joshuago’s business Bookmarks

Spending a little or spending a lot is a means, not an end. Choose the right strategy to win the market or you may end up going straight to purgatory. From Ben Horowitz, former CEO of Opsware, which sold to HP for $1.6B.

What we discovered, of course, was that innovation survived the death of its institutions. High tech companies didn't own innovation; the innovators did. News organizations don't own journalism: journalists do.

An overview of the major problems facing journalism today, and an exploration of potential funding models.

Could it be that the last chance to save a young family from foreclosure is a 28-year-old Pakistani-American playwright-attorney who learned bankruptcy law on the Internet? A fun and informative, if at times infuriating, read.

Startups need different metrics than large companies do. They need metrics to tell how well the search for the business model is going, and whether at the end of that search is the business model you picked worth scaling into a company. Or is it time to pivot and look for a different business model?

Build your admin panel, implement CMS features, and have a good metrics dashboard and logger.

The default startup business model for 2010 and beyond will be subscriptions and transactions -- not growth/acquisition and advertising.

The appeal of bundling is partly that it reduces transaction costs: instead of having to figure out how much each part of a package is worth to you, you can make a blanket judgment. Bundling eliminates the problem of fretting about small expenditures, which may be one reason that flat-rate pricing is very common in the vacation industry. It also offers what economists call option value: you may never watch those sixty other channels, but the fact that you could if you wanted to is worth something. Many consumers also perceive bundles as bargains; getting a bunch of things for one price feels like a deal, even when it’s not.

If you’re planning a web app, it’s always worth reminding yourself what the base need is that you’re satisfying, and how much value it is likely to have with the user: a successful business/service should neither over nor under-value itself.

By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.