Home Business Answered

Remember the new billing/invoice system I designed and launched for UniversityTutor.com?

Things aren’t looking very promising so far. They started off well and in the first week or two about a dozen invoices got processed through the site.

I figured it would slowly trend upwards from there as people started adopting it, but in the past week not a single new invoice has come through the site.

On average about 40 tutors per day get contacted through the site for jobs. If (conservatively) just 20% of these ended up meeting with the student, then I should be getting 8 invoices per day. But that is of course if they only met with the student once. Some tutors end up meeting with the same student twice a week for a year, and others just once. But the average would certainly be at least 2 or 3 times (again, conservatively) meaning the number of invoices being processed per day should probably be at least 20. But it’s no where near this. Tutors simply aren’t using the new system.

I’ve been in contact with the tutors and students who HAVE used it to get feedback. There were a few minor problems (a bug with Amex cards not going through – now resolved) and some tutors were concerned with the 3-4 business takes it took for the direct deposit to show up in their account, but otherwise they were happy and it’s functioning as designed so the lack of adoption is somewhat puzzling.

One thought that occurred to me today: I sent out an email and blog post announcing the new system when it came out, but there may be some tutors who simply didn’t read the email or have forgotten about the new change.

Lot’s of email doesn’t get read and when it does people often skim it. An average open rate for a mass email is about 30%.

If they were to login to their account they would notice immediately that something was new. But I realized today that many tutors probably have no need to login to their account. Their profile is already created and they simply receive emails from people looking to hire them and reply to the emails. They may vaguely remember seeing an email from me a few weeks back about a new feature, but since they still have no need to login they will probably just go through business as usual (accepting cash/check afterwards) and not think twice about it.

I did have one idea to resolve this: Those 40 contacts per day are another chance to reinforce the benefits of the new system:

• Getting positive reviews from clients
• Hours of experience increasing

So I’ve just added a new line in the emails that go out when tutors get contacted by students. Hopefully this will help remind them RIGHT before they start working with a new client:

A new student has contacted you from your profile on UniversityTutor.com! Please get in touch with them as soon as you can.

After working with a student, make sure to send them an invoice and get paid online. This will ensure the student can leave you a positive review and your hours of experience will be updated.

…

The second line is the new part. Hopefully this helps. I’ll have to see.

If ultimately the benefits of this new billing/invoice system are not convincing enough to get tutors to pay online, then I may have to think about going back to the old system (charging tutors $10/month). This old business model was certainly working, it just wasn’t growing as fast as I’d like. The percentage based business model has a lot of advantages, but what remains to be seen is if tutors will actually use it.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

P.S. I’m in St. Augustine, Florida right now for a wedding. Departing to Buenos Aires May 4th, can’t wait!!

Source:New UniversityTutor Business Model Not Working

Well last week I launched BuyersVote.com and the response was good. Lots of people sent me their feedback and I was able to watch people use it (a very valuable experience).

I also put it through the “parent test” where I watched people who weren’t SUPER tech savvy (my parents use it.

By far the biggest piece of feedback I got was the rating system didn’t make sense.

Here is the old rating system:

Every user got 1 vote per page – either yes or no (up or down arrow). Then the idea was to display the AVERAGE of everyone’s votes at the top (the “10 out of 10″) as a summary.

The problem was that the arrows seemed like they would add or subtract one to the number and people assumed they could click it multiple times. In reality, however another click would remove your previous review because you only got one (it was more like a button that toggled on or off but the design didn’t suggest this).

Obviously it was not making sense.

I went through a lot of ideas for a better design, and this UI Patterns gallery of a bunch of different rating system was helpful.

I contemplated…

• changing it to a percent so 6 out of 10 would become “60% of people liked this”
• Doing a 5 star rating system
• A variety of others things

A couple factors I was considering as well:

• The more options you give someone, the less likely they are to act – so it would be ideal to keep the number of possible ratings fairly small (Digg is the master of this with just one option – up!)
• There is also the problem of “false accuracy” where a lot of review systems say “this one has a rating of 62% and this one has 63%” but there are only a dozen or so votes, and the statistical significance is not there to make a claim of “better” down to percent. Google does a good job of this with their PageRank which simply gives a number between 1 and 10. Basically they are implying – this is an estimate, and it’s not more accurate than about 10 different levels of distinction.

After messing around for a bit, here is the new rating system I setup:

You can mouse over the different levels and it updates the text below it with words like “Perfect”, “Good”, or “Abysmal”. The effect is pretty neat and you can see it in action here.

