Recently in Thoughts Category

I just received my favorite magazine - Entrepreneur, in the mail. There is an article called Marketing - word to the wise that lists 8 tired words that will turn customers off instead of drawing them in. Very interesting, and if I think about the words they're listing it actually makes sense. In fact, it turned out that FirmDot was guilty of word crimes - using one word out of those 8.

The words, if anyone is interested, are: Care, Solutions (that is the one we've been using till today, now replaced with Services), Results, Amazing, Needs, Quality, Turnkey and #1.

The reason I replaced the word Solutions with Services is quite simple - although we do offer Blog Solutions to some extent, it is mostly Blog Services and not necessarily Solutions per se. I hope it makes sense.

Happy blogging!

As I was looking for books to put on one of my shelves, I remembered the book I special ordered from Barnes and Noble a couple of years ago. It's called Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days, By Jessica Livingston. I see the book is now available on books.google.com for free if you'd like to check it out. I actually encourage you to check it out if you're into business stories, or just interested to know how some companies have started. Like some movies, you can read that book over and over again, or at least a couple of times.

The book contains stories of companies such as: Adobe, Apple, Blogger, Craigslist, Del.icio.us, Firefox, Flickr, Hotmail, PayPal, RIM, Six Apart and many others.

You will be hooked once you start reading it, very interesting material.

For example did you know that husband-and-wife co-founders Mena and Ben Trott started Six Apart (named for the number of days between their birthdays) in their apartment in 2001. Now it's a company with 4 offices and over 100 employees.

I think I'm going to re-read some of the stories, and also check Google before buying any books since you can find them online!