Patrick C. Price

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Nope, can’t talk about it …

Today, Swiss just started it’s six time weekly flight connection from Zurich to San Francisco, bringing Silicon Valley and the Bay Area even closer to Zurich.

I really like the design they put on their flight for the inauguration of the new connection:

Just came accross an article on: onstartups.com about 10 great tipps for startups:

1.  You don’t need office space:  Plenty of startups do just fine working out of a basement or spare bedroom.2.  Don’t Bargain Shop For Small Things:  Resist the temptation to find the best deal on cheap things (like computers).  It may be personally satisfying to save $50 on a printer, but you’re wasting valuable time.

3.  Think Of A Good Name:  Spend at least a few hours thinking about a name for your business.  Read a couple of practical articles on the topic.  Talk to other people to test your names.  Most entrepreneurs spend too little time (as in almost none) on a company name.  A good name won’t make your startup successful, and a bad one won’t make it fail, but some simple guidelines help.  And, a name is hard to change later.

Reference 1 (Guy Kawasaki): The Name Game

Reference 2 (Dharmesh Shah):  The Startup Name Game

Note:  Unsurprisingly, Guy’s article is better, but I wrote mine first (did not copy his “Name Game” title).

4.  No Fancy Titles: Don’t waste time coming up with fancy titles for the founders.  Simply use “founder” for your title and get back to real work.

5.  Forget Business Plans:  Instead of laboring over your business plan, labor over your business.  If you do work intensely on your business plan, assume that you are the only person that will ever read it.  Even your mom and you spouse won’t read it.  Potential investors will definitely not read it.

6.  Avoid Pontificators:  Early team members all need to do something.  Don’t recruit pontificators.  Beware the pure “idea people”.  You want “get things done” people.  There will always be more ideas in your startup than there are people to execute them.

7.  Venture Funding Is Hard:  Raising venture funding is actually harder than bootstrapping — especially if it’s your first startup.  Try and figure out a way to get going without funding.  Take the hundreds of hours you’ll save and go help customers solve problems.

8.  Allocate Most Time To Customer Value:  Act as if someone is paying you $1,000/hour for every hour you spend making life measurably better for your customers — and $10/hour for everything else.  In the long-run, the ratio will be about right.

9.  Part-Time Is Sub-Optimal (but OK):  Many people will tell you that you are unlikely to succeed with a startup if you’re working on it just nights and weekends.  They’re probably right.  But, better nights and weekends than waiting forever to get things kicked off.

10.  Get Started!  I have yet to meet someone that took the leap, quit their job, started a company and regretted their decision (regardless of outcome).  Most people that have great jobs over-estimate the risk of leaving them.  Great people can almost always find another job if things go really, really poorly with their startup.

What do you think? Any additional tipps and recommendations?

Today we are announcing the launch of our local Swiss Social Media News Website: www.BlogNews.ch

BlogNews is a regular Social Media News Website such als Digg, Yigg, or WebNews. Users can submit News-Stories from the Web and vote on them to make them popular. Once a Website reaches the popularity level, it automatically surfaces to the front-page where it profits from additional traffic and direct Links to it’s original source.

Give it a try! Or give me Feedback, am glad to hear from you! -> BlogNews

If you have been following my blog (not much to follow ) you will know, that I have founded a company called: Idealizer Ltd. which is an eLab for Online Media in Switzerland.

As one of our 4 main areas of business, we have launched AdSpace, an online marketing consultancy. My team and I share some of our Search Engine Optimization know-how with companies or affiliated companies.

Other than most SEO companies, my business development background has led us to develop an Online Optimization model, rather than just search engine optimization. What we have found is, that often a person or company will have a great idea, hire a developer and launch a service. But due to the lack of online knowledge, such projects often just slumber, rather than actually take off.

We have decided, that that is a good stage for us to enter and offer our services. We started calling it: pre-angel-invest phase. What we can do, is help turn a good idea with bad online excellence into  a good idea with a nice online track record.

Therefore our services cover OnSite-Optimization, OffSite-Optimization, Ad-Tuning, SiteTuning as well as optical Redesign.

One of our recent customers is an online contact lens shop (Kontaktlinsen ist the German word for contact lenses) called Linsen4you.ch.

We redid the entire shop and design part and have reduced the order process from approx. 7 to approx. 4 steps. So in case you need any contact lenses, give our friends a try and have a look at what we did.