After you click it your rating stays in place.

The biggest benefit is that the metaphors match now between your rating and the overall score: both are on a 1 to 10 scale.

The only drawback to it that I can see is that it’s a bit more complicated (there are probably too many choices, I’d have preferred to go with a maybe 5 choices, but I didn’t make the neat little CSS that does it all, I got it for free from here and didn’t have time to change it).

What do you think?

I’m sort of undecided still. A 5 star rating system might be better since it is so common and people understand it instantly, but for some reason I’m hesitant on it and this one looked cool.

Other BuyersVote.com Q&A

Here are a few other items I said I’d follow up on about BuyersVote.com:

• How was it developed so quickly?
  It was pretty neat to build the whole thing in one week. Ruby on rails made this possible because there are so many good plugins for it now. For example I’m using built in plugins to handle the following functionality: user authentication/password resets, OpenID authentication, tags/categories, ratings, searching, auto completion in text fields, seo optimized urls, versioning and the “diff” view which shows changes in revisions, and captchas.  
• How did you get the web hosting for free?
  I’m using Heroku which offers a free rails hosting platform for small simple apps. Once it gets bigger or has more traffic I will hopefully be able to monetize it a bit and then move it to SliceHost.com for hosting.
• Who did the design?
  I am not a very good designer by trade, so I like to borrow other designs. The design I’m using actually comes from a free wordpress theme that is in the public domain. It was released by Design Disease to showcase their talent. Personally, I think that most people spend too much time on the design when launching a small test project like this. The design (as long as it is not terrible) is really not that important in the beginning (sorry designers reading this!). It’s more the idea and functionality you want to test. I just googled “free wordpress themes” and looked at a bunch until I found one I liked. Then I adapted it to what I needed. Since it’s released under the GPL this is perfectly legal.
• How did you setup the login thing where people can sign-in with their Google, Yahoo, Aol, Facebook, etc account?
  The technology underneath it is called OpenID but only super geeks know about this or have an OpenID login. So what I used was the widget from RPXNow.com which makes the signin process much easier for people to understand. Making the account creation process SUPER easy (2 clicks and no typing) or in some cases not even necessary (like to create a new page) was really important to me because I wanted to LOWER ANY BARRIERS to people participating in the site. There are lots of review/forum sites where I come across it one day and want to leave a quick comment but because of the signin process (a half dozen fields to fill out, then verify the email, then worry about getting spam, etc…) makes it just not worth it. This, in my opinion, is a big part of why epinions.com isn’t more successful – they tried to lock it down instead of trusting people and opening it up (like a wiki). I would have even preferred to making the login optional for voting, but after much research couldn’t find any way to do this and still prevent duplicate voting. So for now voting requires a login, but you can create an account with literally two clicks in most cases.

That’s about it for now…let me know what you think about the new rating feature and feel free to login and try it out!

Brian Armstrong

Source:New Rating System For BuyersVote.com

The announcement is finally here! In the last week I launched BuyersVote.com.

Here is the description from the about page which describes the site:

=====================================

Friends help you make buying decisions every day…

This phone is great!

That mechanic is a crook!

We know we can trust our friends (unlike advertisements) because they aren’t selling us anything.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask a friend about EVERY product you wanted to buy before you bought it?

Wouldn’t it be even better if dozens or hundreds of people could tell you about their experience with it and any related products too? One person might be biased or get it wrong but surely if you could AVERAGE the reviews of hundreds of people you could know which was best.

The power is now in YOUR hands (the consumer)…

The internet has enabled consumers from all around the world to COLLABORATE – sharing their collective experiences to let each other know what is good and what is bad.

Online reviews are nothing new of course. You can find a great book on Amazon, a great hotel on TripAdvisor, and a great digital camera on CNet – all from reading opinions of real people who have already used the product.

But what about the myriad of other products that DON’T have a dedicated, trusted, portal on the web?

If you aren’t searching for a major consumer good on a website you already trust, you’ll often get back junk pages full of affiliate links, biased reviews by one person, or endless forum posts that you don’t have time to read and summarize.

What if there was a site that was community editable – just like Wikipedia – so that ANYBODY and EVERYBODY could create reviews for any product they wanted?

And what if it was completely free?

What I have just described of course is BuyersVote.com – a community editable site where anybody can create and edit pages for any product, service, or company in the world.

A trusted, portal site can now be formed for niche products, mainstream products, local products, individual service providers and anything else that people or companies want to rate and review.

