One of the best things about Askablogr’s recent publicity was a fresh influx of member feedback and feature suggestions. Craig and I sat down and prioritized these early last week, and (amazingly) he found a way to squeeze a bunch of them in around a nasty cold and a crushing consulting load (kudos again, Craig). continue…
Phew! Ever since the Mashable story hit I’ve been scrambling to keep up with the new customer signups at Askablogr. To get a sense for the kinds of folks who are signing up, I decided to make a point of welcoming each new member personally, including a visit to the blog they registered as a continue…
Last Friday afternoon (not the best moment for a PR break, but I’ll take what I can get), Mashable posted a generous review of Askablogr. I was curious to see what the mention would do to our traffic curve, and I thought you might be too. The graph above shows our traffic for the past continue…
As a partial explanation for my recent series of “Investment Thesis” posts, Andy and I are announcing today the formation of a new seed fund here in Seattle called Founders Co-op. I’ll be writing about it much more in the days to come, but between our site for the new fund and my investment thesis continue…
Just before I left the office this afternoon I fired off a cheeky email about Askablogr to the folks at Mashable. They’d recently covered Guy Kawasaki’s new project, Alltop, with a focus on the fact that he’d “only” spent $10K to launch the product, which is $2,500 more than I’ve spent on Askablogr so far. continue…
Thanks to Mike Arrington for his timely post on Sequoia Capital’s Elements of Sustainable Companies. While my own list of investment heuristics is a little more modest in its ambitions, theirs covers many of the same topics while winning hands-down on brevity. My personal favorites from the list include: Rich CustomersTarget customers who will move continue…
Yesterday was Askablogr’s two-month birthday. I posted earlier this week about our recent styling changes (that’s our new logo to the left), but wanted to follow up with some stats and commentary about how things are going. First, some basic numbers for the two-month period: Registered members: 145 Questions asked: 239 AdSense revenue / eCPM: continue…
This is the third installment in a series. For context, here are links to the prior two posts:– Investment Thesis Envy– Investment Thesis: The Basics This one will focus on the beliefs and assumptions I use to evaluate the content of an investment opportunity (independent of the people behind it, or the price at which continue…
Per my recent post introducing the topic, this is the first installment in a series in which I plan to put in writing the themes and heuristics behind my early stage investing activity. For this first post, my goal is just to categorize and ‘bucket’ the major themes. In subsequent posts, I’ll pick up each continue…
Some of my favorite blogger-investors have posted recently on the whys and wherefores behind their investment approach, including Fred Wilson on his latest fund at Union Square, Brad Feld on the launch of Foundry Group, and Paul Graham on what sets Y Combinator apart from traditional VC. While each of these three has a slightly continue…