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- Essays (139)
- External Articles (1)
- Guest Posts (15)
- How-To (54)
- Mailbag (10)
- Satire (4)
- SBLive (8)
- Uncategorized (46)
- Uncommon Interviews (4)
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All Blog Posts
- An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales
- Solving the Low-Budget Online Marketing Dilemma
- Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25
- Reframing the problems with “Freemium” by charging the marketing department
- The *real* pivot
- Startup identity & the sadness of a successful exit
- “Because that’s the way it’s done” — should a founder listen?
- How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?
- Better for whom?
- A compass is not a map
- Austin in San Francisco
- My simple ways to be a happier, smarter 30-something
- Entrepreneurial Re-entry — Businesses for Moms
- How to get attention from internet celebrities
- But I know that he knows that I know
- Teeny bit of traction — what next?
- The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company
- Why “saving money” and “ROI” are probably the wrong way to sell your product
- “Stealth mode” and other f’ing brilliant strategies
- Roulette, Startups, and the paradox of the infinite bankroll
- Smart Bear Live 7: More from AZ Disruptors
- How do I raise prices?
- Business of Software – Past two videos, and why you should come in October
- Smart Bear Live 6: Jared from Padseeker.com
- A life-changing challenge: Guided by Pascal’s Wager
- Smart Bear Live 5: Dan from SyncBloc.com with Mark Suster
- What a startup does to you. Or: A celebration of new life
- The “Convergent” theory of finding truth in darkness
- Stop claiming you’re profitable
- When do I *stop* doing customer interviews and start writing code?
- How do I know where to advertise?
- The mid-market briar patch
- Smart Bear Live 4: Nick from PinfoB.com at AZ Disruptors
- How do I stop “analyzing” and pick between two good choices?
- Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price?
- Should I invest my savings in this startup?
- “She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
- Perfect Pricing Part Deux — More money from fewer sales
- WordPress Page Caching Faster than Light — @WPEngine releases TachyCache
- How Perfect Pricing got me 1500 Sales in 2 Days
- Intense Asymmetry and Self-Flagellation
- If you saw your competitor’s roadmap would it matter?
- Learn by copy
- How to convince a startup to hire you
- How to find that first big customer
- Trends: Follow or flee?
- Scars
- It’s a torturous chaos until it isn’t
- How should a startup founder value her time?
- Painful, Surreal, and Surprisingly Effective: The Personal Checklist
- Uncommon Interview: Finding Fulfillment with Good Company
- When being “first” is not a competitive advantage
- Hiring Employee #1
- Easy to criticize, hard to create
- Behind the scenes: Creating custom cartoons
- Episode 3b: Smart Bear Live!
- How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
- How do I sell a general-purpose tool?
- How do I get my first few customers?
- Episode 3a: Smart Bear Live!
- Deep dive: Cancellation rate in SaaS business models
- The full story of “the one important thing” for startups
- Ask your startup question live, Oct 6, 1-3pm Central
- Ballad of The Lean Startup
- Fringe Benefits: Why startups mustn’t appeal to the masses
- Episode 2: Smart Bear Live!
- Improving the worst experience
- When being an “expert” is harmful
- Being who you are, if who you are is being better
- 10 things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say
- Episode 1: Smart Bear Live!
- Startup Weekend pep talk: It ain’t the code
- When free markets make it worse: new TLDs
- Why Rand should take some money off the table
- Why your company should have a single email address
- How to value your company for sale (Part 2)
- How to value your company for sale (Part 1)
- On the (un?)importance of design
- Point/Counter-Point: Startup Genome Project Considered Harmful
- Fighting micro-burn-out
- Do I dare call bullshit aloud? Do you?
- Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”
- Attacking your sucky excuses for not blogging
- Our unhealthy fixation with emulating #1
- Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness
- Startup Exercise: What can’t be solved with money?
- When you want to quit because it’s just not worth it
- How to think about Cash vs. Equity Compensation
- Your startup gets $20k cash + 20 mentors this summer @CapitalFactory 2011
- The unfortunate math behind consulting companies
- Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works
- “Fantastic” beats “efficient”
- Naming your startup: Settle down, it’s cool!
- What did they do before you came along?
- This year, take the risk
- Vetting a startup (or two): The systematic birth of @WPEngine
- How David Garland built a community of 100,000 followers in 24 months
- Marketing Platform Independence
- Rise and fall: Three Lessons for Entrepreneurs
- Build your own Startup Death Clock
- Reputation isn’t as powerful as you imagine
- If you build it, they won’t come, unless…
- It’s time to nut up or shut up
- Impossible that @ChrisBrogan and I are BOTH right, so don’t listen to either of us
- Killer articles on startups
- How a startup should leverage a virtual assistant
- The right way to position against competition
- A vote for me is a vote for dipshit businesses everywhere
- Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?
- What the crazy name “Smart Bear” taught me about branding
- Real Unfair Advantages
- No, that IS NOT a competitive advantage
- 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches
- Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund
- Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap
- The Pattern-Seeking Fallacy
- Taking “Fail Fast” to a whole… ‘nutha… level
- Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass
- Bending over: How to sell to large companies
- Tech Support *is* sales
- Solving the “marketplace” business model
- “Authentic” is dead
- Uncommon Interview: Howard Mann puts the fun back in business
- Accounting for Startups: Cash-basis or Accrual-basis?