Imagine…

• Choosing a bank, credit card, or cell phone company based on thousands of votes from their real customers
• Doctors and hospitals making more informed purchases of medical equipment
• Accountants collaborating to choose the right software
• Finding the right lawyer, wedding planner, plumber, or realtor in your neighborhood based on reviews from actual customers
• Companies being able to choose the right vendors and suppliers based on past performance
• Mothers rating private schools
• Motorcycle riders rating biker bars
• Exotic pet lovers describing their favorite species of tarantula

The sky is really the limit here.

People and businesses have millions of different interests, needs, and areas of expertise. Now they have a place to read and create trusted reviews on ANY topic they’d like.

They could even end up creating a way to rate things which aren’t products (charities, blogs, speakers at a conference, etc). That is part of the beauty – BuyersVote so open ended that I have no idea WHAT people will do with it and that is great.

YOU are in control on this site, YOU are the editor, and YOU can create whatever you’d like.

Quality Control And Reputation

We’ve also taken things one step further than Wikipedia by building a reputation system – a quality control if you will – right into BuyersVote.

When you make an edit or post a review on BuyersVote, other users will be able mark your contributions as helpful or not. Over time, you will build a reputation on BuyersVote (the little number by your username) which is an indication of how much the community trusts you.

This is great for a few reasons. First, it means that the community is “self-policing”. If a malicious user tries to deface a page or insert their opinion where facts should go (a major problem on Wikipedia), the community will vote them down and their editing privileges will be removed.

Second, it means that well trusted contributors will gain new privileges and will essentially be full administrators of BuyersVote. They will be able to delete pages, flag them, re-categorize them, combine them, etc.

Consumer Reports, Wikipedia, and the Better Business Bureau In One

One of the most exciting parts about this website for me personally is the idea that it can not only help good companies rise to the top and be rewarded – but also that it will ensure bad companies get punished and won’t be able to keep taking advantage of new consumers.

Almost everyone has had a BAD experience at some point in their life with a product or service. Maybe it was a piece of junk and they refused to honor the warranty. Maybe it was an individual or company who took your money and never delivered the result.

Taking them to court can be a hassle, so you might be stuck – only able to warn your friends about it and share your story. The company might lose one or two new customers (depending on how many friends you have) but chances are they wouldn’t feel the effect and would go right on doing the same thing to other people.

But what if you had several MILLION “friends” who could now read about your experience online? What if when people typed the company’s name into Google your review came up at the top? I bet that shady company might start to listen.

The next time a company or individual treats your poorly, do the world a favor and make a PUBLIC RECORD of your experience on BuyersVote.com. Let the world know how you were treated and you might just save someone else the same fate!

If we all work together we can actually eliminate unethical companies by making this information freely available. Bad companies will either have to clean up their act or go out of business once it’s public knowledge how bad they really are.

In fact, I suggest that when creating a page on BuyersVote you use the individual or company’s REAL NAME. If their name is John Smith and they are a realtor, make a page for them called “John Smith (Realtor)”. If they are a company, write their actual company name.

Why? Because when someone does a Google search for this person or company’s name, you want your review to come up first telling the world to beware.

Final Thoughts…

By no means should BuyersVote ONLY be a negative place for bad reviews. It should also be a place to highlight the BEST in any field and help people make the right buying decisions.

The vast majority of people and companies in the world are good and I hope the site will reflect that. Overall I’m very excited for what BuyersVote.com will become.

Remember that…

• BuyersVote is a “wiki” just like Wikipedia – meaning that anyone can create or edit a page on this site
• Anyone can write a review on this site
• BuyersVote is 100% FREE
• The next time you need some information on what to buy, do a search for it here first
• If you have a specific interest or experience (good or bad) with a certain product, service, or company – create a page for it

Thank you so much, and I’ll see you around BuyersVote!
Brian Armstrong

=====================================

I’ll be describing more about the site over the next few weeks on this blog such as:

• How I developed it quickly using Ruby on Rails and plugins
• How I got the web hosting for free
• The design
• The philosophy behind easy logins
• And more…

But for right now please do me a favor and click here to view the site.

Then please try adding a page to the site. It can be on any product or service you have used recently, perhaps an area you have a particular interest or specialized knowledge in, or someone you’ve had a particularly good/bad experience with.

There is no login required to add a page, but if you want to login you can do so with an existing account you already have (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Aol, etc).

