Yes, we’ve decided to stop.

The Ship It On the Side blog will stay around for the forseeable future since the podcast subject matter is pretty timeless. But we’re not likely to add any new content.

Thank you for listening, reading, and leaving comments. If comments are posted I’ll be notified right away and answer. Don’t hesitate to make your voice known.

Just remember, we’re still building and growing, we haven’t quit. This is not the end of something, but the beginning. So you do the same. Keep going. Keep coding. Get that project done, published, and start marketing. Someone out there wants what you built.

Oh yeah, last thing (you see I’m into long goodbyes): don’t worry about competition either. Twice during the development of my latest project I have seen direct competitors show up: both of them offering what I’ve been slaving over FOR FREE. So, I’ve just redoubled my efforts, searched for holes in their offerings (which is not hard since anything that doesn’t work well for their “customers” is chalked up to: “well, it is free, you know.”) and made my product much better in the process. You do the same. If you see direct competition that means there is demand for your product. Unless that competition blows your doors off, you’ve got a fighting chance.

So that’s it. My last line of advice, un asked for. Take care.

Peace.

It came down to two people: Marius and rkotter. Both did everything the contest required plus some. It was a tough decision between the two and in the end we had to resolve the duel with something masterful and innovative:

Flipped a coin.

OK, so it’s not so innovative or masterful, but it was quick and painless.

Marius was heads and rkotter was tails. The coin was a penny (because that’s what my wife had in her pocket at the time). The penny was flipped into the air over an oak hardwood floor (just to keep things even.)

Tails.

The winner must contact me via email within 10 business days. Just send an email to shipitontheside.com to the user name curtis. Include your mailing address.

Click for a bigger picture

For your convienence here’s a link to the 3M Micro Professional Projector Giveaway page.

courtesy of Inspired Startup

Your software startup will face a ton of obstacles and if you don’t plan for them, well, think of it this way: you might gingerly hurtle the first few obstacles if you’re lucky. Then, when you’re not expecting it, BAM, you’ll get hit with a lawsuit, or run out of money because both cars broke down and your youngest child got sick enough to go to the emergency room (on a Sunday at 3am). Or all of those will happen at once.

If you don’t at least ask yourself a few simple questions like:

• What if nobody wants what I’m building?
• How do we let the world know we exist?
• What if my web designer (or architect, or little brother) flakes and stops working in the middle of the project?

Then, when you least expect it, BAM… and, if someone takes a picture, I will be giggling uncontrollably.

Bailouts didn’t mean a thing to the masses until September 2008. All at once we saw the rapid decline of the stock market. We also started to hear a steady drumbeat of bad economic news that has gotten louder and louder. Every single day there are reports of job losses and layoffs. The unemployment rate is soaring. And everyone is scared.

Or are they?

Take a look at this graph:

This is a graph of the number of visitors to Monster.com from the month of September until now. If you don’t already know, Monster.com is the number two online jobs website on the Internet. Notice how the numbers continually dropped after September? This is not an intuitive conclusion. From the looks of it, while jobless numbers rose jobseekers seem to drop.

The number one jobs search website is Careerbuilder.com. Here’s it’s graph:

Ahh, there we are. While, strangly, the number of visitors drops steadily after September, they start to increase sharply in January. So what happened in January to send folks online looking for jobs in droves? Fear. Or rather, the Politics of Fear.

So, what’s the point anyway? You cannot make decisions by what the news or politicians say. You must decide for yourself whether you will succeed or fail.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure. Benjamin Disraeli

So keep working on that software startup. Keep designing. Keep coding. Keep looking up. Look at the guy in the picture above, he’s still walking!

“No one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone“

Well, I’ve spent at least that long doing… stuff… that, while I’m probably an expert at it, no one would care.

So here I am, marketing an upcoming online software app (FlowerPot) using a blog and podcasts. I’m neither a writer nor ‘blogger’. I’ve run through a bunch few techniques that are supposed to get traffic to your site and gain linkbacks. Every SEO expert on the planet says you must have LINKBACKS!! And while doing all this stuff something is becoming abundantly clear to me: I cannot write. I’m a teriffic typist and a pretty decent reader; I’m even an OK storyteller, so I’m told. But writing? Ech.

This site has grown pretty quickly. We’ve got a pretty steady, and growing, stream of repeat readers, but I WANT MORE, dagnabit!

So I went to a few sites for inspiration, or to at least help with finding something interesting to say. Do you know what I found? The blogs with the most traffic have at least one exceptional writer. Read Fake Steve Jobs list of “Greatest Hits”. They are hilarious, plain and simple. I doubt that I’ll ever be that funny.

My lovely wife says the same stuff to me that I say to her: “Just keep at it. You’ll get better at writing.” We’ll see.

I think I’m going to take a writing class.

List of Giant Companies You Could Buy for $1 Trillion

Here’s a list of 10 companies that could be bought with $1 Trillion. According to the market capitalization of these huge companies, if you added them all up they would be worth $995.42 billion. That means that, after buying all of these companies there would be $4.58 billion left over.

The Stimulus Bill isn’t stimulating anything.

Go here to see how you can take 5 minutes to help stop it.

It’s not hidden, it just not there. And you’ll know it when you see it.

And an exciting new podcast tomorrow!! You won’t want to miss this one!

Subscribe to the podcast either via RSS or iTunes.

For example, my day is broken up into two parts: Technical work and Entrepreneurial work. My day typically begins at 5am with writing ASP.NET software which includes javascript, CSS, HTML, and C#. This has nothing at all to do with entrepreneurial stuff.

The second half of the day begins around 2pm. This time is for doing marketing, writing blog posts, podcasting, or working with business partners. Again, it’s pretty intense work that has nothing at all to do with software development.

Without some method of getting focused quickly one of two things can happen quite easily: 1. Only one kind of work gets done (bad), or 2. I’m working late into the night (very bad). The first is hell on the startup; the second is hell on the family, and we cannot have that.

So here’s the steps I take to get focused quickly to get everything done:

1. Eliminate all Realtime Status Updates — Make all of the following go away:

• Email
• Instant Messaging
• Twitter
• Anything else on the desktop that can update you about what’s going on in the outside world.

2. Write Down What You Plan To Do FIRST– Write just enough detail so you can focus without stopping. It is vital that you do this before you start working so, if you need to look up something online, you can do it quickly and get right back to work.

3. Set a Time Limit — This is a biggie and works wonders. When I do this it makes me stop analysing, researching, and planning and get to work. It is amazing what placing limits on yourself can do. If you have to, use a stopwatch. Set it for, say, 2 hours. Decide to get up and walk away when that watch goes off no matter what. It’s hard the first seven times. But on the eighth time it gets easy. Trust me. Get up and walk away even if it is for two minutes and you have to come back and shut the computer off, or whatever you do to stop working. Walking away helps me because I usually need about a 2 – 5 minute “cool down” period before stopping any particular work. So set the watch and GO. Start working as fast as you can.

This routine takes practice but, if you give it just seven days, you have so much momentum you’ll never want to go back.

Good luck and happy executing!