if you’re starting a company, you’re going to need a landing page at some point, if you haven’t already. So you might as well pop th...