So what happens when you discover that a feature isn’t working properly in one obscure browser?  If you’re like me, you let it go. 

There are quite a few obscure browsers out there, and my obscure meaning that the percent of the overall users using them is very little: Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, SRWare Iron, K-Meleon, Lunascape, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, Songbird, Beonex, Camino, Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, Avant Browser, Maxthon, and I’m sure the list continues.  Even well known browsers (though older versions) fall into this category: Firefox 2, IE 5.5, etc.

I pretty much stop at 3%. If your browser’s share of use is less than 3%, I’m not fixing the issue.  Even if your given browser is 100% standards compliant and scores 100 on the Acid3 test, you’re out of luck with me.

I also stop at 3% on not only browsers, but also operating systems. Still hanging onto Windows ME? Not going to test or fix my apps on that.

When it comes to mobile, you’ll have to find the percentage you’re comfortable with. There are just so many handsets and form factors out there.

Finding out the Cut-off

Where do you find out what to cut out?  The main thing I use is Google Analytics stats for zKorean. Since it is a high-traffic site with a good spread of users across many ages and demographics, I’m pretty comfortable with it.  I also tend to use W3Schools stats (yes I know there are W3Schools haters, don’t give in to hate).  But be warned that sites like this have very tech-heavy visitors like programmers and designers which can skew the OS and browser numbers towards Linux, Mac, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, so take their stats but keep it in mind.

See how Opera is below the 3% cut-off? Sorry, Opera users.  Then I have to dig in to each browser and see where its cutoff is for its per-version market share.  Your favorite spreadsheet program comes in handy here.   W3Schools breaks it out for you already, so you can put away your calculator.  But if you’re doing it on your own, and browser X has a 55% share, but it’s newest version only has 12% of that, then the newest version is at 6.6% of overall share (0.55 x 0.12 = 0.066, then multiply by 100).

Love Thy Customer

But when responding to a customer about it, just be apologetic with a little friendly prodding:

“I’m sorry that you’ve had an issue with using the sorting feature on x browser. I would like to help, but our company does not have the resources to test across a large number of browsers and platforms.  The best we can do is make sure that it runs on the most common configurations. In the future, hopefully we’ll have the ability to run our tests across even the rarest of browser/OS combinations.”

Some of you may say, “well x browser uses the Gecko engine, just like Firefox, are you saying you don’t support it?”. I support the browser, not the engine. Since browser makers are always looking to add some feature to make their browser special, all bets are off if they break the rendering or goof up behaviors.

Don’t be That Kind of Designer

Don’t take the other extreme, either. I’ve seen many a condescending message from a “better than you” designer on a website.  I’m talking about the kind of web designer that thumbs his nose at users running IE, or visitors that are using browsers that aren’t standards compliant (and I could rant on how browsers that tout standards-compliance always add in special sauce to push their own standards, but I won’t). If a browser is below 3%, like IE6, you can show a nice message to your visitor, or let your pages degrade somewhat gracefully.  But if I happen to be on IE8 and checking out your site, I don’t expect “Your browser is weaksauce and doesn’t support web standards.  Go away and come back on a real browser.”  Almost as bad are sites that just fall apart on IE (even IE9) because the designer didn’t think it worth their time to even check.  Yes, the box model is different.  I get it.  But regular Joe web user is not going to blame their browser for how bad your site looks. They are just going to think you suck as a designer.

Going Large

If you are Google or Yahoo, you have the resources (people power) and extensive automation/testing systems to test across a larger range of possible platform/browser combinations. So Yahoo and Google don’t cut off at 3%.  They go below 1%.  The reason is they can afford to not alienate users on obscure configurations.  And each 1% represents millions of people.  It’s a noble goal to be inclusive as possible, but within the limits of what you can handle.

What Do You Think?

Comment below on where you think the cutoff should be.  How far do you go to ensure the experience is pleasant to a variety of users?

Next post: I’ve Joined Earndit as an Advisor

OK, this is where the real action happens. Once you’ve got your business and personal accounts separated, it’s time to take the plunge and get your LLC.  There are any number of companies that would jump to help you: The Company Corporation and LegalZoom are just two.  But since I’ve had good experience with LegalZoom in the past I used them.

I’ll guide you through the whole process, which takes about 30 minutes.  Let’s go!

