MarkMaunder dot com

Try Buying your Hardware

We took a lot of heat from the startup community when we bought $40,000 of Dell servers, a switch and a KVM and racked them ourselves in 2008. Seriously, Kerry (my wife and co-founder) and I hand-racked about 10 Dell 2950’s and a couple of 1950’s in the rack we leased at our data center. We didn’t […]

February 28, 2015 | Startup Hacks, Startups | No comments

11 Questions Every Startup's Money Guy Should Be Able to Answer in Her Sleep.

Every profitable business has a Money Guy. Sometimes it’s the CEO, sometimes it’s another member of the exec team. Money sticks to this persons hands for reasons unknown. They know how to get the best deals for anything they buy and they have a habit of making more money than they lose. If you don’t […]

July 23, 2012 | Finance, Startup Hacks, Startups | No comments

Trial, Error and the God Complex

My new favorite economist Tim Harford did a great TED talk recently chatting about our assumption that an expert approach is needed to problem solving. He argues that instead we should rely more on trial and error, a method that has proven very effective both in nature and business.   If the loading animation won’t […]

July 18, 2011 | Business, Economics, Startup Hacks, Startups | No comments

Domain name search tools

Clarence from Panabee pinged me a few minutes ago mentioning Panabee.com. I hadn’t heard of it and along with nxdom.com I’m going to add it to my toolkit to brainstorm available domain names. My attitude re names these days fluctates between the-name-is-everything and back to sanity. A week ago I was obsessed with the domain […]

May 27, 2011 | Startup Hacks, Startups, Trademark | No comments

Why we breathe

Hold your breath for a moment. In about 10 to 30 seconds you’ll be feeling a strong desire to take a breath. That’s not caused by lack of oxygen. It’s caused by excess carbon dioxide buildup in your blood. [Ok you can breathe again.] The trigger in mammals that causes us to want to take […]

November 11, 2009 | Startup Hacks, Startups | 1 comment

Costs and Startups – Advice for your CFO

In any company if you save $1 it goes straight to your bottom line. Meaning it’s as if you just earned another $1. The company that my wife and I have been running for about 2 years now serves over 30 Million page requests per day. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting more […]

November 1, 2009 | Finance, Startup Hacks, Startups | 1 comment

Startup Hacks: Marketing with no money – RescueTime Interview

This is a followup post to “Think you work hard? Think again.” which generated over 5,000 pageviews in a short time and almost took down my blog server this morning. It’s an audio interview with Tony Wright, the founder and CEO of RescueTime.com. The interview runs for just over 17 Mins. Click here to listen […]

July 25, 2007 | Startup Hacks | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.