Pajama Entrepreneur

Marc Andreessen has posted an excellent piece on why not to do a startup, part one of his series on his guide to startups. The stress, hiring and firing people, the hours, battling with co-founders and investors can drain the joy out of even the most devoted entrepreneur. But, I am an optimist and I think that working for other people especially in a large company is worse option. What do the words “success” or “failure” mean? Whatever you want them to mean.

For me, working for someone else is just not the way to spend my life. People think they have all the time in the world. They live their lives as if they have 10 lifetimes. Marc mentions in his blog post why one should do a startup: control your destiny, have an impact on the world, create your ideal work environment and have a chance to make money. Of those reasons, controlling your destiny is the most important one for me.

I stopped working for big companies because I was unhappy always working on other people’s projects. I decided I wanted to bring to fruition all those ideas burbling in my head. I wanted to work on MY projects during the little time I have on this earth.

The pains that Marc mentions in his blog post are so minor compared to the awfulness of working for someone else.

I was having breakfast yesterday with Alexander Casassovici, a young entrepreneur from Paris, who was in Amsterdam for the Nextweb conference. Alexander’s startup Wavestorm develops technology for the “Internet of Things” — machine to machine communications via Wi-Fi. We were talking about how this tech “bubble” is different from the first one in the late 1990s in that there are a lot of European entrepreneurs who are NOT moving to Silicon Valley. Back in the 1990s, a lot of non-American startups felt they had to move. Not so today. I believe there are 2 reasons:

- the high cost of living and working in Silicon Valley;

- this is a different generation of entrepreneurs who prefer to live and work in places like Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hongkong.

Alexander told me he’d rather live in Asia than in Silicon Valley. I’ve met a lot of other people who spend months working in places like Buenos Aires. More exotic than the Valley.

Another big change is that you can get good programmers and web developers in Eastern Europe and Asia, so you don’t necessarily have to go to California.

If you want to follow European startups, go to Alarm: Clock Euro.

Here are the first eight chapters on turning your blog into a media company. They are based on my experience as the founder of Muniwireless.com.

Part 1: birth of Muniwireless

Part 2: first year of Muniwireless

Part 3: finding a business model

Part 4: the Ninth Circle of Hell

Part 5: becoming a niche online publisher

Part 6: miracles happen in laundromats

Part 7: getting readers, rising high on search engines

Part 8: Microcast tells how to grow a blog into a media company

I will be posting more in the next few weeks. If you have questions, please post in the comments section below.

I came across the Open Coffee Club for entrepreneurs, which is located in cities around the world. Local entrepreneurs create clubs on Meetup.com or Upcoming.org and meet.

When I saw this mentioned on Read Write Web, I thought, “The bubble is back. This looks like First Tuesday.” But I will be going to our local coffee club in Amsterdam on Thursday and let you know if  indeed it’s First Tuesday brought back from the dead.

So how did Microcast take Muniwireless to the next stage, from a blog to a vertically integrated media company (as I mentioned in part 6)? What is Microcast’s business model? Sam Whitmore, who runs Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey interviews Joe Panettieri of Microcast. Sam writes:

Take a look at MuniWireless.com. It’s fronted by blogger Esme Vos, recognized as an expert in the emerging field. It’s got a clean look, ample advertising, an event series or two — even a freshly posted commentary from tech industry legend Bob Frankston. The site looks like the work of a top-tier trade publisher, but MuniWireless.com is a custom web title produced by little-known Microcast Communications.

Go to Sam’s blog and listen to the podcast (6:54), short but very informative (click here).

If you work freelance or have small business with no staff, you need to organize everything yourself and work efficiently. Fortunately, there are a lot of online tools for time tracking, invoicing, project management, shared workspaces, customer relationship management, etc. available from Freelanceswitch.com.

In part 2 of this series, I mentioned that it took me a year to make money (via advertising) from my blog, Muniwireless.com. You won’t attract advertisers in the first month of blogging because you probably won’t have a lot of readers.

How many visitors do you need to attract advertisers? How do you get and keep loyal readers? How do you get the word out about your blog? How do you rise high on search engines such as Google? Continue reading »