Characteristics that will Destroy your Startup

A “startup” can be anything from a business making a new product to a starting band looking to make it in the music industry. And, no matter what your startup is, there are certain characteristics, such as stubbornness and arrogance, that will doom you to failure if not addressed.

1. Stubbornness

Entrepreneurs become passionate about their topic and to some degree that’s critical to success. However, when the passion keeps you from being flexible and open to new ideas, you may as well start ringing the death-knell for your business.

It is important to remember that your idea may not be what your customers really want. If a new song is just not receiving positive feedback from fans no matter how much you push it, perhaps it is time to move on. Similarly, if every focus group hates your product, adapt and accept that, although you loved your idea, it may not be right for the market.

2. Arrogance

You know the product or service inside and out; you’ve been formulating it forever! You have a vision and you feel certain that you are the best person to carry it out. But if you think you know it all, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Being an entrepreneur is a learning experience, and the most important thing to accomplish along the way is the creation of a good team. You cannot know everything about your particular field of business – no one can. If you try to learn and know and do everything yourself you will surely not have enough time for what you do best, be it making music or running your business.

To see the full list, visit Inc.com.

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Beyond the Playlist with Viinyl 2.0

Why do most music players look like spreadsheets?

Discovering music on your own requires that you listen to a song for a period of time to see if you like it. Sure, if one of your friends tells you about a track you may “discover” it through them, but you will also spend some time listening to the song before you decide if it’s for you. This is the nature of the beast. Music is a time-based phenomenon.

Unlike with videos where you can “time compress” a video into a single frame image that you can easily visually scan, with music there is no alternative format that represents the song that can be easily scanned, except for the song name. This explains why most music interfaces display playlists, with song names as text not unlike in a spreadsheet, or list of song names. These can be easily scanned, but have no direct correlation to the sound or feeling of the song itself. I have always found it odd that in this era of digital music and highly designed interfaces, that most players default to a spreadsheet of song names to present music – true of iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Rdio and many others.  Spreadsheet music players.

Sure you can have a thumbnail of the album cover, but rarely do you see this on a song-by-song basis. Maybe in parts of Beatport or other DJ sites that are focused on tracks, but not generally on the web for the mass consumers of songs. And yes we have also seen many different visual interfaces like Sonorflow that let you visually traverse music genres or the linkage between bands, but these do not convey information about the songs themselves or the emotions that they convey.

What if we had a way to make a song come alive visually? This was the whole idea behind the original MTV and it was wildly successful for decades. What is the online equivalent, or even better, what can we do to push the whole boundary of music discovery and showcasing to new levels by embracing the time-based nature of music and coupling it with visual expression and a modern interface that lets you experience and interact with music in new and interesting ways. And no, I’m not talking about the waveform displays on Soundcloud.

I am working with a new company called Viinyl which is in the final testing stage for a whole new video-based version of their Music Showcasing platform that is very hot. I haven’t seen anything like Viinyl 2.0 and I think it represents a whole new way of presenting music. Viinyl amplifies the emotional content of songs visually, in a way that is enjoyable and super easy to use. This is a whole new way of showcasing music.

Viinyl is re-defining the way music and videos are experienced. In fact their video player is a new way to attract attention, engage an audience with the emotion of a song, and make money on singles and tracks. From a simple URL you can run a full screen video with interactive overlays and gather email, sell tracks and tickets, connect to your social networks and literally showcase music thru video. You can sell any digital file including music and movies, and provide relavent information directly in the context of the song including bios, links, credits, contacts, concert dates, lyrics, etc.

Here are some examples of the new Viinyl 2.0 in action:

http://hiphopdraft-ghost-in-the-machine.new.viinyl.com/
http://synthetica-mini-documentary.new.viinyl.com/
http://destination-brazil.new.viinyl.com/
http://idareyoubeta.new.viinyl.com/

The new platform supports audio file sales with fixed or flexible album pricing (minimum price and Pay What You Want) along with various free distribution options. The software is lightning fast, with just a few clicks, musicians and labels will be able to share their work independently – and hold onto all revenue generated.

The new Viinyl 2.0 LP format delivers a visual playlist, giving listeners and fans a far richer, more immersive and inviting music experience compared with the current spreadsheet format.  This new software will be available in the coming weeks.

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Crowdfunding On The Rise

Online crowdfunding has been gaining momentum over the past few years and is becoming an increasingly powerful resource for startups and indie projects.

Check out this cool infographic created by GoGetFunding.com for some interesting details on the recent growth of the crowdfunding industry.

