I guest-post on other blogs fairly regularly, but it was pointed out to me by rising blogging star Ash Maurya that I don't usually share these with you!

So here's a selection of articles I've published elsewhere.

Four ways to get automatically rejected by an Angel investor
(VentureBeat)

Advice on pitching Angel investors who often have different criteria than the typical VC. Also see my follow-up article: Four more ways.

I've been pitched a lot, especially as a Capital Factory mentor, so this comes not only from my own experience but in discussing pitches with dozens of other angel investors.

Ten ways to make your writing more compelling
(Copyblogger)

Well, that was my title... it was edited to "10 Secrets to More Magnetic Copy," but that's OK, they were on a "magnetic copy" series binge at the time, and it made the "Best of Copyblogger 2009" list.  Sweet!

What was the trick to writing about writing in a fresh way?  The format was self-referential, e.g. using repetition when describing repetition.

Why your startup shouldn't copy 37signals or FogCreek
(OnStartups)

A controversial post about why you shouldn't blindly follow bloggers or celebrities. Interestingly Jason Fried at 37signals agreed but I ended up pissing of the folks at Copyblogger (later mended, as evidenced by my guest posting there). I wrote up the full behind-the-scenes story.

How to get hired at a startup and
How to write a cover letter that actually gets read
(WorkAwesome)

Both of these are aimed at the employee rather than the employer. Still, no matter which side of the table you're on, this is useful for your hiring process. Some of this stuff you might have heard, but between them these articles were retweeted over 1000 times so apparently it needed to be said!

How a smart bear built a company so he could sell it (Video)
(Mixergy)

Andrew Warner, the interview host, summarized it well:

"My hands were trembling as I was faxing eighty pages of the agreement over to the lawyers in New York City," Jason Cohen said about what it was like to finalize the sale of the company he founded, Smart Bear. Even though he was nervous about the sale, selling the company was his plan all along.

In this interview, you'll hear why he wanted to sell his business, and how he prepared for a sale as he built up his business. You'll learn how he founded it from scratch, with no venture funding and no debt. And you'll get his advice for how you can build your business.

Now two questions for you; please answer in the comments:

1. Want to see more of these?
   (i.e. Should I let you know about guest posts more regularly?)
2. Want to see other people guest-post here?
   (i.e. Do you come here for my opinions alone or would you enjoy other voices?)

Nothing clarifies things quite like a hyperactive, all-knowing, all-seeing, real asshole of a devil's advocate beating the living crap out of you.

(Cartoon by Andertoons)

Baseball players swing heavy bats before going up to the plate; acclimating to difficult working conditions makes it easier to hit the ball out of the park.

What's the equivalent of the heavy bat for honing your skills at pitching your product and raising money for your company?

For years I've been a fan of Scott Berkun's concept of Rude Q&A:

What would the meanest, nastiest, but smartest people in the world grill you on when you show your work?

A Rude Q&A is a list of questions [about your work that] you don't want to hear.

When you're contemplating an exciting new idea, you don't want to hear questions that might contradict your concept.

And of course, that's exactly when you need the biggest, baddest, smartest, devil's advocate to challenge all your assumptions.

It's not just about testing the mettle of your ideas, it also forces you to refine and clarify your marketing messages, your target customer profile, and your feature set. When you're being grilled there's no room for being generic about how you're different from the competition, no leniency for not knowing exactly what customer pain you solve, and no clemency for wavering on your company values and what compromises you're willing to make.

Scott goes on to explain just how unfair the questions need to be:

Make sure to include questions that are unfair or based on erroneous information. Reporters, clients, and the public all have their share of unfair questions and erroneous information, and you want to be ready for them.

These answers take more time as the responses need to be more polite and mature than the questions. They also need to carefully refute assumptions in the questions without being dismissive.

I love it; now we're deep into "heavy bat" territory.

So how do you go about writing your Rude Q&A? Oddly, the hardest part can be coming up with the questions.

To get you started, I've assembled a laundry list of questions common to many startups:

• Your biggest competitor just dropped their price to $0. How do you continue to justify your price point?
• If your idea is any good, you'll have competition from multiple players, both funded and bootstrapped, both smart and stupid, both large and small. How will you persevere?
• If the economy stays bad for two more years, how will you survive?
• The last thing anyone needs is another damn tool. What's the overwhelming reason I should even bother looking at you?
• Technorati reports one million new blog posts appear every day. Why should I read yours?
• What are the top three features your competitor has that you lack? How do you address that today, and what are you doing about it in the next six months?
• How can you call yourself an expert when you've only been at this for a year?
• What are three tangible, undeniable ways in which your product/company saves more money than you cost and saves more time than you consume?
• Truly great products and companies are rare, even when smart people are at the helm. What makes you think you have what it takes?
• There are thousands of consultants who make the same basic claims you make: high-quality, on-time, on-budget, good service, happy customers. What makes you any different?

These are generic; you'll need to come up with more specific attacks. For example, if I were defending this blog and answering the question about why anyone should read it, I would make the question more specific:

There are already too many blogs about startups, especially high-tech startups. Those blogs are far more popular than yours, their authors far more famous, and their advice is excellent. Smart Bear is a success but it's nothing like the success earned by someone like Steve Blank. Why should anyone listen to you?

And here's my answer:

I read those blogs; they're great! But the world needs more perspectives, not fewer.

For every Jason Fried who says "simple design is better than complex features," someone else needs to point out that they've (I've!) made millions with poor graphic design and too many features. For every Seth Godin who says a tribe of 1,000 followers is all you need, someone else needs to point out that it's not true in practice.

The biggest reason to read is that my advice and perspective, while not a massive thought-revolution in the universe, is "unique enough" that I constantly meet intelligent, capable, thoughtful entrepreneurs who haven't heard it before, haven't thought of it themselves, and whose lives and companies are improved after they've heard it, even when they disagree with my point of view.

I know this because of the comments and wonderful emails I receive. As long as people keep saying that I've lifted a burden off their chest or produced invaluable customer feedback or prevented them from wasting time and money, or even if they just get a laugh, that's my answer to why anyone should listen.

Don't get discouraged if you're not happy with all your answers. That's a good sign — it means you're being honest about the exercise and you're not yet satisfied. Keep it in the back of your mind and look for answers while you forge ahead. Discuss the hard ones with other people to get more ideas.

This is all just another way of being introspective, but it's a technique I've found to be particular useful.

Do you have more Q&A to contribute? Leave a comment!

Eric Sink says that tradeshows are like sex: When it's good it's really really good, but when it's bad...  it's still pretty good.

A lot of tradeshows have been cancelled due to low attendance (which in turn is probably due to slashed travel budgets), but those which remain are that much more interesting.

It's easy to waste time and money at tradeshows. It's not just the booth ($2k-$20k) and travel expenses ($1000/day including airline, hotel, rent car, shipping, and buying an extension cable at an outrageously overpriced convention center office supply center), it's the week of time spent at the show (including travel days) plus weeks of time spent preparing your strategy, crafting your sales pitches, organizing the booth crap, and chewing out the stoned guy at the print shop counter who claims to not see that the "red" in the color swatch is not the same as the "red" in your 6' x 6' banner.

Tradeshows are a combination of high-level strategy and low-level minutiae, so a checklist comes in handy.

3-6 months before the tradeshow

• Have a goal. Although there are many benefits of attending a show, you need a primary goal. A goal helps you make the decisions below and provides a yardstick for whether the tradeshow was "successful," and therefore whether you should do more. Examples:
  • Make a sale on the tradeshow floor
  • Get at least 20 genuine prospects
  • Talk with 10 industry leaders
  • Find 10 good recruiting prospects
  • Find 3 serious investors.
  • Ask potential customers 3 specific things (market research)

• Schedule a vendor presentation. Most shows allow vendors to give presentations, sometimes for a fee. Always do this. Even if just 20 people come to your talk, that's 20 people you get to talk to in depth for 45 minutes — far more valuable than talking to 100 of people at your booth for 5-60 seconds. I frequently get a few sales just from the presentation.