- Not disruptive, and proud of it
- Permission Follow-Up
- Maybe not so much with the “optimization”
- Avoiding common data-interpretation errors
- A butterfly flaps its wings and you make a sale
- The true meaning of common idioms
- Employed with a side of startup
- Startup Fitness
- Guest Post Guidelines
- Pick one and own it
- CapitalFactory: Your startup gets $20k cash + 20 mentors for a summer
- Enough with the “expert” guilt
- New moderators and flair on Answers OnStartups
- Sunk Costs: An invisible, pervasive peril
- Guest post round-up
- Constructive Devil’s Advocate: Rude Q&A
- A Tradeshow Checklist, born of experience
- Why I feel like a fraud
- A tour of my WordPress plugins
- Uncommon Interview: Bob Walsh, Digital Entrepreneur
- Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month
- Don’t write a business plan
- How I got 6000 RSS subscribers in 12 months
- Really give thanks this time
- New empirical data for SEO and social media marketing strategies
- Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
- Ask your startup questions on OnStartups Answers
- Response: Sacrifice your health for your startup
- Discover what’s blocking sales with less than a day of work
- Why I switched to WordPress
- Put down the compiler until you learn why they’re not buying
- Uncommon Interview: Balsamiq Studios
- If Kindergarten were like Social Media Marketing
- You’re a little company, now act like one
- Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias
- 90-minute podcast on creative marketing
- Tips for increasing software conversions, parts 1 & 2
- Darwinian explanation and advice for “Going Viral”
- Why business blogs should focus on cheerleaders, not lead-generation
- Get 5 seats of Code Reviewer for $5
- Sacrifice your health for your startup
- Letters to Joel Spolsky
- Too small to fail: How startups can grow in recessions
- Audio Interlude
- Starting a business isn’t as crazy and risky as they say
- Communicating Values: Show, don’t Tell
- The real reason we cried at Susan Boyle
- Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want to
- Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don’t tell you
- How to get customers who love you even when you screw up
- Easy statistics for AdWords A/B testing, and hamsters
- How much of success is luck?
- Please stop saying social media marketing is free
- How to get quality freelance graphics design work on a budget
- Double your productivity without more work or stress
- LinksFor.Us: Track links to your blog for free
- High-concept pitches are not your friend
- Act like your price just doubled
- Behind the scenes of a viral post: Why your startup shouldn’t copy 37signals or FogCreek
- Convert shortcomings into advantages without lying
- Differentiate yourself through honesty
- Starting up while employed: Admit it
- Joy of Honesty in Business: A 5-part Series
- Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds
- Please Vote for A Smart Bear: 10 seconds of your time
- Get more blog links by offering fewer choices
- Distinguishing constructive criticism from bad business advice
- Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
- Breaking the Rules
- Standing out from the noise
- Heatmaps from Clicks: How Crazyegg improved our website overnight
- Start a Business Now: 6 Reasons Why This Economy is Good for Startups
- Bed, Bath, Linens, Things, Beyond, and More!
- QA vs. QC
- Strong opinions, somewhat weakly held
- Squarespace – my new blogging platform
- Agile Marketing: The Movie
- The leading provider of meaningless marketing solutions
- Five ways to listen to customers instead of goin’ fishin’
- Voting early: What if there were no election day?
- Love the messenger
- 2000 feature requests: Our foray into Uservoice
- Is it OK to Sucks?
- Procrastinate for Success!
- Labels Matter
- Ideas for Swarm
- Giving it away
- Customers over Employees
- Peer code review interview at GeekAustin
- Joshua Bloch dripping with wisdom
- Software Quality Mortgage
- Avatar Marketing: Sell to Carol
- Wordle me this
- Hello, I’m 1074018628
- The customer is always right?
- Obfuscation
- The Benefits of Features
- Pecha Kucha
- Surprised to find bugs?
- Boiling waste and goo
- No hats!
- We’re on the same page
- Limiting Options
- Agile marketing interview at GeekAustin.org
- The Anti-Bullet Test
- Identity Crisis
- Caricatures
- Discount gambit
- Resumes considered harmful, or at least useless
- We called him Tortoise ’cause he taught us!
- We Won the Jolt Award!
- Using fear to discover what’s important
- Free for all
- Twenty words for hoax
- Tell me a story
- I’m gonna learn you good
- Tidbits from New Hampshire
- Google is not evil… right?
- Outside-In
- Microsoft isn’t scary anymore
- Jolt Finalist: Code Collaborator
- Not in the cards
- Choose your words
- I Will Survive
- How to be the most expensive product on the market
- How to build a checklist
- It’s not about in-scope/out-scope
- Software is NOT like 6-Sigma
- Bing! You’ve got Cash!
- December Dumbass
- 800lb Gorrillas Don’t Care
- Do the right thing
- I’ve got nothing
- Where have your fingers been?
- I am a tree
- Lead with your neck
- Who are you to deny my space?
- Yes, and 7 more things in my closet
- Interview with Dr. Dobbs
- Bears Again!
- You’re a real company when…
- Guy in a bear suit
- Talk at SD West on Peer Review Best Practices
- Selling to the Bottom & Coffee II
- Idiot! Buying SmartBear.com
- DiY Projects & Coffee
- Black Shirts
- Road Trip! Product Planning by Customers
- I thought XML-RPC was supposed to be easy
- Team-Building for the Cold, Dark, and Alone
- Journey to a Build
- Overlay Spam
- The Case for Peer Code Review