Whether you’re here to incorporate or do an LLC, they can handle either, and for just about every state. But for the purposes of this, we’re going with a Delaware LLC.

Step 1:

Get to LegalZoom’s LLC start page.

There are three packages you can choose, but you don’t have to worry about picking which until checkout.  There’s something here for everyone from the budget-conscious to the impatient high-roller.  I chose the middle package (Standard), because I wasn’t in a huge hurry, and because I’m a sucker for fancy stuff like leather-looking binders and company seals:

Before we go too much further, here’s a rundown of the price I paid for the whole deal:

I chopped off the part where it states that the purchase price is tax deductible, subject to IRS limitations.  Also, if you are a little queasy on the total, they offer an installment plan over 2 months.  It also mentioned that a typical lawyer would charge $1839 for a LLC. Wowzers.  Anyway, enough with narrow filler. On with the show.

I’ll hit on some of the screens you’ll see and give you some extra info on what they are asking. The little help parts on the forms were quite helpful in making informed decisions about which paths to take.

Step 2:

I won’t go over every screen (although almost all are here), but some key ones.

The answers you see above are my answers, and not necessarily the defaults. See the “How did most people answer this question?” parts? Those were helpful, but I sometimes went against the wisdom of the crowd.  The main question here that I had to think on was whether to use percentage for membership share or business units. Business units are arbitrary and not tied to a dollar amount.  So you could express 2 members sharing 50/50 ownership by 50% each, or in terms of half the business units. I went with business units since I viewed them like shares, and are easier to divide in large numbers or small numbers without needing to go into 5 decimal places.  I think in the big picture it may not matter as much, but do your own research to see what works best for you.

On this screen where you add members, enter your initial investment in the LLC, and what percentage of the business, or how many business units it represents. Here I chose one million business units as the entire business unit pool, since I am the only member.  You can choose the initial size of the business unit pool at whatever you like, but I chose to go large on the number, since I view them as shares.

I decided to go with officers, and as such crowned myself CEO.  That’s right.

Below the officers you must define rules on how decisions for the company will be made, and who the IRS contact will be.  Think hard about the decision on how ownership interests will be handled.  As soon as you add one more member to your LLC, this decision could make or break you.  And don’t get too hung up on getting everything perfect here. You can change these my amending your company articles later, but I wanted to have it solid from the beginning.

Step 3: Taxation and the EIN

These next questions determine how you wish your LLC to be taxed.  The big question is if you want to be taxed as a sole proprietor, which I do for simplicity’s sake, and so I don’t contribute too much profit to Uncle Sam.

The questions above pertain to the SS-4.  I decided in an earlier step to spend an extra $30 and have LegalZoom prepare my SS-4 form, which is how you get your EIN (Employer Identification Number) which acts kind of like your company’s Social Security number.  It turns out that you don’t really need an SS-4 for requesting it since I ended up requesting the EIN over the phone with the IRS, but you’ll still need your signed and dated SS-4 in your records. And it also makes it easier to request the EIN over the phone since they will ask you questions from the form.  Nice to have it handy so you don’t fumble on the phone with the IRS.

That’s a short one, also pertains to the SS-4.

Step 4: Pay Up

Pick the package you want and lay your money down. This was the total for the “Standard” package with overnight delivery and Tax ID number form preparation.

Post-pay instructions:

There is a bit of time built in to the delivery process, since LegalZoom must prepare papers for the Delaware Secretary of State and send and get approval.  See the 35 days above? If it really took that long the overnight shipping might have been a waste, but maybe I was lucky because it didn’t take long at all.  Check out the status page:

Was ordered July 7th.  Took only 14 days to process and was delivered on the fourteenth day. So I don’t feel too dumb for paying for overnight.  Go LegalZoom!

Step 5: Aftermath

Once you get the package from LegalZoom there will be a few things to sign and you’ll need to get on the horn and call the IRS to get your EIN.  That takes about 10 minutes, mostly wait time on hold.  Once you get your EIN, it’s immediately effective.  Now you’re in business!