• Decide on your main message. Just like your home page, you get 3 seconds to convince someone to stop at your booth. You'll need this message elsewhere (e.g. banner) so you need to decide what it is early on. Remember the goal is to get people to stop, not to explain everything about who you are and what you do! Boil it down to a single, short sentence.

• Pick your booth. Booths go fast, and location does matter. Booths next to the bathroom are good even though they're "in the back" because everyone's going to hit the head. Booths near the front doors are good. Booths nearer to the center of the room are better than the ends. Booths at the ends of isles are good because you have a "corner" which means more traffic and your stuff can spill out over the edge.

• Design your banner and handouts. Printing takes longer than you think because you'll need to iterate. I've never gotten the result I wanted from a print shop on the first try. Never. The colors on your screen aren't the colors on their paper. The Pantone® colors you selected for your banner won't look the same as the samples. The sales guy you see at the counter screws things up. You need time to iterate and complain. And to find the right person:

• Find the techie in the back of the print shop. The first person you see at the sign shop is typically the sales guy, who knows nothing about Adobe InDesign, DPI, CMYK, vector vs. raster, or anything else important to making your stuff come out properly. Ask for the techie and talk to her directly.

• Plan on at least 3 people. You need two people at the booth to allow for busy times, to restock items, and to take breaks. Then you need another who can be walking around and going to meetings. Doesn't have to be a strict separation of powers, just need enough people to do all of the above simultaneously.

• Finish all the travel arrangements. Airplane tickets, hotels, rent cars. Fares are cheaper and there's no last-minute surprises with things being full.

• Decide how your booth will be different. Attendees will see a ton of booths, all essentially identical. A logo, a banner, some "clever" phrase, and 8 adjectives like "fast" and "scalable." Snore. You have to do something different. It doesn't have to be amazingly unique, just different.

• Buy shirts and other swag. With customization (i.e. your logo on a shirt), it can sometimes take a while, so get this done early. At least have a "tradeshow shirt." It's the law.

1 month before the tradeshow

• Postcard mailers work! I know, you thought "print media" was dead. Well not before a tradeshow, and not if you do it right. Best is to offer something cool/expensive at your booth, but only if they bring the postcard to you. This means they keep the postcard handy starting now and even during the tradeshow, which means whatever else you put on there (marketing material) gets seen repeatedly. It also means they seek you out on the tradeshow floor. Then, because you collect the card, you have their contact info (their name, company, and address), so you get to follow up later. Don't forget to put your booth number on there!  (Another reason to pick the booth early.)

• Emails probably work. Because you can use the tradeshow's name in the subject of the email, people will probably read your email blast.

• Set up meetings. Yes meetings! Tradeshows are a rare chance to get face-time with:
  • Editors of on-line and off-line magazines. Often overlooked, editors are your key to real press. I've been published in every major programming magazine; almost all of that I can directly attribute to talking with editors at tradeshows! It works.
  • Bloggers you like, especially if you wish they'd write about you
  • Existing Customers
  • Potential customers currently trialing your stuff
  • Your vendors
  • Your competition
  • Potential partners

  Proactively set meetings. Call/email everyone you can find. It's easy to use email titles which will be obviously non-spam such as "At [Tradeshow]: Can we chat for 5 minutes?" I try to get at least 5 meetings per day. Organizing dinner and/or drinks after the show is good too.

• Promote the show. You want people showing up and going to your booth, especially people who live in the area where attending the show just means getting half a day leave from work. Add a line to everyone's email signature with the show info and your booth number. If you have a giveaway or something else interesting, say that too.

• Box of everything. I can't tell you how many times we've been saved by a box of stuff. A small, cheap plastic box from Walmart is fine. You won't use all the stuff every time, but I guarantee you will use an unpredictable subset every time. The box should contain:
  • pens (multiple, different colors)
  • Sharpie
  • Scotch tape
  • masking tape
  • extension cord
  • electric plug bar
  • post-it notes
  • rubber bands
  • tiny stapler
  • highlighter
  • paper clips
  • scissors
  • all-in-one tool (screwdriver, can opener)
  • medicine (Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, DayQuil)
  • zip-ties
  • Generic business cards (in case anyone runs out)

• Comfortable shoes. You'll be standing for much longer than you're used to; comfortable shoes are a must. Attendees can't see your shoes so sneakers or clogs might be OK; you can change into your pumps when you leave the booth. You can also bring floor pads designed for people who stand all day, or for a fee most venues can put padding under your booth's carpeting.

At the tradeshow

• A/B test your pick-up line. This is no different than your landing pages! A tradeshow is a wonderful place to test attention-grabbers. What gets people to stop? To laugh? To say "OK, fair enough, tell me more?" Test all show long. After the 100th pitch, you'll know exactly what gets people's attention — now put that on your home page!
• Ask questions instead of pitching. Everyone else "pitches at" people; be different and actually have a conversation.  Good conversationalists are genuinely interested in the other person — what do they do, what are they interested in.  If you start chatting they will actually ask you for a pitch as a form of reciprocation.  Then you've got permission to "sell," and they're truly listening.
• Don't ask how they're doing. Your opening line should engage them with something you specifically have to offer. "Hello, how's it going" is not interesting or unique. Even just a simple "Are you interested in [thing you do]" is better, although still weak.
• Ask questions, don't just transmit. Sure you want to pitch your stuff, but this is a fantastic opportunity for direct market research on your potential customers! Come up with 3-5 questions that you're going to ask of people who walk by the booth, then ask away. No need to carefully record the results — the big trends will be obvious and the rest is noise.
• Stand, don't sit. Sitting looks like you don't want to be there. It's uninviting. The head-height differential is psychologically off-putting. I know your feet hurt; stand.
• Get into the aisle. Just because there's a table there doesn't mean you have to stand behind it. Break out of your 10'x10' prison and engage people in the aisle. Best is to have someone inside the booth to talk to folks who walk up and another in the aisle getting attention and directing folks inward. Especially during high-traffic, just being a barrier in the middle forces people to squeeze by your booth, which gives you a chance to engage. Learn from the guy in the bear suit!
• Moving pictures rock. When you're sitting at a bar and there's a TV behind the person you're talking to, it's really hard not to look, right? We tend to look at moving images, especially when they're bright. So your booth should have a big monitor or better yet a bright projector. Don't just show a static screenshot or PowerPoint image, and don't leave it stuck wherever the last demo left off — get a demo movie going and catch some eyes. We did this at Smart Bear and I can't count the number of times another vendor said "OMG we have to do that next year."
• Always be able to demo. Nothing is more sticky than a live demo. Not swag, not brochures, not clever phrases, not raffles. That other stuff is good — both for getting traffic and as a reminder — but you need a demo to make the experience memorable. I prefer demoing on a projector so it's big and passers-by get hooked as well, but a large monitor works too. Large. Not your laptop screen.
• Make notes on business cards. You'll talk to hundreds of people; you'll never remember what one guy said or what he wants. Always write it down on their business card. If they have one of those silly cards where you can't make notes (why people, why?), use a post-it from your box-o-stuff to keep notes together with the card.
• Sales people aren't enough. Most attendees don't want to talk to sales people anyway; if they're interested at all they want to geek out with their peers. Air out some of those folks who typically don't get to go on sales calls.
• Build your own happy hour party Rent a room at or near the conference site with wine, beer, and basic food. Pass out invites at the show and on your pre-show mailers. Who can resist free booze and free food? It's cheaper than you think and you get to pitch people in a relaxed atmosphere. People are willing to talk about your product to reciprocate.
• Don't depend on the Internet. Tradeshow Internet is spotty at best. Your demos and note-taking must operate without being online.
• Use LinkedIn every night. Most people will accept, especially if you add the contact the same day and reference the conference. Take advantage of this opportunity to significantly expand your online network.
• Walk the floor and talk to everyone. As a fellow vendor, you can commiserate about how the show is going and how it compares to other shows. Try to think of a way your two companies could work together; usually it doesn't work out but the discussion helps them remember who you are. Try to skip past their salespeople. Meet the founder if she's there.
• Note the jokes. People will make fun of you. Actually, if they don't, maybe that's a bad sign because they can't figure out what you do. Usually you get some wise-cracks. That's interesting, right? Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.
• Free food. Works better than almost any other free thing. The more "real" the food is (i.e. not just candy) the better. Cookies are good. Put it at the center of your booth so it's harder for someone to take without talking.
• Raffle something. I'm not a fan of raffles as a way to get sales, but I do like them at tradeshows because it gets a crowd to appear at your booth. Crowds make other people think your booth is interesting. We've seen people stop by our booth a day after a big crowd saying "I didn't want to stop yesterday because you guys were swamped, but I guess whatever you're doing is interesting!" Make sure you have to provide contact info to enter (fill form, scan badge, drop business card). Those leads won't be particularly qualified but it's better than nothing.
• Take names instead of pushing brochures.  Attendees get dozens of pieces of paper pushed into their hands and pre-filled in their tote bags.  Even if yours is clever, funny, and useful, it's still going to be lost.  Instead of hand-outs, scan their badge or get a business card, and mail them something.  It will be waiting on their desk one morning without all the distraction of a tradeshow.
• Quality not quantity. It's cliché, but it's better to have six solid conversations with people who will buy your software than to give away 200 pieces of branded swag to people who can't remember who you are.