A cool new service in order to find an appropriate ADSL provider in Switzerland is offered by adsl.vergleiche.ch.

The service is part of Switzerlands Comparison Portal: www.vergleiche.

It allows you to compare Sunrise Free Internet, Orange ADSL, Cablecom Hispeed Internet, VTX and many other broadband internet providers in Switzerland.

So it’s been a couple of days, since my Team and I had launched our Swiss Blog directory. (Press release: www.idealizer.ch)

We got quite some media review and a lot of new traffic. Actually the press release and coverage has led to a flood of new blog registrations, which of course we highly welcome, as our Blog Directory is completely free to any Swiss related blog.

In order to keep up with the media coverage, I figuered, I would post all articles I am aware of over here in chronological order, as noticed by us:

- KleinReport: Hilfe bei der Suche nach Weblogs
- NetzWoche: Neues Blogverzeichnis soll Finden von Blogs erleichtern
- Radio Toxic: Schweizer Blog Verzeichnis – Radio Interview Radio: Toxic.fm
- PCTipp: Schweizer Blog-Überblick
- InfoWeek: Neu: Schweizer Blog-Verzeichnis
- Bluewin.ch Schweizer Blog-Überblick
- ITnewsbyte: Schweizer Blogs einfach und übersichtlich finden
- SwissStartups.com: Geburt von Blogverzeichnis.ch

- Heute: Eine Chance für “Blogverzeichnis”?

Just arrived in San Jose last night. Feels good to be back in California

I have picked up posting on my Swiss Video Blog as of the beginning of August. On netznews.tv I interview a bunch of interesting internet decision makers and try to transfer some of their insights to the viewer.

Also I have purchased a couple of new domains and am now up to 421 .

I will post about my newest project in a few days here, but want to apply some of the know how I’ll be gaining here first.

So what am I doing in San Jose? I am registered press for the Search-Engine Strategies Conference, will be attending the Google Dance 2007 as well as AOL Search Lunch and WebmasterWorlds SearchBash. Today, I will also be at BarCamp Block and have an interview with a few interesting people there. Stay tuned

Also, last night, when I arrived at my hotel room, the fire alarm went off and we all needed to evacuate. Afterwards the building was cleared again. So why did the alarm go off? Some idiot urinated on the hot sauna stones… I guess I won’t be using the sauna, while I’m here…

Oh, my…. so it’s been a very long time, since I last blogged, it seems… Not quite so, I have recently launched and blogged on my own “TechCrunch for Switzerland” Swiss Internet Blog website netznews.tv.

Just came home, from having dinner with one of Switzerland’s leading online classified websites. Very interesting “historical” conversation. So on my way home, I thought of my “historical achievements” with Scout24.

I guess one of them might have been to introduce the term “WhiteLabeling” to the Swiss Internet Market. In August of 2002, Andrew Mueller and I, were given the Task of building up the “leading real estate platform of Switzerland“.

One of our fantasies was to build a network of premium online websites catering to an opposing targetgroup of partners, to deliver great value for money experience (that expressing user-experience).

So we had to come up with a term for this type of new product. As my Dad had been a scientist and provided me with tons of ideas and models on how things work and where to research them, I stumbled across the therm “white-label drugs”, being medicine being produced for 3rd party companies, to be resold under their brand. These products where delivered with blank white-labels, so that 3rd parties could print what ever they intended on the “front-end” of the product.

My dinner colleague had an opposing view of the term “white labeling”, as his understanding was, that whitelabel meant, everything in your colors (but our structure), but mainly the ability to have an individual “back end”, thus being filtering and enrichment of content.

Same term, different understandings… WhiteLabeling rules… My “historical achievement…”

What to learn more about WhiteLabels?

Today I am happy to announce, that one of the options I had recommended for realization during my work on the pan-european Strategy Team of Scout24 in Munich has officially been launched in BETA mode.

www.scout24.ch is Scout24 Switzerland’s newest portal. It’s a general merchandise (or “stuff” as my friends) classifieds portal and covers about 300 different categories.

Also we cover events as an own category and have approx. 10’000 events on file.

I have been named Director of this new portal and have staffed 5 new positions for it.

So in case you happen to be searching for a place to post your “stuff” in Switzerland, come and visit Scout24!