If you’re an Oregon company looking for angel investment, you should consider applying for the Bend Venture Conference before the Sept. 10 deadline. You can click here to go straight to the registration page. 
Although Bend is a relatively small town in central Oregon, it’s also relatively sunny for Oregon, has great outdoor activities and–here’s what’s relevant in this context–its annual venture competition draws an unusually powerful group of investors from up and down the Pacific Coast.
Bend and nearby Sunriver have attracted a number of California and Seattle high-tech people who have either retired there or keep vacation homes. Their presence adds to the venture conference interest.
This year’s version is promising $175,000 in investment money.
Be aware, though: This isn’t a business plan contest; it’s angel investment. The winner is supposed to agree to an investment that’s interesting to the angels. The typical deal is a convertible note that is set up to look like a loan, but gets converted to stocks as soon as major venture capital comes in.
I’ve attended this event three of the past four years. Only scheduling conflicts keep me away. It’s a great venue, and some very interesting companies have entered. Last year Paul Kedrosky did an excellent keynote speech. I’m looking forward to the conference again this year.
(Note: this is awkward. The list I linked to is down. I’ve emailed onlineuniversities asking about it, but in the meantime, it’s just not there. Damn. I’ve checked back at the TED site, hoping to provide a quick fix, and there does seem to be a good match with TED’s Not Business As Usual theme. You can click here to go there directly. )
My thanks to the folks at onlineuniversities.com for this list of 20 Excellent TED Talks for Small Business Owners. 
I’m a believer in the TED talks as the best of the best, and this is a good list. And my thanks as well to Steve King of SmallBizLabs for pointing it out in his post last Friday.
There are several there that I’ve posted about or mentioned before in my own blogging, and one that I disagreed with, but so what: I disagree with a lot of smart opinions. Certainly it’s an excellent resource.
It makes me think of how valuable this list might be for all of those people who are already or want to be business owners. I’m adding it to my list of recommended resources for my online curriculum in starting and growing a business.
Some of my favorites:
Want to know a secret to success?
Make sure your website works.
Honestly!
The impression a customer or client gets when they realize links are broken or words are misspelled is less than great. And all those problems can say things about your business you might not want. And what it’s saying isn’t good.
Quality assurance is a must for any website. Small, medium or large. Service or product. Even if it’s a personal blog.
For instance, I was on a blog earlier this week and worked for a long time to craft an answer to the thoughtful piece I’d just read, only to find this:
Enter the code below. Code? What code? There’s just a lot of dots. There’s not even a refresh button to allow me to get a new code. Or… any code at all!
It’s things like this that bring a customer to a bad experience with your website and with your company.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that since you’ve checked everything over once, it’s fine. Constantly check for broken or changed sections. If you’ve made an update, even if it’s a small adjustment, make sure you’ve covered the site to check for new errors.
In the long run, it will be worth the time you spend.
‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager – Palo Alto Software
I loved Pamela Slim’s excellent advice on her Escape From Cubicle Nation blog yesterday. It’s got a great title: You are officially granted permission to create a non-perfect first website. 
And she drives home a great point. It reminds me of the common advice about not waiting until all the lights are green before you leave the garage.
Pam points out that as you start out, you try to have a good sense of strategy with market niche, value proposition and strategic focus. But you’re guessing in the beginning. You shouldn’t expect it to be perfect. But you do have to get going.
Here’s what she calls the metaphor:
Your first website can be like a bland, basic, boring house. It is functional. It meets your needs. It is agreeable to many, but exciting to few.
But as you grow and develop your business, and clarify your brand, you can add rooms to your house, and paint the walls, and plant beautiful flowers out front and fill it with music.
The foundation and basic structure will be the same. But it will look and feel quite different.
And here’s what she calls the permission:
It is OK to put up a website that is not perfect. You will not lose branding karma points or be laughed out of your web neighborhood.
Most importantly, you will stop obsessing about clarifying your perfect brand before you have had the experience necessary to define it properly.
The important thing is that you get a web presence established so that you can move on to more important things like getting clients.
I think that advice is exactly on target, even if your first website isn’t. This is the real world. As Adam Osborne said, “adequate is good enough.”
The caveat, by the way? Pam adds it at the end, and you should read it. Read also her advice on WordPress, and trust that if you work it, your brand will emerge.
The other day somebody asked me how to get started on Twitter. I decided to write my answer down and post it here, because I thought it might be useful to others. If you’re already a Twitter user, then this post is probably not for you. Sorry.
If you aren’t a Twitter user and don’t want to be, then this is not for you, either. Sorry again.
But if you aren’t a Twitter user yet and you’d like to be, I can help. I took the time to think it through and write it out, and here are my step-by-step suggestions.
- Examine your goals. What do you want out of Twitter? It might be business relationships, leads, customer service, personal relationships, a new job, timely information. Get it straight in your head.
- Set up a Twitter account–and remember those goals as you do. Go to twitter.com and follow directions to set up a new account. Choose a Twitter handle–your own name is often best; I use “timberry” and my daughter Megan uses “meganberry,” but some people use names related to their business or blog, like my friend John Reddish who is “getresults” or Anita Campbell, who is “SmallBizTrends.” Palo Alto Software uses the name of our business plan resource site, “bplans.” You’re going to have to live with it.
- Log in and upload a picture. First, look around, see what others are doing. You don’t follow anybody yet, so that won’t work to see a bunch of Twitter people; but you can search for a term, and that will work. Try a term that fits your interest. I searched first for “business plan.” That generates a list of 140-character published microposts, which we call “tweets.” The list will show the pictures or icons the people are using. Most people use their face, but some businesses use their logo, and some accounts have an icon or something. Do upload something. Only newbies have no picture.