After the tradeshow

• Follow up! Attendees are saturated with presentations and vendor pitches, so there's a 99% chance they've forgotten about you. Yes, even if they took your oh-so-memorable swag or your fabulously-designed brochure. It's up to you to follow up and remind them who you were, and take them up on their offer to get a demo, trial the software, or look at a draft of an article you want published.

• Apply what you learned about selling. You talked to hundreds of people, pitching a hundred different ways, with mixed results. What did you learn? Some questions to get you started:
  • Which one-liners got people's attention, and what did people not relate to?
  • How can you incorporate the successful one-liners in your home page?
  • What new AdWords text do you want to try?
  • How should you change your 2-minute demo?
  • What were people saying about your competition? What were your best retorts?
• Apply what you learned about your software. Having to demo the product 50 times always churns up invaluable product information. Some questions to get your started:
  • What features did people ask about which you already have, but it wasn't obvious?
  • What features did people keep asking for which you don't have?
  • What part of your demo seemed to drag because your workflow wasn't easy enough?
  • What part confused viewers because the interface wasn't obvious?
  • What terminology made no sense to newbies?
  • What did people hate about your competitors, and how can you maintain that advantage?
  • What did people love about your competitors, and how can you close that gap?

What are your tips?

Leave a comment.  I'll incorporate ideas into the main text.

Contributors:

• Jason Calcanis, Mahalo
• Ferruh Mavituna, Mavituna Security
• Jay Neely, Social Strategist
• Joseph Fung, serial entrepreneur
• Michael Trafton, owner BlueFish Development Group
• Sanket Nadhani, Fusion Charts
• Marc Winitz

"I feel like a fraud. I've been at this for 16 years and I still feel like a fraud. I'm just waiting for the day they see through the façade, but they keep coming back every year."   --Jason Young

Ah yes, the awe-inspiring words of confidence from the seasoned entrepreneur. My friend Jason intended this as soothing words of solace during (one of my) periods of personal freak-out while Smart Bear was in its infancy.

I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that didn't exist. (My software was the first commercial tool for code review.) Every second I felt like I was putting one over on the world.

I would explain how my tool cuts code review time in half, but was that actually true or had I just repeated the argument so many times that I stopped questioning it? I would instruct customers on "best practices" for code review, but who am I to tell other people how to critique code? I would orchestrate purchases, but should I be handling large sums of money with no knowledge of accounting, cash-flow, invoicing, purchase orders, or "enterprise sales" process?

Aren't I too young? Isn't the tool too crappy to charge for? Aren't I too inexperienced? Don't I need an MBA or at least some sales training?

Is Smart Bear a "real company?" What does that even mean?

Objectively, and with hindsight, my feelings were misplaced. The tool really did save time and headache; customers said so. As much as I doubted the title "Code Review Expert," I had developed more experience with more teams in more situations than any one person could (because everyone else was busy doing their actual jobs). And sales isn't as mystical and unknowable as I feared.

Still, emotions don't respond to logic. Jason was telling me that these feelings don't go away, even when they ought.

The other thing he was saying is: You're not alone. As it turns out, it's not even just business founders. Mike Meyers said "I still believe that at any time the No-Talent Police will come and arrest me." Jodie Foster said "I thought it [winning the Oscar] was a fluke. The same way as when I walked on the campus at Yale. I thought everybody would find out, and they'd take the Oscar back."

It turns out there's a psycho-babble name for this: Impostor Syndrome. As Inc Magazine points out, studies show that "40% of successful people consider themselves frauds." Ask any small business coach; they'll confirm how prevalent these feelings are. It's even common with PhD candidates.

Although not an official psychological disorder, and generally not crippling, if you have these feelings it's useful to know that it's common and there's something you can do about it.

See if these sound familiar:

• You dismiss complements, awards, and positive reinforcement as "no big deal."
• You are crushed by mild, constructive criticism.
• You believe you're not as smart/talented/capable as other people think you are.
• You worry others will discover you're not as smart/talented/capable as they think you are.
• You think other people with similar jobs are more "adult" than you are, and they "have their shit together" while you flounder around.
• You feel your successes are due more to luck than ability; with your failures it's the other way around.
• You find it difficult to take credit for your accomplishments.
• You feel that you're the living embodiment of "fake it until you make it."

But wait, how can this be? This overwhelming lack of self-confidence is the opposite of the traditional entrepreneurial stereotype. Don't founders forge ahead even when others say success is impossible? Doesn't a founder invent a new product based on her confidence that others will want it? Doesn't the very idea of starting your own company scream "I'm doing it my way, and my way is better?"

But it does make sense. Consider what it means to be a perfectionist. The perfectionist sees flaws in everyone else's work; there's always a way to make it better — her way. She doesn't respond well to authority dictating how things must be; neither is she comfortable delegating to those who (by her definition) clearly don't care as much as she does.

Sounds like the stereotypical attitude of the arrogant startup founder, but wait! At the same time, the perfectionist is never happy with her own work either, seeing (inventing?) a never-ending stream of flaws that require attention. No matter how highly others regard her work, the perfectionist insists it's incomplete and unsatisfactory. She can't accept the idea that others would be impressed with her accomplishments, since to her they're mediocre works-in-progress. She worries that one day they'll realize she's right.

Our entrepreneurial motivation is not confidence, it's an insatiable desire to improve. It's not about thinking your ideas are better than everyone else's, it's about never accepting any idea as being best.

Can these feelings be constructive? Yes, if they're a sign that you're striving to learn and improve. As Andy Wibbels says:

If I don't feel like a fraud at least once a day then I'm not reaching far enough.

If you aren't scared shitless then why bother?

Here's what it looks like when you're channeling these self-doubts into something constructive:

• I doubt my title as "expert," so every day I read, write, and immerse myself in my field.
• I doubt the quality of my software, so I fix bugs as fast as possible, I write unit tests proactively, and I thank my customers for their patience.
• I doubt I deserve my reputation, so I work hard to earn it.
• I'm not as good as I want to be at speaking/ writing/ programming/ designing/ managing, but I can see myself slowly improving.
• I'm not a "real company" yet, so I concentrate on making my customers successful, so they don't care about corporate size or structure.

On the other hand, here's what it looks like when these doubts are harming you:

• I doubt my title as "expert," so every night I worry about what will happen when I'm discovered as a fraud. I'm absent-mindedly looking for trivially-easy jobs I could take where this pressure won't exist. (Looking for an "escape-hatch" is a well-documented behavior.)
• I doubt the quality of my software, so I spend lots of time covering it up with graphic design and heavy sales pitches.
• I doubt I deserve my reputation, so I live in constant fear of exposure. I can't sleep at night and I loathe myself for lying.
• I'm not as good as I want to be at speaking/ writing/ programming/ designing/ managing, so I go out of my way to avoid any of it, and feel like a trapped animal when I'm forced to do it.
• I'm not a "real company" yet, so I feel guilty every time someone gives me money or believes anything I say.

If you're letting these feelings get to you too, at least recognize it so you can deal with it logically.