At this point, you can set up your business account. Your bank will need your copy of the letter from Delaware Secretary of State showing that your LLC was recorded.  LegalZoom will send you this with your packet. If you get your Delaware LLC through LegalZoom, you’ll need to call LegalZoom’s business assistance number and request a “bridge letter”. This letter connects you, your LLC, and your registered agent so that your bank will know that you are a representative of your LLC.  The reason they need this is because they will check the Delaware Secretary of State’s website and do an entity search.  Since LegalZoom is responsible for maintaining your registered agent, the registered agent will show up in this search, and not your name.  This bridge letter fills in the gaps by connecting you with the business.  They will email it to you soon after as an attachment.  Print it out and take it to the bank.

Note: Keep in mind that LegalZoom will set you up with a Delaware registered agent, and will bill you $159 per year a month later and every year afterwards on the anniversary of your LLC’s inception.

I hope you enjoyed this short series. I hope it helps many of you in protecting yourselves and also legitimizing your business in the business world.  Now let’s kick some tail.

Next post: Don’t Worry About the 3 Percent

In order to protect your personal assets, it’s vital to separate your personal money, expenses, and debt from those of your business, or you may forfeit the legal protections that LLCs and corporations offer.

Failure to separate business and personal accounts can lead to, should your business be brought up for litigation, a judge finding that your LLC or corporation’s liability should be bound to you personally. This is called “piercing the corporate veil”.

Read more on piercing the corporate veil at Wikipedia.

Bank Account

The first step is to start a bank account for your business. The account can be at the same bank you do your personal banking with, but it should not be your personal account.  Also, if your personal account has a savings and checking account, do not reserve one for personal and one for business. It’s not good enough. 

Many banks will upgrade your account for free if you add a business. This can save you money in fees. So even though it’s bundled, you’ll still separate personal and business.

One important note is that your bank will likely NOT allow you to change your sole proprietorship account to an LLC. You will have to pay for getting your LLC expenses paid for out of a personal account. Once your LLC is registered on the Secretary of State’s website and you have an EIN, you’ll be able to make your business’ bank account.  In addition, if the state of your LLC and the state your bank is in are different, your bank may not allow creating a business account for it.  Just something to check.

Domain Registrar

If you have domains for personal use, like for your personal blog or website, you’ll need to create a new account at your registrar and move your personal domains to it. Hover did this for me on request. Was a piece of cake.

When setting up your account for personal and business domains, make sure you use a non-domain related email for the account.  This means if your domain is mysite.com, make sure you’re not using a @mysite.com email address on your account.  Just use a free gmail or hotmail account.  This is just good practice in case you lose control of your domain and need to get it rectified.  This is not a personal vs. business thing. It’s just a smart thing to do.

Web Host / Server Host

If you have a personal site or blog hosted on your business’ servers, it’s best to move it off to its own account.  The exception to this is if your blog is an extension of your “brand”.  Many social media personalities and famous persons fall into this exception. If you are running your email through your server, you should use a non-domain related email, just as with domain registrar section above.

Phone Number

Make a phone number for your business and use it in your contact info instead of your personal number. I use Kall8 for this. It’s only $2 a month for an 888 phone number.  You can always forward that number to your cell phone or voicemail until your business gets big, but it’s smart to have all your expenses (no matter how small) and contact info as business-centric as possible.

E-mail Host

I use Rackspace Mail for my personal and business email accounts, instead of running my own mail server. 

If you are using the same email for both business and personal, you should create one for personal that does not use your business’ domain. This may mean buying a domain just for personal use, or switching to a free email host.

The same advice for using a non-domain related email domain is applicable here, in case there is an issue with your mail host’s account, you’ll still be able to communicate with them.

Rule of Thumb

If in doubt about an expense, think of it this way.  You should have business and personal separate enough that if a company came along and wanted to purchase your business and all accounts outright, it would be easy to hand it all over without going in and changing everything.

Other

Other types of accounts you should consider separating from personal use:

• insurance
• credit cards (get you a card for your company)
• email sending systems, like SendGrid
• newsletter mail systems, like MailChimp
• payments to outsourced services (design, coding, etc)
• legal services
• marketing services (PR, Google Adwords, etc)
• payroll

There could many more, so before you whip out your personal credit or debit card to pay for something business related, think twice.

Photo courtesy dominicpics – Creative Commons BY 2.0

Next post: Using LegalZoom to set up your Delaware LLC

Part I: Why you need one, and your options

This is the first of a three-part series on how to set your startup with a Delaware LLC. I recently did this, and will guide you through the process. Let’s get started.

