Patrick C. Price

Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Nope, can’t talk about it …

Quite a while ago, I had read a post by Danny Sullivan, about his screen setup in his office and thought, wow, I want that too! Actually when I was still working for Scout24 and requested at least 2 Monitors per employee in my team, and was denied, that was one of the reasons I called it quits.

Anyhow for about 2 years now, I was trying to get 3 monitors to work on my pc and it just wouldn’t work. Most tipps inclueded 2x the same graphic-card, etc. What ever I tried, it didn’t work Fortunately the friendly people of Digitec finally got me out of my misery and even improved my own wished, by getting me a PCI-E graphicscard (using one PCI-E slot) that will simultaneously run 4 monitors!

Now you might ask, why in the hell would you want to run 4 monitors? Really easy. It’s like having a large desk over a really small desk, more space to layout things, less searching through your stuff.

Here is how I use them:
- middle monitor: this is my main working area where I do most my work, i.e. just typing this post on it
- left monitor: browser screen, use this to read up on stuff, navigate to pages that I want to copy and paste content from to the middle monitor
- right monitor: my communication window. here i run my e-mail, my twitter client, skype, etc. and can view all my communication with one view
- right upper monitor: my monitoring-screen. this is where I run real time live stats of my projects and portals, allowing me to see current server load, query strings, refering sites, etc. really good, to give you a feel of whats happening on your site. Actually almost like having a camera looking in to the seales area of your shop.

Learning out of all of this? If you want to increase your productivity, get more working space

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”?

So today, was my last day at Scout24. I held a nice presentation and all went great. Had a nice chat with an interesting SEO guy on the train.The last couple of weeks, I was working on my start-up and have gone through a great course called ‘venture training’, offered by http://www.venturelab.ch. The guy running the show is Dominik Tarolli. Doing a great job at it, he provides young swiss startups with know-how and network.

I met a few cool guys on the way. eLoad24 is a companyproviding web-users with access to condensed knowhow. LogCut.com is a micromedia-commercialization-assistant . Need an airport shuttle? Use transferbus.net for european airport transfers. Social collaboration? amazee.com might be what you are looking for…

Anyhow, it’s interesting to learn, how the visual enfavors perception.

A friend of mine recently had a IM-mood-tag: ‘the future is here to take’. Let’s see, what the future brings.

It’s official…

After 6.5 years in various positions with Scout24 Switzerland, I have decided to leave the company and persue my own way. On January 16 I handed in my resignation, which will become effective July 31, 2007. I still have approx. 6 weeks of vacation, so I can’t say exactly as to when I will no longer be there.

I had a wonderful time there and learned a lot. Unfortunately the company does not offer a stock option plan for their employees, due to the fact, that it is part of Deutsche Telekom. So I guess it will be dificult to hold the entreprenurial employees within the group.

Good learning for my own company setup, use the “Trivadis” participation model I heard of. Employees vest shares with each year they are in the company. They can additionaly buy shares at their own expense. The company is valued independently once a year. If you leave the company, you must return your shares by the time of the next valuation and at that price. This way, the company avoids former employees to bring in new proprietors (see craigslist & ebay) and yet allows them to participate in the company growth during the time, they contribute to it.

I will be founding my own company on April 21, 2007, turned out to take longer, but was founded in September: Idealizer AG a Swiss eMedia Lab.

More on what I plan to do, the developments around this, etc. to follow…

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!