And when logic fails, maybe this will help:

You believe that Mike Meyers and Jodie Foster are talented, right? You might even believe that I'm an expert in peer code review. Yet we doubt ourselves every day. And we're wrong.

You know we're wrong about ourselves; that means you're wrong about yourself too.

Don't stop striving to become better, just stop holding yourself up to an impossible standard.

Sometimes getting it off your chest is the best medicine: Leave a comment!

I don't write many meta-posts, but I was just asked for the forty-seventh time which Wordpress plugin I use for this or that.

I know I recently said your blogging platform doesn't matter, but it's not that it doesn't matter at all, just that it's not the primary driver of success and shouldn't be the first thing you spend time on.

But still I take pride in my work, and that means attention to detail, and that means customizing the blog for both appearances and utility.

So here are the Wordpress plugins I use, and why.

Can't live without these:

• Akismet
  Free comment-spam protection from Wordpress. You'll need a Wordpress account but it also works on a self-hosted blog (like mine). I get 30 spam comments per day, and Akismet blocks very nearly all of it.
• Comment Relish
  Auto-email (once!) after someone comments for the first time to thank them and encourage dialog. Blogging can be a one-way soap box, which is OK for some people but not for me. This is on the must-have list because I've had scores of interactions (both short and in-depth) as a direct result of someone hitting "Reply" to this email.
• Secure WordPress
  Alerts you if your Wordpress installation is insecure, at least in a few common ways. Wordpress is easily hacked!
• WP Super Cache
  Automatically caches plain-HTML versions of your pages. This saved me — the times I'm slammed with traffic (usually Hacker News or StumbleUpon) Apache can croak. Really it's not Apache per se — it's that Wordpress is (famously) inefficient and Apache PHP threads running Wordpress each occupy 20M of RAM, so if you have 50 simultaneous connections you're likely to either run out of memory and crater the server (at worst) or display a "Not available" message (at best). Since installing this plug-in I've had no problems with scalability.

  All I can do now is hope that I get slammed with even more traffic!  :-)

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
  This generates those "related posts" at the end of each article. A lot of plugins which do this; this one does the best job deciding what "related" means and has good options allowing me to exclude certain types of posts (e.g. announcements).

  I used to think this was just a nice-to-have toy, but it turns out to be a big deal. It's most important for new readers who haven't seen old posts — especially anything older than the 10-15 posts displayed by your RSS reader when you first subscribe.

  I noticed that after adding this plugin there was a significant increase in kind, magnanimous folks Twittering older articles, typically those listed under "related" on the latest post. Not only does it mean folks are more engaged in the blog, they're spreading the word. Anything that helps spread the word is good!

Nice-to-haves:

• WP Greet Box
  Generates a message near the top of the page suggesting that you subscribe by RSS or email, tuned to the source of the traffic (e.g. Hacker News, Search, Twitter, Reddit). I don't know if tuning to traffic source helps, but having the message at all does seem to encourage subscriptions.

  Although once someone on Hacker News complained that "Hacker News readers are smart enough to know whether to subscribe or not, so this is insulting." I would have thought it was just that guy, but his comment was then up-voted 26 times! Lesson? Pleasing a few people is hard, pleasing many is impossible, and pleasing all while also achieving your own self-interest is... also impossible?

• CommentLuv
  Appends link to a person's latest blog post when they leave a comment. An easy way to promote the blogs of your commentors, which means an easy way to encourage more comments and to say "Thanks for contributing, here's my way of automatically contributing a little back."
• Get Recent Comments
  Sidebar of latest comments, again to thank/promote.
• No Revisions
  Wordpress saves a post revision every time you hit "save." This enables "revert" but it also fills your database with crap, which in turn slows down the entire site. Not worth it. Anyway I write everything in a text editor (Notepad++) using Sphinx because I can write in plain-text with simple stylistic markup instead of cumbersome HTML tags, and the HTML it generates is plain-Jane so it's easy to paste into Wordpress, touch up, and schedule for posting.

Not even sure if it makes a difference, but...

• Google XML Sitemaps
  Creates proper Google sitemap automatically.
• Robots Meta
  Automatically create a "robots" meta-tag for search engines.

Conspicuously not a plugin

These aren't plugins, but they're Wordpress customizations. I did all of these in PHP, linked in the "right" way with hooks and filters. I also use the Thesis Wordpress Theme for overall site structure and I used the hooks from that system as well.

• The "Twitter me" button
  Appearing at the top and bottom of posts, both on the web and in the RSS feed, this is the Tweetmeme button that millions of other people use. There are plugins for this, but none could place the button in those four spots, none put the button where I wanted it (i.e. outside the main text, not word-wrapped inside), and none could handle the use-case of dealing with imported posts from other blogging software (I used to be on Squarespace).
• Automatic reformatting
  I like to use things like em-dashes — the extra-long dashes bracketing this phrase — but it's easier to type two dashes in a row. On the other hand I want simple quotes, not curly quotes. There are plugins to do things like that, but I wasn't happy with the options there so I wrote my own filter.

  This might sound petty and too detailed to be concerned about, but just because these things might not matter to overall success/failure, it doesn't mean I don't take pride in making things just so!

  And there's a better reason. HTML on the web I can format with CSS, but HTML in RSS readers I cannot. And worse, usually the CSS for them sucks. So for example, I use <H3> tags for section dividers, but in many RSS readers those aren't even displayed bold, or the text size is weird. So part of my filter takes all <H3> tags and brackets them on the inside with a <B> tag, but it does this only for the RSS feed. This way my HTML can be simple and styled, but the RSS feed works better in practice.

Hopes this helps some of you. Would you like to see more posts like this — mechanical stuff — or do you come here for the stories and a good kick in the pants? Leave a comment and let me know.

I hate most interviews, and I think everyone else does too. They're rarely actionable or insightful.

This interview is uncommonly different. In the last interview Peldi Guilizzoni (Balsamiq Studios) gave detailed advice about how he earned almost a million dollars in revenue in his first year of operation.

In this installment we hear from startup expert Bob Walsh, whose many works for startup founders include:

• Blog: 47 Hats
• Podcast: Startup Success
• New book: Web Startup Success Guide
• Classic book: Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
• Online guides and support network for founders: StartupToDo.com

Below Bob digs into his years of experience living with, mentoring, and thinking about tiny startups to tell us what's important for a founder starting a company today.

Q: You’ve stated that the goal of both your new book (Web Startup Success Guide) and your new tool for entrepreneurs (StartupToDo) is to double an entrepreneur's chance at success: Increase from 10% to 20%. That’s a terrific goal — and it certainly seems plausible — but to what do you attribute the other 80% of the risk? Luck? Timing? Ideas? Tenacity? What are the big killers lurking for the new startup founder?

I think the big killers of newborn startups lurk mostly inside the heads of founders. First and foremost, succeeding as a Digital Entrepreneur (my new catch-all keyword for traditional funded startups, unfunded startups, microISVs, indie game developers and content creators like bands and authors. Like it?) means you need to be the most stubborn S.O.B. you know. Perseverance is the single most important attribute you need. Pick any 5 successful software companies you’d like from one-person microISVs up to the largest and trace how their market focus, product, marketing etc. has zigged and zagged from inception. That’s staying in the game until you find what works.

Editor's note: Most people think "perseverance" means "being so confident in your ideas that you don't change your mind even when there's reason to doubt." But Bob points out that companies are fluid, and those who survive are stubborn about building something good, not about any one idea.

Another reason DE’s turn back is it’s lonely out there. Whether it’s creating a software app that you’re going to build a global one-person business around, or giving away the Science Fiction stories you write as you build your community so you can launch a book, this is lonely stuff few back in the safe (ha!) warrens of working for some large company would dare do.

Q: You spent two years working on StartupToDo before bringing it to market. Clearly it’s the culmination of your years of experience with startups — writing about them, mentoring them, promoting them, and watching them grow, shrink, live, and die. How were you able to convert this knowledge into a software product? What aspects of building a company can be encoded in this manner, and what’s still outside the realm of “how-tos?”