Sole Proprietorships are good if you are very small

When you’re first starting your business and you’re making a few bucks, you don’t have to worry too much about getting sued. For one, you may only have a few customers, you’re making them happy, and they are paying you. But as time goes on and your customer base grows, it’s realistic to expect that something will go wrong.

Perhaps you host websites for businesses and you have a few hours of downtime due to an outage or something similar outside your control. Or perhaps you infringe on a patent you didn’t know existed. Or you lose a customer’s data that they deemed vital and irreplaceable. By damaging others, even in ways you may consider insignificant, you open yourself up to the greater possibility of a lawsuit.

If your business is a sole proprietorship and your business is sued, the judge can go beyond the assets of the business and a judgment can extend into your personal income and savings. You could lose every penny you have, and perhaps even future earnings. A judgment that your business funds can’t cover could even mean having to sell your car or home. The reason a sole proprietorship is so weak in terms of protecting your assets is that a sole proprietorship, by its name, indicates that you are the sole owner. That includes sole owner of the liability and debt. In addition, whether your sole proprietorship’s bank account is intertwined with your personal account or not is irrelevant. The business is all you and that’s all the judge will see. In a sole proprietorship there is no legal distinction between the owner and the business.

Enter corporations and LLCs

Once you move into the realms of corporations and LLCs, the business transforms into its own entity in the eyes of the law. It is separated from you, and is taxed appropriately. There is a work-around coming ahead, so don’t let the tax thing scare ya.

Both corporations and LLCs protect their investors/shareholders/members from liability should the company become a target of litigation.

Corporations

Read more on Corporations at Wikipedia.

C-Corp

A C corporation has the advantage of having multiple levels of stock: preferred, common, etc.  There is no limit on the number of members who can join the company as shareholders. Profits made by the C-Corp are taxed separately from dividends paid to shareholders.  Therefore, the corporation is taxed on profits, then the dividends are paid to shareholders, who then pay capital gains taxes on the dividends. This is referred to by some as double-taxation.

C Corporations are typically a better fit than LLCs for startups seeking investors such as venture capitalists and angels, due to the flexible share types. You could always convert to a corporation from an LLC if needed.

S-Corp

In contrast to a C-Corp, an S corporation is not subject to income tax. The shareholders pay tax on their share of the profits. This is similar to an LLC from a tax point of view.

S Corporations can only have up to 100 members and one class of stock.

LLC (Limited Liability Company)

A Limited Liability Company, or LLC, is a special type of business that can have one or many members with voting privileges in the company. There is no limit on the number of members, and depending on the state the LLC was formed, members could be individuals, corporations, and partnerships.  Each member is granted either a percentage of the company or a share of the total business units. I’ll discuss business units in part three of this series. An LLC has the advantage of pass-thru taxation. It can be taxed like a corporation, partnership, or even as a sole proprietorship, where the taxes are paid easily on the single owner’s personal tax form. The method is declared on form SS-4 when applying for an EIN (Employer Identification Number) from the IRS (and if you wish your LLC to be taxed like a corporation, file form 8832). More on this also in part three.

LLCs also have it easy compared to corporations as far as the paperwork and maintenance of the business. Read more on LLCs at Wikipedia.

Why Delaware?

Delaware LLCs (as more and more states do nowadays) allow for single-person membership.  In addition, under the business-favorable Delaware LLC law, LLCs do not have to have annual member meetings. And the paperwork needed to maintain the business is minimal.

Some states such as California have steep annual fees to maintain an LLC. The Delaware LLC franchise fee is only $250 per year.

To maintain a Delaware presence, should you live in some other part of the country, you will need a registered agent. Fees for this can range from around $100 per year to close to $300 per year depending on the agent you use. The agency I’m with costs $159/year.  For this you get an agent who will contact you should any paperwork come from the Delaware government or in the event your business is sued. They are your business’ representative in Delaware.

Also, Delaware has no sales tax or intangible personal property tax.  Delaware also allows the owners and managers of an LLC to remain anonymous.

Whether you decide to go Corporation (C or S) or LLC, you’ll find that Delaware is a favorable choice for either.

Legal disclaimer: I’m not your lawyer and I’m not your mom, and you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet. Make sure you do your own research.  And eat your vegetables.

