TWiST 35

Ryan Clarke calls in to ask, I have great domain experience, should I consider outsourcing the technical end for my idea?

Brad and Jason’s advice:

• While you can try to outsource the work the chance of success is slim, the better approach is to get a co-founder that can develop your product.
• The opposite the opposite holds true, someone with developer experience that lack domain experience can succeed, if they listen to the customer they will be able to improve quickly.  It boils down to ideas are easy and execution is hard.

Ryan follows up with, how do I find a developer?

• Search LinkedIn for people who worked for companies that just went out of business or were recently sold.
• Consider Craig’s List
• Hacker News
• Friends of a friends

Finding a co-founder will be your first test as an entrepreneur, if you can’t do that you may have bigger problems down the road.  Also when choosing that person be sure they fit well right from the start because you will both ride the ups and downs together.

If you still can’t find someone consider teaching yourself to code, in the beginning your work will be rough but it will improve and may inspire others to come on-board after seeing some progress.

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TWiST 34

Anthony Colarusso who created myfaceshirt.com, a site that designs and prints the face of the buyer on a t-shirt. He wants to know, how to make his product more visible?

Jason’s advice:

• You need to get this viral and in the social space, DailyBooth may be a perfect place to start marketing your idea.
• Disadvantage is you are making individual shirts not bulk
• Reach out to high profile people and send them one and see if they will tweet or twitpic to their followers
• Consider adding their shirt to Threadless and creating an affiliate program
• The uniqueness of the idea limits your ability to scale
• Jason asked the question to the Mahalo Answers community, How would you market myfaceshirt.com? and received some good advice.

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TWiST 34

Jonathan Dusing of row27 Mobile calls in to ask, how do I defend my product against a big name competitor that wants to throw it’s legal weight around, how aggressive should I be?

Jason’s comments:

You have to be careful but you have to look at what you have to lose and what you have to gain.  You may want to consider taking the “unofficial” approach and be a bit more edgy with your product.  If that doesn’t interest you, consider contacting CBS to try work out a partnership.  If that approach doesn’t work, (fight up) use this to inspire your team to crush CBS, to make a product 10x better and reach out to more schools.  Write some blog posts and be aggressive about why your app is so much better.  Keep iterating, your advantage is that you are nimble and can pivot quicker than a large corporation.

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TWiST 34

Tommy Leap calls in to ask, how do I become an angel investor?  First you have to meet the SECs rules to become an angel investor.  If that is met, you have to understand the risk and create a portfolio that diversifies you enough to find a winner understanding that many startups will fail and only a few succeed.  If you don’t have a significant amount of discretionary income to meet the SEC rules but have a little extra cash, consider creating your own startup and have control of your own destiny.

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TWiST 34

Max Salmeron the youngest caller to date (15 years old) calls in to ask, if Jason has any advice for someone who wants to become a blogger.  Jason suggests you find something that you are passionate about and that you enjoy, start with one vertical and become part of that community.  It will be tempting to start multiple sites but more often than not, most lose interest trying to keep them all up to date and you never get traction, so stick to one and create good content.

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TWiST 33

Stephen Cross calls in with a good question , how do I determine the value of my community?

Jason and Shawn comment:

At Weblogs Inc they used Google’s keyword manager and worked backwards, started with AdSense and got a feel for pricing power and then moved to display ads.

Some advertisers are more cutting edge and you will find them quicker others will take longer it just depends on your niche.

Jason asks a great follow-up, how do you get advertisers willing to write a check to a niche website? You are selling people who influence the influencers (it’s a power play), help them innovate and insert their company  into the blogosphere, you are the expert.  This definitely will not happen overnight, it often takes 5 or more calls to get established and be sure to be short and to the point when you email.  A Jedi tricks is to call just before their assistant is at work or just after the assistant goes home.

At the end of the video is one of the funniest moments in TWiST history, you tell me.

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TWiST 33

Travis Fisher will be graduating soon with a Masters in Software Engineering, he and a friend started ECStageArt they make custom drum heads, guitar amp grills, backdrops, scrims and road cases for touring bands and other applications.  He also started KeyMinor which is an online knowledge exchange for people who play, perform and record music.  Lastly he recently started HowToPlaySong which is a sister site to KeyMinor and is meant to allow users to get expert help learning how to play songs.  Recognizing that most of these endeavors lack scalability he wants to get more involved in a startup and wants to know should he jump in feet first with his own startup or go work for another startup to learn more.