When it comes to software, you as the developer have got to really understand both the people who have the problem you want to address and the problem itself. Now maybe you get this understanding working for a company, writing software for clients, or because you are as the saying goes scratching your own itch.

Between the various things I’ve been doing and my own efforts I started noticing just how much time in this business goes into context work — all of the stuff besides the core of what your are building — and how hard it is, how much you have to sacrifice, especially if you are bootstrapping. I realized that startups reinvent hundreds of wheels and that’s an awful way to build businesses. Then one day I read a comment on Darren Rowse’s blog by a guy who created a point system to keep himself blogging, consistently, and motivated and I was electrified by the idea putting “actionable guides and discussions” together with “measurable progress you could see, share, and compete with in a friendly way.” It took about a year and a half to start learning rails, go off on a tangent (the teachingsells.com approach) get back to learning rails, go off on another tangent (Adobe AIR — good stuff, but not a good fit), get back to learning rails/JS etc. sufficiently well to — with a lot of help — code StartupToDo.com.

There’s a lot of value being able to talk about current business issues with your peers and hearing what other people recommend (See the Business of Software Forum and Answers.Onstartups.com), and getting a solid overview/education on one of the many aspects of this business (see Microprenuer Academy). But one of the unfortunate aspects of “forumizing” is it’s easy to substitute endless online talk for concrete action. I’ve really tried to build the first two big chunks of value in my startup to create what I call focused, actionable discussion.

To Do’s are not enough. Hopefully the Guides at my startup that I and other community members are writing are more than static recipes.

Q: You’re a big advocate for startups using social media because it's essentially free (in dollars). But it costs a lot in time and effort — another scarce resource. Is traditional marketing and advertising completely dead, or is there still room for it in a startup?

Jason, you’re right: social media marketing takes lots of time. And depending on your startup’s market, traditional marketing (paper spam, email spam, sales visits, shows, conferences, display ads, etc.) may still have some residual value.

But there are three things at work here. First, developed country societies are moving from industrialism where standardized advertising worked to post-industrialism where the Internet empowers people, markets and conversations. Second, the core values that you find among people who came of age after the Internet are markedly different – the ugly corporate truth is traditional marketing and advertising barely influence them while what their personal social networks “think” and how they interact person-to-person (e.g. Zappos) matter far more.

Here’s the third: Few startups (let alone Digital Entrepreneurs) have more money than time. It happens to be a very happy circumstance that we can now translate time via social marketing (blogs, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest) into sales. Unfortunately, developers in general hate to market (social or conventional), hence why I’m focusing on making marketing, especially what you do online, ultra easy as the next big feature of StartupToDo.com.

Q: You’re well-known for promoting David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for organization and productivity, and Chapter 8 of your Web Startup Success Guide is devoted to it. How important is “personal productivity” to the success of a startup? We all know people who are completely disorganized yet effective, and others who have everything in order but never seem to accomplish anything. Is organization fundamental to startup success because time is so precious? Or can it just be a distraction?

For 25 or so years when I built software for San Fransisco Bay Area corporations as a contractor, personal productivity was my obsession — the more and better ways I could improve my productivity, the more money I’d make. That’s probably why my first commercial product was a Windows desktop personal task manager.

So far, David Allen’s GTD methodology of getting tasks out of your head, processing them efficiently and tracking your results is the best productivity theory we have, IMO. If you can find an effective, not obsessive, way to apply that, you’re going to have a decided advantage in just about anything you do in this world, including creating your startup.

The key thing about personal organization is it’s very personal. Have you ever seen the shot of Al Gore working on three monitors in his office surrounded by stacks of books, paper, and whatnot? That’s what works for him, with demonstrable results.

Finding/creating the right tools for you to move tasks to results in a consistent manner is what matters, not the ceremony or form you use.

Presently I use Things on my Mac and iPhone to track tasks, Notebook on my Mac to plan in, and SpeakEasy on my iPhone as a way to capture tasks and thoughts throughout the day I can later process. Also, I find Basecamp comfortable when I need to project management with others and checkvist.com an easy way to collaborate on outlines.

Q: You wait until Chapter 7 of the Web Startup Success Guide to talk about the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that uniquely describes your company’s purpose and niche. Do you believe startups need to determine their USP from the beginning (because it’s vital to defining yourself) or is it something you back into over time (because you have to seek your market position)? In either case, how exactly do you go about defining it?

I believe the Internet rewards original content and punishes unoriginal content, be it software, ideas, or products. If you can’t explain to the market and yourself who your product or service helps how, you’re in trouble. I think that the earlier you can define your startup’s USP the better and recently I’ve found some validation of that approach in what Marc Andreessen and Steve Blank have said about product/market Fit (useful stuff, and yes, I’m writing it up as a S2D Guide!).

That said, the "defining part" is no easy exercise. I wish I could boil it down to a checklist, but there’s more to it than that: your USP depends on what you are bringing to the party. Your experience, insight, opinions, values and abilities define your solution to the problem. One thing I think is true: is it’s an iterative process --the more times you examine your USP, the sharper, more useful, more effective it becomes.

Q: Your book is clearly targeted at web-based software companies, and perhaps even more specifically at software developers. What of this advice is applicable to other businesses, or at least businesses who want a strong web and social media presence? For the non-technical business owners out there, what parts of the book should they still read, and how do they know which of your advice to apply?

Guilty!   :-)

I write/podcast/work for developers who want to build their own software and software companies. Why? Because those are the people I like, and want to help succeed.

But for a while I’ve been thinking that software startups, microISVs, bands, authors, and others have more in common and share more values online than they do offline. Hence the Digital Entrepreneur meme. Neither The Web Startup Success Guide , the Startup Success Podcast or StartupToDo.com are for programmers as programmers — you won’t find a single line of code in the lot of them. So, whether you are or are not a programmer, the stuff I’ve created over the years will have some value for you.

Any questions?

Thanks Bob!  Please leave questions (or arguments!) in the comments to continue the discussion.

Tired of productivity articles instructing you to break down large projects into smaller, more annoying, and less interesting tasks?

Or about how if even the teeniest little thing remains in your inbox at 5:00 on Friday afternoon, then not only will your entire weekend be shot, but also you are a terrible human being?

Well I figured with the New Year ringing in Resolutions about how It's Really Going To Be Different This Time, No Really I Mean It Why Are You Looking At Me Like That, it would be a good time to share with you a favorite technique of mine which doesn't require that you sacrifice a goat at an altar of David Allen.

This technique is weird, and not in a good way. More like a painful, aggravating way, but entirely worth it.

It really does work. You'll measurably improve your productivity.

It's called the "Personal Checklist," which sounds boring and benign but is actually the emotional equivalent of punching yourself in the face.

Here's how you do it.

In the last post I beat you to death about ditching your business plan but failed to provide an alternative.

Okay okay, "Planning == Bad," but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what's worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues.

To help you, I'm stealing a trick from therapists.

You're smart. You'll make good decisions. But you also get bogged down in daily minutiae and putting out fires, meanwhile missing the big picture.

That's where this article comes in: To splash cold water on your face, forcing you to face reality and continue to defend or change the important choices inside your business.

What follows is your startup therapy session. Having to think through and answer these questions forces you to identify what you need to do today to seek profits and growth.

1. In one sentence, what does your product do and who buys it?
2. In one sentence, why does someone buy your product?
   These are surprisingly difficult. The shorter and more precise your answers, the more you understand why you exist. If the answer is, "I honestly don't really know why people give us money," that's something to remedy immediately.

   If you have an answer, is it because you have hard evidence that this is how your customers perceive you and why they give you money, or just because you believe it? "Evidence" means emails and Tweets and testimonials that use those words exactly; otherwise you're likely interpreting their feedback to match your expectations. (I find myself constantly guilty of this disconnect.) If you don't have evidence, it is OK to have a hypothesis but you should be concerned about collecting proof and disproof.

   If you do know the answer, these two sentences should drive your marketing efforts. If these sentences aren't on your home page, why the hell aren't they? Is there anything else more compelling to potential customers? At the least, these represent the themes that drive your marketing campaigns.

