What the Fax?
In this day and age, faxes are still surprisingly widely used. Should you have a fax machine to run your business? Not necessarily. I’ve got the solution to all your faxing needs and it’s not expensive.
In this day and age, faxes are still surprisingly widely used. Should you have a fax machine to run your business? Not necessarily. I’ve got the solution to all your faxing needs and it’s not expensive.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted under the “stealth” tag. If you’re unaware, these stealth posts are for businesses made up of just one or two people that try to give the illusion of a thriving office environment, instead of just a living room/office.
Most businesses have 9-5 business hours. It’s not necessary that you post business hours on your site. And responding to customers during business hours may be difficult, depending on your day job, service or technology.
On June 30th, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP programming language, joined Earndit as advisor.
You may remember my interview with Earndit back on April 7th. The free service tracks members’ exercise (jogs, runs, walking) and offers rewards in the form of discounts on great products.
Don’t use photos of people pointing at computers
You’ve come up with a brilliant startup idea, and perhaps have even completed the site, but at this point it’s just working wireframes. It’s ugly. It’s time to employ your design skills to make it appeal to people. But if you’re like me, your design skills are not up to the task? So what do you do? Hire a design firm at thousands of dollars? That could work but it kind of goes against the cheapskate theme I have going here. What you need are some attractive, ready-made site designs!
As I mentioned a few months back in I’m a Startup Rancher, I tend to create startups, let them run for a while, and see if they have any traction. Some flop due to difficulties in the business model, or in the marketing, or just because I didn’t solve a problem that many people had. So the failed startups get taken offline and are heaped onto the compost pile. But once you have paying customers, turning off a service that people depend on can have big consequences.
My last post covered getting your email campaigns out on your own. Today will cover all-in-one email services. These services will handle subscribes/unsubscribes, email composition, CAN-SPAM compliance, will keep your email looking consistent across many email clients, send email for you, and keep analytics on opens, bounces, and clicks.
Whether you have a good-sized customer base and email list or you’ve got a nice blog following going, at some point you’re going to want to blast out an email campaign to everyone. It’s not as easy as writing out a nicely formatted email in Outlook and sending out a big BCC to everyone. Don’t do that. Seriously, don’t.
Not too long ago, I wrote a lengthy post called “I’m Your BlackBerry” where I explained how great my BlackBerry is for getting business done. I was at that point shopping for a new BlackBerry to replace my aging one.
Then a little over a week ago a buddy of mine was showing me his new Droid Incredible. It was mighty impressive. It was fast, beautiful, had a polished user interface, and did everything my phone did (camera, wi-fi, web browsing, multiple email accounts, etc) but better.
When you set out to build your startup, coming up with a business model is one of the qualifiers, and hand-in-hand with that decision is what payment model to use. If making money solely using ads is your revenue model, you may skip this article. Today I’ll touch on how customers will pay you.

Today we introduce Medizzle, a medically-focused social network that connects doctors and patients, and matches up users using a whiz-bang algorithm so that they can find each other more easily and share experiences and questions about their medical conditions. I interview Dr. C. Layne Fontenot, the CEO of Collaborative Health Solutions, and Wade Sikkink, Chief Marketing Officer.