In the next post, I’ll go over the first step in protecting your personal assets – separating all your personal accounts from your business. It’s vital to do it and do it right, or you may forfeit the legal protections that LLCs and corporations offer.

Next post: Separate your Business and Personal Accounts

Why dumb? Because once you’ve had people contributing to your site with their hard work and diligence, you decide to sell or rent all the work they did.  Even though you may continue to let those who built it use it for free, it’s still a jerk thing to do.

I was going to write an analogy about a farm and community garden, but, like most analogies, turned out to not mimic the scenario.

Here’s the bottom line. Don’t be a content punk. Don’t try to make money off the hard work of your visitors. You wouldn’t expect Wikipedia to all of a sudden put up a paywall?

What about sharing in the profits?

Now that’s a business model! This has been done before.  There are a number of topic sites where people write on different topics and get paid for traffic that their pages generate. It depends on the site and the philosophy of the site. If users know they are writing content to get paid, it’s quite different than writing content to help others.  The reason? It crosses the line from a social transaction into a monetary transaction.

Next post: Solo Focus: DuckDuckGo

When I first moved from a shared host to a dedicated server, and had my sites set up to send email (to customers), I immediately received rejections from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many other email servers (this was before there was Gmail).  The rejections all shared the same reason.  The IP block my server was in was blacklisted.  That means that the IP address of my server was within a list of neighboring IP addresses that was blacklisted.  It seems people grabbed dedicated servers and used them as spamming machines.

After attempting to communicate with these email services and get my IP whitelisted, I raised a ticket with my server host and they had a solution: smart host.

This smart host mechanism allows me to set my server to forward all outgoing mail to another server that only accepts from specified domains.  Then it will send the email for me.  Since the forwarding server is in a nice IP space, the email won’t get bounced.

If you run into this problem and your server provider won’t or can’t do this for you, there is a very affordable service to do it for you.

AuthSMTP

I discovered this company around the same time I had the email issue, and ended up using them at a company I worked for that was running into a similar problem with their email campaigns (that were opt-in and on the “on the level”).  It is what is called an SMTP relay.  That means that you send email through them instead of directly into the wild.

The pricing is reasonable.  If you’re sending fewer than 1000 emails a month, you’ll only pay $24 a year.  I made that bold-faced so you’ll notice.  It’s only $2 per month.

Dumping Sendmail

If you have a hosted email solution like Rackspace Mail, you can use them as your SMTP relay and save money.  Since you would normally use their service to send mail from your mail client using SMTP (with authentication), you can use an SMTP library in your code (PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc) to send mail.  It’s easy to set up and since you are using authentication in sending email, your mail provider can be assured it’s you.  Here’s an example in PHP – note the SMTPAuth usage and username and password.  Thereafter, you may completely remove sendmail and postfix from your server.  There is no need for your server to act like a mail server at all.  Like I mentioned long ago, that’s a pain to manage on your own.

Next post: merchandising, merchandising, merchandising

So how do you avoid this?

The trick is to display your email in a way that the user viewing the site sees the email address and can click it or copy it into their email program, while robots only see a jumble of characters that to a machine does not look like an email address.

There are a number of sites to help you.  My favorite is David Grayson’s Email Hider: http://www.davidegrayson.com/emailhider/

What it will do is replace some characters with HTML entities, which are readable by your browser and will display as normal characters.  The probability that a character in your email will be replaced is determined by the second number.  The closer it is to 1, the more characters will be replaced.  0.6 is a good balance.

There are other sites, too.  You can find them using a search for “email obfuscator”.

I don’t recommend making an image of your email address because then your visitors will have to copy it visually and try not to make mistakes, which is common in long email addresses or noisy images where your email address does not appear clearly.

An Extra Note

Avoid using certain email addresses with your domain. Very common addresses like info@yourdomain, webmaster@yourdomain, and sales@yourdomain are already built-in to spam lists.  It’s better to use something friendly but also less common.  Let’s get original and creative, yes?

Next post: when your server is in a bad neighborhood

Let’s say you’re hosting web sites for customers.  You can’t just turn it off.  Your customers may have their business running on their site.  This situation is one of the hardest.  You have to work with the customer and help them migrate.  If you just shut down their site with little warning you’ll be getting calls from lawyers.

You may be wondering, if a site actually has customers, why would you shut it down?  Good question.  Sometimes it’s just not financially feasible to have a handful of customers.  You’ll have to do the math for your situation.

