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
As I sat drinking espresso chatting to my experienced entrepreneur friend who prefers to remain anonymous, we decided there are three classes of businesses: Mimes Mime businesses perform a service similar to a mime in a Parisian public square. The mime can try and charge the audience, but it doesn’t always work and it’s tough. […]
July 12, 2011 | Startups | No comments
If you’re using timthumb in your wordpress theme on WordPressMU and it’s not finding certain files, this may be why: WordPressMU uses the blogs.dir directory to store uploads. timthumb’s search routine when looking for images to resize doesn’t include this directory. Here a modified version I created that does include the dir: https://markmaunder.com/timthumb.txt You will […]
July 12, 2011 | Startups | 1 comment
I’ve had this blog entry saved as draft for a month, and Tom Buck’s post earlier today titled “Failure: Building a $50/month web app” inspired me to post this. He remarks in his post “My mistake quickly became obvious: I had built a tool for an audience that didn’t like to spend money.”. Here’s my […]
Update: It’s sold. You know those bought-new-by-an-old-lady-and-hardly-driven sports car deals used car salesmen try to convince you you’re getting. Well this is the real deal so I thought I’d post it to my blog. My mom in law who is a lovely english lady with a taste for red collectible sports cars is selling her […]
June 29, 2011 | Startups | 1 comment
Money talks. Or, in this case it doesn’t. Have you noticed that the vast majority of published ideas will not increase your business or personal revenue? If someone has a truly great idea for increasing earnings or creating new revenue out of thin air, they will implement or trade it themselves and will never share. At […]
The Alexa graph above only shows the ycombinator.com domain, but most of the traffic to the domain is HN. Also HN is visible on several other domains like hackerne.ws, which isn’t counted in the above graph, so it’s probably already passed Slashdot. Footnote: This post was something more political re comment scores. But I decided I […]
May 28, 2011 | Startups | No comments
It’s been a year long break from blogging and getting back to writing and getting a so many new visitors this soon is cool. [Thanks HN!] This blog runs on the smallest available Linode 512 instance for $20/month. It runs several sites including family blogs and hobby sites. I run nginx on the front end […]
May 28, 2011 | Economics, Innovation, lighttpd, Nginx, Startups | No comments
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
This quote, which went viral 2 months ago and that Steinbeck probably never said, has stuck with me: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ~Maybe not Steinbeck, but it’s cool and it’s true. As temporarily embarrassed millionaire programmers I feel we sometimes […]
May 27, 2011 | Innovation, Inspiration, Printing Money, Startups | 13 comments