Please post feedback in the comments below on…

• Your first impression (whether bad or good)
• What is confusing or unclear about it
• What you like, what you dislike

Thank you so much!

Brian Armstrong

Source:BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: BuyersVote.com

My last announcement is unfortunately going to be a delayed a day or two because I spent the entire weekend attending the Rice University Business Plan Competition!

My new website for the annoucement is done and online, I’m just having a few folks test it out and make sure nothing major is broken before posting it to the blog. Everyone will definitely get a chance to check it out soon though. I promise!

I the mean time, I will leave you with a few AWESOME finalists from the competition that I saw over the weekend. These are some great examples of innovation happening all around us in a down economy. These finalists raised about $800,000 in funding over the weekend (possibly more in the next few weeks depending on if the VC’s in the audience decide to invest).

80Legs

I wrote about these guys back when I attended the Web 2.0 venture forum when they were called Plura Processing. It’s the same concept – distributed computing power across the internet somewhat like SETI at home, but they’ve decided to focus specifically on companies who need to crawl the web and have renamed themselves. There were concerns about privacy which I think are largely unfounded, but these guys are going to be super successful. Check out their site to read more.

Dynamics

This team has no website and is operating in stealth mode, but their product is brilliant. It is a credit card that can CHANGE the data on the magnetic stripe at any time and has a digital display on it. It still works with existing credit card swipers so that infrastructure doesn’t need to be changed. With this technology the card could change the credit card number once per day to eliminate fraud, use a pin entry right on the card, or allow you to store ALL your credit cards in just one card, and use a button to cycle through them – the number would update on the visual display as you cycle through them. The battery would last 4 years and the demo seemed durable enough. I’m pretty sure you will start seeing these in the next 3 years or so showing up in your mailbox. I feel like I glimpsed a piece of the future.

TENDIX Development

These guys built a new engine design that could (potentially) improve on the internal combustion engine by about 50% in efficiency. Here is a rough demo of how it works. They had a cool looking physical model at the competition that made it more clear but that should give you a rough idea. It definitely turned some heads.

There were also some very impressive new XRay technologies, sound technologies, rubber manufacturing techniques, surgery tools and many more. These were a bit outside my field so I didn’t understand enough of the technology underneath to really know if it would work, but very impressive none the less.

It was incredibly inspiring to be at the conference and around so many great minds. I had to get home immediately and back to work!

I’ll have that announcement of my new project for you ASAP, promise!

Brian Armstrong

Source:Rice Business Plan Competition

Hey Folks,

Now that UniversityTutor.com has the billing/invoice system setup and running (more and more people are starting to use it) I’ve had a few days to work on a project I’ve been pondering for a long time.

I don’t want to give away too many details yet, but here’s what I can tell you:

• It’s a web app
• Whereas UniversityTutor.com focuses on a specific niche (tutoring) this new app will have a MUCH broader appeal and potential if it takes off – something on the order of Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.
• In the pay vs. ad-supported debate this one will be completely free for right now. To be honest I don’t have the business model really figured out yet for this, but it’s something that would be REALLY awesome whether it makes money or not and deserves to be free for the world.
• I’ve been thinking about it for probably at least two years, but I’ve just recently seen some developments which really made it come together in my mind.
• I worked till 3 or 4 am the last few days on this, and even after trying to go to sleep last night I couldn’t because it was racing through my mind! I had to pace on the balcony at 5am and watch the cars to calm myself down.
• This is a website that I’ve found myself wanting a number of times over the past year. This is really the best kind of business in some ways because you are creating it for yourself and understand the target market. Some people refer to this as dogfooding.
• I will be asking YOU to help me test it out and try it later this week when I announce it. As always, I would love to get your feedback.
• I am following my own advice on this project and launching the whole thing QUICKLY and INEXPENSIVELY to test out the idea. As you may remember, I launched UniversityTutor.com in one month for less than $100 (to be fair I did the programming myself which I know isn’t an option for everyone, but there are alternatives to that if you’re interested). This project will be even better by those measures: I’ll have it done in ONE WEEK and for only 7 DOLLARS AND 95 CENTS. Literally my only expense so far has been the domain name and I don’t plan on spending a single cent more to launch this website (not even for web hosting). I’ll show you how I did that later this week.

And to top it all off I’m leaving for Argentina in about 2 and half weeks! Today I sold my car, and I’m wrapping up various loose ends on that front as well (insurance, selling furniture, putting gym/phone/etc on hold).