The site shutdown scenario doesn’t affect just web hosts.  What about a Flickr-style site?  Are you going to do one last backup then turn it off?  If your site has the only copies of the photos from some kid’s third birthday party you’re going to have some anger heaped upon you should you take it away.  In this case, where you’re storing items for little or no cost, and you can’t make enough to afford the scaling issues, you’ve got to give plenty of warning to customers and make a way to get them their files.

Any startup that holds information for a customer, whether it be images, a social graph, transactions, even links (like tinyurl or bit.ly), can create legal troubles if taken away.

The safe thing to do is to never start this way.  Make sure your business model can support itself.

For small self-startups, freemium can wipe you out.  You may overestimate the ratio of free vs. paid customers you’re going to get.  Then you’re stuck with a crippling amount of data to manage/store/serve and the costs involved.

With the right business model where revenue from paying customers dwarf your operating costs, you’re in the clear.

Next post: Professional Design at a Bargain

He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.

  – Paul Atreides

And if that thing is valuable, you become the monopoly.

Providing a reference tool is a good business idea.  I’ve been in organizations where having a large-size data repository and searching capabilities keep people coming back.  This is a solid method for building a long-term SaaS (software as a service) where you can charge a monthly subscription for its use.

My Experience

For zKorean, I spent years building an online dictionary.  Over time I added more entries and added features that made searching it easier, too.  Now the dictionary has tens of thousands of entries (just recently added 400 and have immediate plans for more).  People can use it for daily use on a limited basis (25 searches per day) and get unlimited use for $4.95/month.  There are also audio pronunciations for all the Korean words (voiced by my lovely wife Suzy).

Am I bragging or trying to make a pitch?
No.  The point I’m trying to make is that it takes a lot of work and you have to keep it fresh to keep competitors at bay.

Once you have a resource like this under your control, it gives you an advantage that your software doesn’t need tweaking or maintenance very much.  A few features now and then where you see the need, but mainly your data is where you’ll make improvements.  And adding data means not having to touch your code.

Data is Expensive

When I worked at a company that offered an online medical coding reference, we licensed data from other companies.  Our technology was based on bringing multiple data sources together to give the best information display to the people that needed it.  And the service was expensive, partially because of the cost of licensing the data in the first place.  I won’t give numbers but once someone comes along and wants to license a data store that you have, it becomes even more profitable.  They pay you for usage of the data, and they make the sales and handle their service.  Your responsibility then is to deliver quality data in a timely fashion.

Is It Possible for You?

Take a little time and consider a hobby or area of expertise that you have.  Is there a large data store that you need or that people like you need?  Think about it a second.  There are databases of Scrabble words (by word length), World of WarCraft game items, medical terminology, and automobile parts.  With some effort and time, what interest do you have that could turn your hobby into a business?

Next post: one browser is not enough

If you go to Rand-McNally nowadays, it looks like MapQuest did back in 2005.

My question: Why wasn’t Rand-McNally the online leader the whole time?  They had the data (the hard part) and just needed a way to get it online, then have a very small group of experienced web developers and software engineers make improvements over the years.

Google’s draggable maps were the rage back in 2005, using AJAX technology that was not widely supported at the time.  There’s no reason why Rand-McNally couldn’t have owned this space, and run the MapQuest style maps for browsers that didn’t support AJAX at the time, and offering draggable maps where supported.

Now in automobiles you have TomTom and other GPS systems for navigating the road without a paper map.  Rand-McNally has its own, but still nowhere near Garmin or Magellan.

This is not meant as a rant against Rand-McNally.  It’s a rant against companies who have the resources but shallow vision.  Where is the long-term vision?  Or is the vision there but you’re too large to move quickly?

If you work in an industry that could do so much with what it has but crawls in terms of progress, perhaps it’s time to go somewhere else, or take advantage of the situation and create a competitor that blows them off the map. 

In these days a small player can get word-of-mouth faster and more widespread than ever.  MapQuest (an unknown) beat Rand-McNally.  They blew their brand off the internet.  Did you even know Rand-McNally had a map site? I didn’t.

So don’t be afraid if you’re going against a giant company.  If you can deliver a better product, the brand name is inconsequential.

Next post: a business lesson from Dune