Jason Calacanis wants you to save money for your startup, so he has come up with 17 tips on how . The intention is good. Working lean is great and means you probably won' t need outside money. And there' s some good stuff, like don' t buy Microsoft Office and skip the phone system. But there' s also some depressing bullshit like: Fire people who are not workaholics . come on folks, this is startup life, it' s not ...

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Millennials is the nickname for people born between 1980 and 1995. Last week, 60 minutes ran a story about this generation in the workplace . Here' s what viewers learned about this group from the story: 1. Many Milennials think anyone over 30 can' t be trusted and can' t be counted upon to be coherent. 2. Milennials want to roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday. 3. Milennials need ...

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Matt asks: In my experience, credit card processing has been one of the major hurdles in starting an online business. Especially recurring/subscription charges. You' ve got PayPal, which seems a little unprofessional (and is a pain in the a*), and an absurd number of 3rd party vendors offering various pieces of the puzzle. Integration is a pain, and the costs are really steep. Can you offer any advice or guidance? When you were still small and just starting out with ...

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Yesterday Amazon released an eBook reader/service called Kindle . Yesterday a lot of people wrote reviews of Kindle. Yesterday barely anyone on the planet had actually used Kindle, but they just couldn' t wait to tell you how much it sucked. There' s a lot of premature hating going on. Hypercritical negativity is in season among a large set of the web' s independent tech observers. Most of the 300 reviews on Amazon' s Kindle product page were overwhelmingly negative. ...

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So far our four-day work week experiment is working. We haven' t found ourselves collectively wishing we had an extra work day a week. We haven' t found ourselves gasping for extra hours. Instead I feel like we' ve been more focused and working better together. Since going to the four-day work week just about a month ago we' ve released the following updates: A better project switcher in Basecamp. A complete revamp of tasks in Highrise . Reply to ...

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David Feinleib at Mohr Davidow Ventures pens a piece called, Why Startups Fail . Here are his four reasons with my thoughts below. 1. Spending too much on sales marketing before they' re ready This is exactly why we encourage new companies to stay as far away from venture funding as they can. VC' s encourage you to spend! And since software is virtually free, and hardware is dirt cheap these days, and you only need a couple people to ...

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A slide from my South by Southwest presentation : These are questions we ask each other before, during, and sometimes after we work on something. That something can be as small as a couple-hour project or as big as something that takes a few weeks or more. Either way, it' s important to ask questions like this in order to make sure you' re doing work that matters. Why are we doing this? Ever find yourself working on something but ...

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Neil Wilson asks: ' Get Ink is the fundamental marketing mantra. You guys are natural self-promoters. What do you find is the best way of getting your name in the frame? 10 ideas that came to mind when I thought about ways to get people to notice you/your product: 1. Provide something of value. The first step is recognizing that marketing is asking for someone else' s time and attention. You need to provide something worthy of those valuable commodities. ...

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I can' t even begin to imagine the complexity of rolling out something as big as the iPhone 3G/2.0. You have to coordinate retail, marketing, web services, support, manufacturing, shipping, and many of other business and tech units months in advance. They all have to be ready by a a date determined by guesswork, pressure, and wishful thinking. Which means that you essentially have to make the call that the product is going to be done long before it actually ...

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Share and annotate your videos with Omnisio! cDovL3d3dy5naWd5YS5jb2 vd2lsZGZpcmUvd2Zwb3AuYXNweD9tb2R1bGU9ZW1haWwmdXJsPWh dHAlM ElMkYlMkZvbW5pc2lvJTJFY29tJTJGdiUyRlpXNFdUVUdkamhHJTJGZGF2aWQlMkRoZWluZW1laWVyJTJEaGFuc3NvbiUyRGF JTJEc3RhcnR1cCUyRHNjaG9vbCUyRDA4 target= _blank PTEyMDg3NDYxNzI3ODQmcHQ9MTIwODc*NjM1MzYwMiZwPTE5MzUwMSZkPSZuPQ==.jpg / I gave this talk at Paul Graham' s excellent Startup School and the fine folks at Omnisio synthesized slides and video. They have all the other talks from the school as well.

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What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth. What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile. And while mobile platforms have been around for a while, they never really gained passionate traction. Palm sorta had it for a while. Windows Mobile has been getting better. RIM is ...

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What questions do you have for 37signals? Fire away and we'll do our best to answer in the comments. Note: We can't guarantee we'll answer everything (sometimes we just don't know and there's some info we can't share). Also, we’re a private company and we do not disclose revenues, profits, or investment details. Sorry.FYI, here are some of the good questions we answered last time we did this: Can you share some times when you bought items for the business ...

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We' re often victims of design piracy. Roughly once a week someone emails us with an anonymous tip that someone has ripped off our UI look and feel and is using it for their own site or their own app. It' s amazing what people and businesses think they can get away with. We send the violators an email letting them know they can' t take our work, our words, our code, or our design. 98% of the time the ...

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It seems to be Spring season for rich-interface technologies. Most trying to blossom with a story about how they'll rescue developers from the perils of web programming and its dirty tech of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These stories are told with a shadow assumption that the only reason developers put up with this trinity of web specs is because of what they get back in form of ubiquitous distribution. That assumption then leads to the fallacy that if only someone ...

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A recent Screens Around Town post prompted a healthy debate about crowdSPRING and designers working on spec. We invited crowdSPRING' s Ross Kimbarovsky to write more about the issue. Below is his response. For those who haven' t heard about us: crowdSPRING is the creative marketplace, where buyers post creative projects (logos, websites, print design, illustrations, marketing materials, etc.) and instead of receiving bids and proposals, designers from around the world submit actual designs. Buyers choose the design they like. ...

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Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can' t pay, he' ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs. Now we all borrow occasionally and that' s okay if you fully understand the consequences and don' t make it a habit. I did that the other night. We pushed ...

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When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML /CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop: You can' t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren' t real. Paper isn' t real either, but paper doesn' t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it' s on your screen it should ...

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What a beauty.

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Programming platform experience is like knowing your way around the kitchen. Where are the knives, what size plates do we have, and what spices are available. It' s very useful for getting things done without having to search high and low for every little thing. But it' s also an asset with a cut-off point of diminished returns. Once you have a reasonably good idea where things are, it' s no longer the bottleneck in your culinary performance. Like chefs, ...

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At our company-wide get together last December we decided that 2008 was going to be a year of workplace experiments. Among other things, we discussed how we could make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy. Here' s are a few of the things we' ve implemented so far: Shorter work weeks Last summer we experimented with 4-day work weeks. People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that ...

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