Back in my first startup where we were accepting credit cards, we purchased an SSL certificate in order to assure our customers that their credit card information was being transmitted securely. We bought that SSL certificate from VeriSign for $495 per year. That was 2003. Nowadays, you can get an…
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Today we feature an interview with the founders of KnowEm, a rapidly-growing startup that has found great success without venture capital or outside funding. KnowEm is a brand protection service that allows you to create your brand’s user account on 300 popular social media sites and will…
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If your reaction to my last post was “screw you” or words to that effect, and you plan on running a site that will attract large amounts of traffic without a business model, you will suffer as Twitter has suffered. But in your case, users will probably never see your cutesy version of…
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When someone imagines a business idea that launches a startup, many times it’s a “big play” - which means it’s a large idea that will need many people to build, and will likely serve a huge market. Such ideas cost a lot of money. And you’ll either need a lot of…
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Our first Startup Next Door interview features Earndit and its founders, Andres Moran and Harry Kautzman II. Earndit is a site that rewards you for exercising – specifically runs, walks, jogging, and bicycling. Here’s a listing of current rewards. ▶ 0:00 …
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So you’re a businessperson and you have a great idea but you know nothing of the IT nerd world. Or you’re the nerd but have no business acumen. Here’s a great video segment on finding someone to fill in your partnership. From This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis…
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Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of…
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Back when my startups were under the radar, I wanted to display a mailing address on my contact pages, but not my home address, of course. My assumption is that a mailing address gives customers the impression that you have an office somewhere, even though you’re actually working from a…
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Thanks to a comment by Wade on the article “A Businessperson’s Introduction to Servers”, I looked into the BizSpark program from Microsoft. BizSpark is a program to help young startups get all the software they need to run their businesses. These are the requirements for…
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This is an article I’m posting just for fun. We’ll get back to bootstrap startup advice next time. I ran across a spreadsheet I made in 2000, when I was just figuring out what skills I would need to become a professional web programmer and get paid the big bucks. I had pored over…
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