3. What one thing is most responsible for preventing sales? (e.g. people not knowing you exist, pricing, not enough product features, unorganized sales strategy, look-and-feel of website, haven't identified pain points, ...)
   

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   Cartoon by Andertoons

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   Most little companies aren't honest about this, yet it's possibly the most important question you could ask. For example, I'm an engineer, so my first answer to "Why don't you have more customers?" is almost always:  "Because we need this feature." You hear some potential customer say "we will buy if you do XYZ" so you conclude that if you implemented XYZ people would start breaking your door down.

   But is that really the case? If you added one feature and maybe satisfied that one customer (assuming they wouldn't ask for a second thing, and in my experience they usually do), would that get you 100 more sales? For those hundreds of people who downloaded your software and never bought — is the reason "not enough features?"

   For the hundreds of thousands of people who never came to your website in the first place, or hit the front page and left after three seconds, is the solution "more features?"

   When you honestly ask yourself this question, it will naturally lead into things you can do right away to get more people to the site, into a trial, and/or into a sale. Don't just rest on what comes easiest.

4. What's one thing you could do to get more feedback from customers, potential customers, or sales you've lost?
   You already know that external feedback is the only way to empirically determine how to build products people want to buy. Maybe you can't drop everything to solicit feedback (although folks like Eric Ries say you should), but surely it's worth one day every month to go out of your way to collection information from the field.

   To get the ideas flowing, here are eleven ways to get more feedback, most of which take less than a day to implement.

5. If you had zero revenue from now on, on what date would you run out of money?
   

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   Cartoon by Andertoons

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   The first thing this does is force you to nail down your monthly expenses and accounts payable. Second, you know the length of your fuse even in event of disaster (if you have revenue) or if you never manage to land a customer (if you're just starting out).

   More than that, knowing your "padding" as I used to call it is helpful in making decisions like "Can I afford to try this Risky Expensive Thing," such as making your first hire or trying a $20,000 media blitz. Whenever you're contemplating a new expensive idea that could be awesome but could be setting money on fire, your fuse date helps you know how much time you're risking — time to recover if your bet doesn't pay off.

   Finally, knowing "The day my business could die" helps focus your attention on activities that bring in revenue.

6. If someone handed you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize future profits?
   This gets you to crystallize what cost-centric activities would most help your business. We get caught up in free-but-takes-tons-of-time marketing and development activities — and most of the time that's a good way to think — but sometimes it's still true that "you have to spend money to make money."

   Sometimes the "thing you could do" is so compelling, it might mean you should raise a small angel round or consider debt. Typically it's best to get by with minimal debt and investment, but if the "thing you could do" is transformative, you might reconsider.

7. If you were forced to hire someone today, how would you define her job such that she would contribute enough revenue to cover her expense?
   I know, you can't afford anyone right now, no one can do as good a job as you, and you don't even know that you'll ever hire someone. That's OK, that's not the point of this question. This gets you to ferret out what tasks are being dropped by the wayside because you've got higher-value things to work on, because you're having to fight fires, or maybe because you've got your priorities wrong.

   If you honestly can't imagine that there's anything a full-time person could do that would generate enough revenue to cover their salary, that's not a bad thing.

   But often this churns up one or two very-part-time tasks which really ought to be done but aren't. No need for a new employee of course, but maybe you should re-prioritize those tasks next month.

   Sometimes you come up with a good answer, which means you should contemplate help. "Help" doesn't necessarily mean a proper, 40 hours/week (OK, who are we kidding, 60 hours/week) employee. It could be a part-time consultant. It could be an intern.  It could be an outsourced office assistant. It could be a new partner willing to work for stock.

8. Which of your business operations do you hate?
   Do you like creating new features but hate tech support? Enjoy product demos but hate cold-calls? Need to have your arms around company finances but hate bookkeeping? Love writing ads but hate dealing with ad sales agents? Get excited about your field of expertise but hate writing blog posts and Twittering?

   Part of why you're in business for yourself is creating something from scratch and delighting customers, but the fact is that most business operations just suck. You can't justify avoiding important tasks because they're not fun. I know — I'm the worst procrastinator when it comes to those things!

   It's useful to identify these undesirable-but-necessary tasks because you can do something about it:

   • If you shut off email, Twitter, chat, and the phone, and just buckle down, you might be able to get through some of these tasks in under 15 minutes. Bookkeeping is like that. Get it off your plate; you'll feel better.
   • Mundane tasks might be outsourceable. I've found that "virtual assistance" services (like Four Star Service in Austin) are surprisingly affordable if you have a lot of little time-consuming tasks.
   • See if your existing vendors are willing to do some of your tasks for a small fee. For example accountants often provide bookkeeping services at a lower hourly rate.
   • Consider an intern or consultant. Before you argue that the cost is too great, factor in the lost revenue due to you working on those tasks.
   • Can you share the burden with your co-founder or employees? Maybe they don't hate it as much as you do; you can trade hated activities. Or switch off.
   If you're still stuck on not wanting to spend any money to save time, remember what Dharmesh says: Act as if someone is paying you $1000/hour for any activities that improve sales (making, selling, and your customer's happiness), and for everything else they're paying you $10/hour. It's accurate.  (Before you argue, don't forget about the cost of lost sales.)
9. What initiatives could be done half-assed without significant impact?
   I know, this is a shitty question. If you're like me, you are that aggravating combination of perfectionist and control-freak that on the one hand leads to stellar work but on the other hand means some things take too long. Some parts of your business are core to your success: Which features you implement, how you present yourself and interact with customers, discovering how and why people give you money.

   But the fact is your to-do list is infinitely long and you have to pick your battles. Your "Contact Me" page has to exist but it doesn't matter what it looks like. Every blog post doesn't have to be a work of art. Your Google Ads need variety (for testing), not hours of wordsmithing. It's better to have an eBook about anything than to have no eBook at all.

   If it can be done half-assed, and it's not going to impact revenue, maybe it should be half-assed. Allow yourself to delegate (because it's OK if it's not done exactly how you would do it). Push more out the door.

10. If you could get one solid hour of advice from a guru you respect, what would you discuss and what would be the goal of the meeting?
    This is a fun way of asking: "What knowledge/feedback/direction is critical to your business right now, and which you're uncertain about, and which you feel other people are expert in?"

    Phrasing the question this way also leads to solutions. For example, maybe you should set aside 4 hours to get your hands on that guru's materials (blog, book, podcasts) and immerse yourself not just in advice but in their mindset. Or email them and see if you can get some advice! Or find other people that guru respects and who might be more accessible.

    Or hell, ask me! I publish my email address you know.

What tips do you have? Leave a comment!

"You need a business plan" is the mantra of MBA types.

As they say, businesses don't plan to fail, they fail to plan! Who could argue with such a clever turn of phrase?

Let's do some quotes:

• "Without a business plan, how will you know whether you can make a profit?" (source)
• "A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling." (source)
• "Many businesses fail due to poor planning. It is important for every business owner to understand the entire depth, flexibility, strength and weakness of their business plan." (source)
• "Adjust your business plan as needed, but be sure to not stray too far off of your original idea." (source)

Surely those Harvard MBA grads are correct! After all they don't give out those MBAs for nothing — you have to at least start a business yourself! Oh wait, you don't have to do that? Oh.

Trouble is, this advice is inconsistent with how real (small) businesses operate, as you can often see for yourself in the same articles that promote the use of the business plan.

For example, Kenrya Naasel writing for Latina.com starts by saying "A business plan is the most important document you'll ever create." (And you thought your website's home page was important? Ha.) But later she quotes a successful entrepreneur who admits "We operated with no real plan for years" and "Things don't generally go as planned."

That's one thing everyone can agree with: Things don't go as planned. Yeah, so how are you supposed to write a three-year projection with a straight face?

Or take Sean Davis of Success on my Mind who tells us "Writing a business plan is your most important step," but then admits that his past two (successful!) projects were "simply an idea I ran with."

The telling part comes in the comment section where Sean adds:

Now that I think back on it, I've done plenty of marketing that led sites to success... but it was all from trial and error. Had I known BEFORE what I know now, I could have had a plan and reached my goals much earlier."