I was really reminded today of my post from a few weeks back about how time is your most precious resource. UniversityTutor.com is turning into a great “water wheel” for me. It is running almost entirely on auto-pilot now with new tutors and students signing up daily. It’s making money and growing every day while I’m busy already working on the next water wheel!

These are exciting times to say the least. Stay tuned for the announcement later this week…I think you’ll really like it!

Brian

Source:Big Annoucement Coming Up Later This Week!

Hey Folks,

Here is the video as promised of the new billing features on UniversityTutor.com.

For those just joining us, this represented a big change in the business model. Previously I was charging tutors $10/month to keep their profiles on the site.

With the new business model, tutors can now have a free account, but the client pays a 15% fee on any money they earn. For tutors who use the site a lot and don’t want their clients to have the 15% fee, they can still pay $10/month (for a Pro Account) and then the markup is only 5%. This is similar to the Guru.com business model which I think balances nicely between the free and pro account.

There were a couple important points I wanted to reinforce to the tutors:

• The *client* pays the 15% markup and not you. I stole this idea from odesk.com by the way, and it’s slightly different than how elance.com or guru.com does it, where they charge the tutor.
• Clients can only leave you a positive review if you complete the transaction online.
• Similarly, your number of hours of tutoring (aka your tutoring experience) will only get updated if you complete the transaction online.
• You don’t have to pay up front for “contacts” from potential students anymore. Now, we only make money if you make money – which seems more fair.

Here it the video on Veoh (which has slightly better resolution). Click here if you don’t see it below.

Or if you are international here is the same video on YouTube.

As you can see, it ended up remarkably close to my drawings from a few weeks ago:

I launched the feature this weekend, and sent emails out to about 5,000 tutors explaining the change and how it would (hopefully) benefit them. A handful of the tutors wrote back and were pretty upset about the change (which was to be expected when sending to this many people). But I wrote them back right away thanking them for the feedback and telling them it was still a work in progress and that really using the invoicing was optional for right now. They could still get paid with cash/checks if they wanted – clients just wouldn’t be able to leave them a review after.

Here is an example of one of the emails I got:

Subject: Silly

While I feel that it is justifiable for the website to make money and operating costs, the website should find another way to make these costs. Advertising to both the potential tutees and tutors could be a much better option. It could include specially directed advertisements based on
-info given about potential tutees
-Area
-Major and area of tutoring (of college students)

Additionally, I am concerned about the method of payment. Would it be through pay pall? That would be bad for me. My students have been very reliable with their checks.

Sincerely,
A disgruntled student

And my response:

Hi[NAME REMOVED],

Thanks for the feedback you make some very valid points! It is still a work in progress and nothing is set in stone yet so we’re definitely taking everyones feedback seriously.

To answer your question, the student can pay via credit card which is more common online, so no, Paypal is not required. In addition, you are not required to use our online payment method at all. If you prefer to keep using checks or cash that is ok with us, and you wouldn’t pay us any markup in that case.

For your current clients it may be easier to just continue doing this. Just keep in mind that to build a reputation on the site (reviews and hours) it might be better long term to transition over, but it is still totally optional, and to be honest right now it won’t make much of a difference since nobody has any hours recorded yet anyway.

But hope this helps and we’ll continue working on it. Thanks again!

Thank you,
Brian Armstrong
–
www.UniversityTutor.com

Her mood changed instantly when she wrote back:

Thank you for answering my questions.
I am actually quite excited about using the online system now!

Success! I’m really excited about it and hopefully it helps make the site much more profitable over the new few months as people start using it.

What do you think? Feel free to send me your feedback in the comments…

Source:Video Of The New Billing Feature On UniversityTutor.com

As part of getting ready to move to Argentina I have to sell my car.

Two good pieces of advice I’ve gotten:

• Don’t wait till the last week to sell it even if you need the car. The cost of renting a car for a few days is negligible to the cost of having to take a fire-sale price at the last minute. – My Dad
• Most people are too cheap or lazy to spend $50 and get their car REALLY well cleaned and polished inside and out before selling it. But spending the $50 earns you $500 instantly – its a 9,000% instant ROI. – Donald Trump

Anyway, today I took my car to get professionally washed and I stumbled across this AWESOME car wash. It’s called Mister Car Wash on Kirby in Houston.

They gave you free pop corn, and had a water cannon (yes a freakin water cannon) where you could shoot the cars as they went by. I mean… I think it was there for kids, but I thought it was especially awesome and I even convinced an old lady to help me try it out.