As a follow-up I contacted Travis about his segment and he had one additional question that he hoped the community would give some input.  He understands that the LaCrosse, WI isn’t the meca of tech but for other lifestyle type startups (ie. music industry) do you think it is feasible to be based elsewhere (ie. not LA, NY, SF)?

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TWiST 32

Francis Gulotta, of MacSupport, (MacFirst on Twitter) a support call center for mac users, calls in to ask, how do I get more customers?

Jason and George comment:

• Paying $30 is obviously your barrier
• Web site is ok, logo can use work
• No money back guarantee visible
• You need to A/B Test your home page and optimize
• Create a promotion where you leverage your existing customers, ask them if they enjoyed the service to write up a small testimonial and either tweet or Facebook it and you give them a free incident call
• Try get some press from people that do Mac blogs
• Capitalize on the inefficiency of the Genius Bar, go to the Apple store and give away free support tickets
• Be creative with the offers
• Create some press releases, promoting your “Free Support Friday’s”
• Promote the fact that you are a US based company
• Eric Stevens (of Etsy) conducted listening labs for Mahalo ask him for some advice on how to conduct one.  (A listening lab is where people comment on your web site while they use the site.)
• Blog about Mac issues and give some free tips/support
• Study how GeekSquad and competitors promote their service
• Video record some of your calls or promote “Free Support Friday’s” on Ustream, so people can observe calls and interact with the you.
• Be patient and grow as a lifestyle business until you get some scale.

The “Ask Jason” segments are probably my favorite to blog about for a couple reasons, one people can ask specific questions that are their pain points and secondly sometimes we see if advice has been taken and this is a perfect example.  Here is a image of the MacSupport homepage and the changes made and a  few of my recommendations.

click to enlarge

1. Logo still needs improvement

2 + 3. You added them which is great but you need to add an image, add some color do something that will make these differentiators POP!!! .

Recommendations

• Where is the “Free Support Fridays” promotion?
• Sara Sutton Fell of Flexjobs was interviewed on Mixergy and she felt, having the Better Business Bureau seal and headlines of news outlets helped her credibility, consider adding these.
• I think if you went to the news outlets and could prove that Apple has been getting too big and it’s customer service is starting to fall behind you may be able to get a headline.  The reason being is Apple kind of has that Disney like feel, they do everything right and if you can show they aren’t, someone will want that story and your company is a viable alternative with “Free Support Fridays”
• Rework the right sidebar of your blog so that the RSS and all your social sites (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) are in the same spot, visible toward the top.
• Do all your support techs have Twitter accounts?  If so, try personalizing your business whereby people can interact and create a relationship with your company, no one likes large impersonal corporations.

If you found this helpful please click the “Retweet” button and if you found it extremely help you could always submit it to HN.

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TWiST 31

Dan O’Donnell, Founder of Positive Atmosphere would like to know, how do I grow my site?  Dan’s approach so far has been a lot of Facebook and Twitter and some paid adwords, he wants to know is their a better method.

Jason and Jack recommend:  People need a reason to come to a site, you have to keep it exciting, keep the conversation going.  Jason refers to “Demonstrative Growth” by showing that the community is building and gaining momentum and people will want to be part of that.  If possible recognize users for their participation and keep your core listeners involved and they will promote for you.  The energy of the group will help drive your site.

Additional suggestions for the site, create book groups, review and discuss books in the space, when you are noticed by the author, you may be able to get the author to participate.  Which will create buzz and excitement within the community.  The web site needs work, Jason recommends a new logo and to change the homepage to a calender of events, where it is easy for fans to find topics that interest them (ie. Tony Robbins Tuesdays, or Marriage Mondays).

If you found this interesting please click the “Retweet” button and if you found this incredibly help you could always submit it to HN.

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TWiST 31

Jordan Punchinger a web developer has legal issues with a past client, the project was completed but after a few months the customer wanted updates.  Jordan estimated the update price to get started and a lawsuit was filed against him, the customer has gone to the press and is ask for a full reimbursement of the entire project, what should I do?  Jason offers if the customer is the Canadian Entrepreneur of the Year award winner maybe he can help mediate things.  The monetary value seems too small to get messed up in legal battle.  If need be he also recommends go to small claims courts settle your differences, take the high road.  He also recommends asking three prior clients to vouch for your work, place that on your website and move on.

My recommendations:

1. Review or take some time to think about how you present your agreement with customers and make sure you are very clear about what is and isn’t included, when the job is complete and any follow up benefits
2. Consider creating a summary of the work completed when the job is done and have the client sign the summary, relying on the fact that payment was received may be confusing when it comes to updates.

If you found this helpful please click the “Retweet” button or vote here on HN.

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