Here inlies the fallacy. You never "know before what you know now." If success is "all from trial and error," how exactly do you write a plan?

Marketing is trial and error! Features, messaging, the path to customers, your competitive edge, your pricing model — all this gets figured out as you go. You can't know what's going to work ahead of time, so why is Sean concluding that he should have written a business plan?

Business plans are just guesses, and they're almost always wrong.

The very idea of "planning" is ridiculous:

• If you had written a business plan in 2007, what would your assumptions have been? Investors love "Web 2.0," MySpace is how to reach young people, the economy is growing without limit, and products with demonstrable ROIs will get healthy slices of corporate budgets.Of course every assumption in your plan was reversed in 2008. The world economy exploded. Getting money from budgets is like squeezing water from rock. MySpace is dead, long live Facebook. The term "Web 2.0" is passé. Twitter went mainstream and might be more important for "word of mouth" than blogging.Good thing you spent all that time planning.
• At the beginning you don't know anything about what your business will look like. Your product will evolve to fit the market. You'll test marketing messages on AdWords and make unexpected discoveries about what works. Good and bad luck shape your company. You have no answers, no predictive power. Nor should you artificially pin yourself down! Even a "plan" buried in a drawer makes you less likely to consider the radical new idea that changes everything and makes you successful.
• Have you tried actually writing a plan? Go ahead, try it! Be sure to include your mission statement, your vision, your five-year profit-and-loss statement, decide who will be your key personnel, define your pricing strategy, explain the risks, position yourself against competitors.Now be honest, where did this data come from? I'm guessing you reached right up your ass and pulled it out. For the five-year plan you were so deep you tickled your spleen. You know this is crap; why are you doing this when you could, oh I don't know, just talk to potential customers?

But enough from me. What do VCs have to say about this? What if you're trying to raise money, don't you need a business plan? What do other entrepreneurs say?

• From Venture Hacks, a great blog written by entrepreneurs-turned-VCs: "Don't send a business plan to investors. Nobody reads them and nobody executes them. ... Document your detailed plans on a napkin."
• From David Cowham, Bessemer Venture Partners: "Nothing slows down a VC as much as a comprehensive business plan."
• From Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital in a Guy Kawasaki fireside chat, "Five-year plans aren't worth the ink cartridge they're printed with."
• I could fill three pages with links to 37signals railing against business plans (did you like that pun y'all?). From When was the last time you looked at your business plan: "[All three businesses] are still alive but have also completely rethought their original plans. They’ve changed focus, services, salaries, partnership arrangements, etc. ... If these companies' one year projections were so far off, imagine how worthless those year three (or five) projections turned out to be." Or, from The only plan is to learn as you go: "Stop presuming you can be right in a world of massive uncertainty. The only plan you should make is to plan on improvising."
• A study found that "quality of business plans had zero impact on the amount of VC funding being raised."
• From VentureBlog, VC David Hornik derides an article on Wired and TechCrunch about how to raise money: "VCs tend not to read business plans because a) they are too long and b) your business will likely have changed by the time anyone gets around to reading your business plan."
• From Business Insider, Kevin Ryan, founder of six companies, says "I don't do a detailed plan. If a VC focuses a lot on the details on the financial model, I won't work with them."
• From Steve Blank, "In the real world, most business plans don't survive the first few months of customer contact. And even if they did — customers don't ask to see your business plan." And then from an article called Startups are Inherently Chaos: "As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant."

Do I really need to go on, or are you sufficiently bludgeoned into not writing that business plan?

In fact, stop reading this article and do something useful like A/B test a landing page.

UPDATE: Here are 10 tips on what you should do instead of writing a plan.

What do you think?  Is there value in writing a plan?  Leave a comment.

This isn't a recipe.

I'm not saying "If you do it my way, you'll succeed too."  These aren't tricks.  This isn't necessarily repeatable exactly this way.

I'm not arrogant enough to think luck didn't play a big part — maybe the biggest. Still, here's my RSS/email subscriber chart from FeedBurner:

The short version: I don't know which of the following techniques were responsible, or what percentage of the effect was pure luck.

All I can do is tell you what I did, and what I still do.

Make your own rules

Initially I was obsessed with the "rules" of blogging, but none of those rules actually got me more readers. What worked in the end was just doing whatever I was most proud of; something that reflected my personality and perspective.

Examples:

• They said to build readership you have to blog at least a few times a week (5-10 times is better).  I post at most once a week, sometimes skipping a week.
• They said anything over 700 words is just skimmed and will intimidate most people to the point of not reading at all. I don't disagree, but I write for those who want more than just a snippet of a concept or a shallow list of 10 ideas with no meat.  I'd rather engage a few people in interesting discussion than a lot of people with no depth.
• They said content is important, but so is writing a lot; you need to build a large corpus of posts for cross-linking, SEO, inbound links, etc..  But I feel that posting frequently necessarily means lower quality. I'd rather post infrequently but obsess over each article. I'd rather get 100 re-tweets on one article (because people really enjoyed it) than 10 on each of 10 articles.
• They said you need a variety of posts — lists, essays, links, guest-posts, videos. I posted just essays for a while. More recently I've started adding some how-to's but I feel no need to e.g. make a video.
• Some say you should do guest posts to involve other people and lighten your own load.  I want my blog to reflect my own voice; folks can subscribe to other blogs for other voices.
• Some say you should use short, choppy sentences, never use fancy constructs like semi-colons, always structure for skimming (section dividers and bullets), and have a picture even if it means nothing. I mostly use essay-form (although sometimes I use sections/bullets — like in this post — but always with further discussion), I love semi-colons, and I like the rhythm a long sentence provides.

I'm not saying any of these rules are wrong! I'm saying you need to decide for yourself what kind of blog you want, and go for it.  Don't blindly apply any rules.

Wouldn't you rather make something you're proud of than something that has X readers?  Of course "both" is best, but for me the former is more important. I'm coming to believe that the latter comes more easily when you work on the former, because the former means good content, written from the heart. And content is everything...

Content über alles

No surprise — most blog advice says that "great content" is the most important thing, and I agree.

But then it's often tempered by other advice like the necessity of a posting schedule, how you need multiple channels of presence (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, forums), how you need a good blogging platform with various widgets and "subscribe now" prompts, and so forth.

Those things are fine, but secondary. Without any doubt, content beats them all. Many of the following sections are really variations on this theme.

My biggest argument for content being paramount is embedded in the subscriber graph above.  Upon seeing that graph, your first question is probably: What happened around Jan 09, May 09, and especially Aug 09 that caused a sudden jump in readers and increase in slope?

Answer: Nothing. I did nothing.

Real answer: Articles went viral by the grace of readers.  The new influx of people not only subscribed but read some older posts and helped revive them. As time passed there were more and more "older posts" that could be spread and more people to spread them, causing a virtuous circle.

But I didn't do anything. I didn't pay for traffic, I didn't submit an article to the right place, I didn't convince someone to post it on their blog, I didn't get credibility with a link-sharing site, ... I didn't do anything.  Other people did stuff (more below), and they did it on their own only because they loved the content.

The only thing under my control is content.  The rest is luck, and maybe a few techniques described below.  But mostly luck. And without good content, luck won't help you either.

Spreading links yourself doesn't work

There are great articles about getting on the front page of Digg, developing a consistent culture of link-sharing, the recurring swarms of traffic from StumbleUpon spurred on by paid views, and the chaos of Reddit.

So naturally after every post I ran out and posted my article on a myriad of link-sharing sites (and others).

And naturally, no one cared. Sure I got a few votes here and there, and a few dozen inbound hits if I was lucky, but it didn't move the needle.

But every once in a while an article would take off — on one of the sites above or on a site I had never heard of (and wouldn't hear of again) or some reasonably popular blogger would mention the article.

On those days traffic would be 100x normal! And frequently I'd see a sizable bump in subscribers. Hurrah! But never did that bump come from a link-share I initiated myself. It was always someone else who posted the article and started the snowball of votes. Always.

The lesson: Content content content.  Because content is the reason that someone would post it or link to it, not because you spread it yourself.