This lady was hilarious by the way…I wish I had my camera on when I first met her because I asked her how her day was going, and instantly replied (totally deadpan) “Well, I woke up breathin today.”

Anyway, here’s the YouTube video:

This got me thinking….if these guys can make a water cannon in their car wash, how can I make my business more fun? I bet they get all kinds of repeat business from mothers whose kids beg them to go there. Google is also great at making their business “fun” by the way and demonstrating some personality other than the typical “professional” corporate demeanor. They put an “I feel lucky” button on their homepage, they change their logo for the holidays, they take April fools day VERY seriously. There is something to be said for incorporating fun and a casual interface into your design. What do you think?

Oh yeah, and if you’re in Houston and know someone who wants to buy a car…check out PIMPIN 2000 Honda Civic for sale on craigslist post.

It’s sort of nice to do these things in the middle of the day when everyone else has a “real job” and only the retired folks are out to keep me company. Keep breaking free!

Source:The Most Awesome Car Wash Of All Time

Check out Time Magazine’s web page for the top 100 most influential people of 2009.

Lots of people on this list are emailing around saying “hey I’m at #25 right now, vote for me please!”

So when you click to their individual page on the website, you move the little slider over to #1 (you want them to be #1 right?) and click submit.

Unfortunately, you have just ranked them as “least influential” which is subtly labeled.

They have two competing paradigms going on here – is #1 the best or 100 the highest score? Consistency is important here. There is no telling how many people have actually voted the opposite of what they intended on these pages.

It reminds of the butterfly ballots that caused all the fuss with Al Gore, or on SouthWest airlines when they say “now boarding rows 10 and higher” – the rows closer to the front of the plane are certainly higher in that they are better and closer to #1, but what they mean is “numbers greater than 10″ or perhaps more clearly “rows 10 to 30″.

Further confusing things on the Time site, there is a number in the top right saying “34 of 204″. Is this their current ranking or just the next one in the list?

Not to mention…the whole idea of a slider with values from 1 to 100 is not correct for something like this. It’s an artificial level of accuracy to say “I think this person is the 29th most influential”. Most people won’t know who everyone on the list is – they just want to either vote yes or no.

Good user interface design is important and worth studying. I think it’s responsible for much more of a products success than people give it credit for.

Source:A Good Example Of Bad User Interface Design

Hey folks…no blog updates yet since I’m still busy finishing the new billing feature for UniversityTutor.com. It’s getting pretty crazy…I’ve mostly finished coding up the hand drawn screens that I showed you last week, so I should have a video of them for you soon. They are all ajaxy and look amazing.

I also got approved with a payment processor: www.achdirect.com. This is great news and means I’m getting very close.

Only trouble is that they don’t have a Ruby library (UniversityTutor.com is developed using Ruby on Rails) so I’m having to code this up myself so my site can talk to their payment gateway. I’ll contribute the code to the open source community (as part of the Active Merchant plugin) when it’s done so other people can use it.

Needless to say I am learning about all sorts of programming mumbo jumbo (PCI compliance, SSL encryption, WSDL web services, POST/GET/PUT, etc, etc, etc) and I was reminded that when I hit a tough problem and I’m just not making any progress, here is what I usually do:

• do 30 minutes of either exercise, walking, or mindless television
• eat something

Then come back and things just seem to start working. Try it next time. It really works. After a certain point, pushing yourself further is a downward spiral. But with 30 minutes to reset – clearing the mental calculator if you will – and some sugar your brain will be a high performing machine once again.

Source:How To Solve Tough Problems

Great article out today by Joel Spoelsky on the emotional management necessary for entrepreneurship. The reason why startups fail is simple: the founder gets tired of “playing with the dials” and gives up before finding the right combination.

This is what it’s like when you’re creating a business. There’s the initial burst of excitement when you come up with the idea and another surge in momentum when you make your first few sales. (At this point, you’re so dang cocky that you have too much wine at Thanksgiving dinner and pointedly remind your mother-in-law about how rude she was to dismiss your start-up idea and how, when you’re making millions of dollars, there will be nothing for her — she can bloody well eat frozen government cheese.)

As the business progresses, you start trying to turn all the various knobs on your fancy radio set in order to get better reception or to find a station you like. And fortunately, in business, we founders have a lot of knobs to play with. There’s price. Location. Employees. Marketing. Advertising. Return policies. Trade shows. Products. Search-engine optimization. And every item in your budget.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Source:How To Stay Motivated When Starting A Company