For a more detailed report, check out the 2012 “Crowdfunding Industry Report: Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms” by CrowdSourcing.org

Crowdfunding Infographic
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The Most Interesting Startup in the World

The Most Interesting Startup in the World

  • They have no employees, only customers.
  • Strangers ride the elevator up and down, just to hear their pitch.
  • When they meet with Angels, they take equity… in their investors.
  • Their seed round was an IPO.
  • They once pivoted all the way around, just to see how it feels.
  • They mentor their mentors.
  • Their business cards say only “We’ll call you”.
  • Their lean model produces water and gold from air with no waste.

I found most of this written on a wall at the Mass Challenge accelerator in Boston.  I don’t know who started it or where it came from, but here you go.  Fun stuff.

What can you add to the story, the company, the myth…

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5 Tips For Bands Using HootSuite

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Photo by yisk on Flickr

Here are a few ideas for making the most out of HootSuite and managing social media as a band.  If you are going “DIY” on your promotional campaign, things like pre-scheduling important tweets in advance of hitting the road can be a big help.

The music industry has changed so much in the past decade, and now bands, musicians, promoters, and record labels have the ability to do their own promotions online. With the myriad of social media tools available for bands, it’s not easy to get started. Luckily, HootSuite offers a complete solution that allows bands to take social media into their own hands. This blog post will share a series of insider tips and tricks for bands in the music industry, and will show you how easy it is to use HootSuite to get the most out of your social media efforts.

1) Make a List. Make a List. Rinse, and Repeat

Bevis-1Twitter lists are your friend. Use them strategically and frequently. Whenever you have an interaction with someone over Twitter, add them to your “fans” list. Follow this list closely from within your Dashboard, and tweet your fans when you’re in their town. Let them know you have a show, and that you’d love to see them there. This simple move allows you to take something as simple as a tweet, and turn it into a ticket sale, and as a bonus, you start to cultivate a meaningful relationship with your fans.

If you find that your fans list is growing significantly (good job!) then create a fans list for each of the major cities that you visit. Filter this list by Klout score, and see which of your fans in that area have the most reach. Cozy up to these people and offer them a spot on your guest list, or schedule an in-person meet up. All of a sudden, you have a brand ambassador.

These influencers are invaluable: they’ll spread the word about your amazing live show, they’ll come back next time you’re in town, and if you play your cards right, they might even bring people with them.

Read the full story at HypeBot.com

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The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

sethlevineTechnology investor and managing director of The Foundry Group, Seth Levine, shares his thoughts about the changing trends in entrepreneurship over the past few years.

He points to several factors that have recently contributed to shifts in the way people consider and approach entrepreneurship including the breaking down of geographical barriers and a decreasing emphasis on pedigree.

One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend and one that I think will have a huge impact not just on the US economy and workforce, but perhaps even more intensely on other areas of the world – particularly developing economies.

Read the full story on his blog, at SethLevine.com

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Startup Strategies – Best of 2012

Here is a fantastic compilation of posts and articles from 2012 about managing startups from  Professor at Harvard Business School who studies lean startups, entrepreneurship, platforms, and network effects (Twitter: @teisenmann).  This is so much information and wisdom here for anyone starting a new venture or trying to make their startup successful.

As Tom says “The generosity of the startup community is amazing, and these insights are invaluable to those of us who teach and coach aspiring entrepreneurs.”  Dig in, there is a lot to digest:

Lean Startup

Business Models
Customer Discovery and Validation

Marketing: Demand Generation and Optimization

Sales and Sales Management
Viral Marketing
PR Strategy

Branding/Naming a Startup

Product Management/Product Design

Business Development

  • John O’Farrell of a16z describes how quality trumps quantity and clarity regarding mutual objectives is crucial in doing business development deals, using Opsware’s transformative distribution agreement with Cisco as a case study.
Scaling

Funding Strategy

Founding Process
  • My colleague Noam Wasserman published his book, The Founder’s Dilemmas, that describes tradeoffs that founders confront when deciding when/with whom to found, how to split equity, how to divide roles, etc.
  • Blake Masters’ summary of Peter Thiel’s Stanford CS183 lecture on the importance on early founding decisions.
  • Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures on questions that co-founders must address ASAP and the concept of the “minimum viable team,” i.e., the smallest set of skills needed to get traction in an early-stage startup.
Company Culture, Organizational Structure, Recruiting and Other HR Issues
Board Management

Startup Failure

Exiting By Selling Your Company

The Startup Mindset and Coping with Startup Pressures

Management Advice, Not Elsewhere Classified
Career Advice (Especially for MBAs)

Startup Hubs

  • Brad Feld of Foundry Group and TechStars has published the book Startup Communities, a guide to building an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Tools for Entrepreneurs

  • Beyond Steve Blank’s Startup Owner’s Manual, a book he co-authored with Bob Dorf, here is a list of the fantastic resources Steve has made available to the startup community — mostly for free.
 Original post is here.  Thank’s for compiling and sharing this Tom.
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