And anyway, link-sharing traffic sucks

Here's what I've found empirically from "going viral" on the various link-sharing sites:

• It's really hard to get any Digg traffic.  Even when I've gotten 100+ diggs, the referring link count from Digg is typically only 10% more than the number of votes, which means essentially no new traffic.
• Digg traffic isn't sticky or active (subscribing, commenting, clicking ads, ...)
• It's easy to get 30-300 hits from Reddit even from the front page, so long as you have a reasonably interesting post title. But hard to get more.
• StumbleUpon is the best in terms of total amount of traffic, because besides the initial influx you get a recurring "long tail" of traffic forever more. This has been observed by others. I've not only witnessed a long tail trickle but, as in the case of my more general post about Susan Boyle, recurring big bumps in traffic resulting in over 100,000 hits over 6 months.
• But it doesn't matter because none of it sticks. My web analytics tells me fewer than 1 in 1000 StumbleUpon visitors subscribes.

Bottom line: You can't force a post to get shared, and even when it does the traffic isn't that good.  Every second spent screwing with a link sharing site was always a waste of my time.

When I wrote good posts I had a chance to thrill someone, possibly getting a valuable referral from Twitter or another blog.  All the time I spent failing to force posts to be noticed could have been used to write more, better posts.

Except Twitter.  Twitter is good.

There's something magical about Twitter traffic. Twitterers like to comment, like to spread the word, and like to subscribe to stuff.

Maybe it's because Twitter is so personal compared to those other sites. Maybe it's because identity leads to accountability which leads to trust. Maybe because the attitude is "This is a good read" rather than "Who has the most votes."

In any case, encourage Twittering.  Take the time to add one of those "Tweet This" widgets; I (like most bloggers) use TweetMeme, although I wrote some custom PHP code to get it to work just like I wanted.

(See, from my own advice I probably shouldn't bother with custom Twitter code, but I'm still a geek... sometimes I have to reinvent the wheel, or spin my wheels, or otherwise screw with wheels...)

Guest posting, done right

Some of the big initial bumps of traffic you see on the chart came from guest-posting, but sometimes a guest-post didn't move the needle at all.  Here's what I've learned:

• Your guest posts have to be your best work. Don't save your best article for your own blog — use it for a guest-post!  I know that feels wrong, but every time I've gone ahead with a post that I felt I ought to "save for myself" I've gotten a ton of traffic — far more traffic than I would have gotten otherwise, and traffic that's highly sticky.Three examples for me: Why you shouldn't copy 37signals or FogCreek (OnStartups blog), How to write a cover letter that actually gets read (WorkAwesome), and 4 ways to get instantly rejected by an angel investor (VentureBeat).  In my own opinion some of my best writing, and none of these articles are republished here, but I can attribute hundreds of subscribers to each of these posts. Remember, a guest-post is going in front of thousands of people who couldn't care less who you are, so your goal is to completely and utterly thrill them. I've had people say "I immediately subscribed to your blog without reading any other articles, just because I loved that article so much."
• Have a great post featured on your own blog before a big guest post goes live. You want that influx of high-quality traffic to see something solid. For example, don't show them a general announcement or a "vote for me in this contest" post. More specifically, do not say "I just published a guest post." Say that later, or have a "guest post round-up" later in the week.
• Get to know the blogger first. Meet in person, link to that blogger a few times, send genuinely useful stuff to them over Twitter, review something that blogger is doing, mention a blogger in a different guest post, etc..  All this opens the door to a real relationship.  Remember that popular bloggers get guest-post offers all the time, so it helps to make yourself known.  I've done all of the above.
• Maniacally follow the "guest post guidelines" if there are any. Sounds obvious I know, but popular bloggers constantly complain that people don't do this.  Duh.
• If there are no guidelines, send a fully completed ready-to-post article with your initial email. "Ready" means using plain-Jane HTML (so it can be copy/pasted into any blogging platform), including good images (attached to the email or hosted), a catchy title, outbound links, and a good question at the bottom to encourage comments.
• Write posts specifically for the target blog. That means appropriate content, the right length, and a subject they haven't talked about lately.  A good way to get an idea for a post is to look at one of their posts from at least 12 months ago.  That subject matter is probably still relevant, but the specific topic is now old enough that it could use a refresh.  Don't worry about wasting your time — if the guest post isn't accepted, try for another blog or just post it on your own blog!

Reveal

Everyone says to "be authentic" and "admit faults" and "tell stories."  All good advice, but repeated so often it's hard to know what it means anymore.

With few exceptions, my most popular posts reveal something typically kept secret.

If it's embarrassing, that's a good sign.  If you're scared that people will think less of you, that's a good sign.  If you know a lot of people will disagree, that's a good sign.

It's the controversial sentiment that thousands of people themselves secretly agree with but never had the courage to say.  They appreciate and love you for your courage.

It's the embarrassing underbelly people love to read about — a peek into a world normally hidden, a peek into a story people don't want to talk about.  When it's embarrassing it's honest, and when you tell the truth even when it's difficult, everyone appreciates it.

It's the story that makes you seem weaker, dumber, more scared, less sure — that's the story everyone can relate to, though few will admit it. Be one of the few.

What's more inspiring: Me confidently instructing you how to run a company, or me admitting that I was scared, unsure, almost gave up more than once, didn't know what I didn't know, and yet persevered?

Of course there's a line between personal and professional, between appropriate and inappropriate, between revealing other people's secrets and revealing your own. You need to decide where that line is, and it's not true that you have an obligation to talk about home life in order to be authentic.

The blogging software doesn't matter

Blogging software is like web application frameworks — there are plenty of major and minor successes with any of the choices, so the choices don't matter.

If you forced me to lay down a set of rules — even though I really think it doesn't matter — I'd say this:

1. Start with hosted Wordpress. You can customize enough, and you can move to your own server later if you really feel like it. Wordpress is the biggest platform with the most plug-ins and the largest community. Sometimes bigger isn't better, but in this case it is.
2. Use your own domain name, not yourname.wordpress.com.  Not because it looks better (e.g. sethgodin.typepad.com proves it doesn't matter) but because it allows you to move off the hosted platform in future without changing your URL.
3. Don't host yourself at first — you'll spend a ton of time messing with the server instead of working on your blog.
4. Only use plug-ins or features that clearly contribute to the quality and spreadability of your content or joy of your readers. For example, I use a "related posts" plugin because I found (empirically) that new readers do find other posts that are interesting to them, which increases the chance they'll want to subscribe or re-tweet. I use a "recent comments" plugin for the sidebar to highlight commentors, because that rewards folks for commenting. But I don't have an automated "newsfeed" widget, because people don't come to my blog for news. Indeed, I actively want to differentiate this site from a news site.

But really, none of this is as important as:

Time × Luck × ( Being there ) == Success

Since I didn't mastermind the spikes and cusps in the subscriber graph above, you have to chalk it up to luck (that a story was spread) and content (to have a story worth spreading).

Here's my (completely out of my ass) theory:

1. You have to have great content even if no one is looking, otherwise the engine never starts.
2. Then when you get lucky, something will happen.
3. As time passes, there are more chances to get lucky.
4. As you add more great content, there are more chances to get lucky.
5. Ergo, the equation above.

It seems from the graph that "time" is a major component; nearly two years are represented. This leads me to the frustrating conclusion that a major component of your sure-fire, hands-on, proactive strategy for success is... waiting.

Do it for yourself

In the end, a blog is a labor of love. It's hard work, it takes lots of time, it's frustrating, and the only thing you can control is what's on the page. (And half the time I second-guess myself so much, I'm not so such about what's on the page either.)

If you're doing it for subscribers only, it's probably not worth it. Rather, try being a guest-poster on an already-popular blog. The readers are already there and you don't need to worry about things like posting schedules or blogging software.

Write a blog because you want to get better at writing. Write a blog because you want to discover what you think about the world by forcing yourself to hack it out in front of other people. Write a blog because you want to make an argument and see how others respond.

Seek yourself rather than seeking the approval of others in the form of "hits" and "RSS."

That way, even if you fail at everything else, you can't fail at improving yourself.

What are your tips for blogging? Do I have something wrong? Leave a comment.