- Edit your profile. Here, too, you should first look at some examples by searching for a term that interests you, which will generate actual tweets. Create a profile that is true and authentic, but also one that presents the side of you that best fits your goals. If you want to pursue your knitting hobby, let the profile show that. If you want to get a new job, have the profile show your present job in a good light. Make it all true, of course, but you just have a few words to describe yourself, so choose them well. Align them with your Twitter goals. Later on you can play with backgrounds and such to customize your look. But that’s later.
- Start searching for tweets that interests you. Your goal is to turn up tweets that address your goals. If it’s about your knitting, then search “knitting” and “yarn” and whatever else (I don’t know much about knitting) works. Look for tweets with links to blog posts on that subject. Click the links, visit the blogs. Follow people tweeting about things that interest you. Subscribe to blogs on subjects that interest you.
- Learn how to retweet. That means you see a tweet that interests you and you click a button and tweet that same tweet again, giving credit to the originator. For example, if I tweeted:
It’s Easier to Maintain Business Momentum Than Overcome Intertia http://bit.ly/9Db5dq
(the last bit there is a link to a blog post, and it’s included in the tweet), then you would retweet it as follows:
RT @Timberry: It’s Easier to Maintain Business Momentum Than Overcome Intertia http://bit.ly/9Db5dq
That’s gives you several benefits: First, it’s publishing something that seems like good content, so that later, as somebody looks at your Twitter presence, you’ve been adding useful tweets. Second, it gives you a record of a tweet you liked. Third, it alerts the originator of the tweet to you, that you follow him or her and, maybe, that he or she should follow you back.
- Repeat steps five through seven from now on, building your presence in Twitter, your list of people to follow and the list of people who follow you.
- As the lists get bigger, experiment with tweetdeck (my favorite) or its competitors that allow you to organize your Twitter world better. I divide mine into lists of friends and family, cyberfriends, business, journalism, news, leaders and so on. Tweetdeck displays the different groups in different columns, making it easier to see what’s going on.
I like Twitter; I use it a lot, and I recommend it. It seems to me like the debate about Twitter is calming down now, meaning that few people care that much who uses it and who doesn’t. But if you’re an entrepreneur, and you haven’t tried it, I would recommend that you do. It’s not about what people are having for lunch–you don’t have to follow those people –or annoying sales pitches–because you don’t have to follow those people, either. It’s about what’s up, what’s interesting and what’s going on.
Follow me on Twitter: timberry. Please.
by sara on August 24, 2010
Have a great idea for something people want, but not sure how to make money from it? Consider the following business models:
Freemium
If what you’ve got is really great, give it away. No, seriously. Let them have a taste, build a relationship with them, and only then offer an upgraded paid experience. Maybe the free version comes with adverts, or the paid version has extra features that they’ll want once they really start using the service. This model works best where customer acquisition costs are high, but the marginal cost of serving an extra customer is low.
Add-Ons
Have you bought an airline ticket lately? If you bought it online, you probably saw some great low prices… prices which had nothing to do with the eventual amount you paid after fees, taxes, surcharges, etc. For a less rancorous example, consider a night out at the movies. Did you know that the theater makes more money from popcorn and sweets than from the ticket price?
Image from Scott Adams, Dilbert
Somali Pirate business model!
OK, don’t really consider this for yourself, but even pirates have a system for generating value. Pirates are great at creating a problem and then solving it (ransom, “protection,” etc.). If you’re not meeting an existing need, perhaps you are creating a new one, or pointing out a need that your customers don’t even know they have, until you show up with your parrot and your eye-patch… kidding.
Don’t get stuck getting your business started just because it doesn’t fit neatly into an existing, familiar, business model. The best new businesses out there are innovating in on everything from product and service offerings to pricing structures to customer relationships. If you can imagine it, you can do it.
Find more examples of effective business models at Bplans.co.uk.
-Sara Manela
Yes, a select few real people are making good money on YouTube, at least according to this Meet the YouTube Stars post on Yahoo Finance. 
Here’s the lead:
There are 10 independent YouTube stars who made over $100,000 in the past year, according to a study done by analytics and advertising company TubeMogul.
Yahoo Finance lists the 10 people, describes their videos, and estimates their annual revenues.
I don’t want to be too cynical here, but still, if this strikes you as easy money, think again. By my rough calculation, the odds of making more than $100K per year on YouTube are about the same as winning the lottery or finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Still, there you are. Some people are making good money on YouTube.
What’s much more interesting to me, from a business and entrepreneurship point of view, is all of the companies using YouTube as part of business strategy. Think about the Old Spice Guy series, which has doubled revenues for Old Spice in recent months. That’s where the real pot of gold is. And where it’s much more accessible.
If you like examples, as in details about real businesses, particularly financial details, you are not alone. In my years of building business plans I was always hungry for real samples to help me ground my educated guesses in reality. It’s not like you could ever just apply what you see in one business straight to another; but a reality check is always good.
It’s for that reason that I really like what Darren Rowse has been doing on his Problogger blog, with his How I Make Money Blogging series. Here’s a real-world example of how the revenue splits for one very successful blog:
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you or I will have the same revenue that Darren has on his hugely successful Problogger blog. That’s obvious. But at least it gives you an idea. And if you’re developing a business plan, it gives you some data points to start with. You’ll want to go to the post itself to see how Darren explains some of the pieces of his revenue pie. You can see immediately that his ebooks are his main source of revenue, followed by Adsense.
If you click through to this post, then scroll toward the bottom, you’ll see that Darren’s been doing this for several months now, so you can see how things have changed over that time. All in all, this is a generous sharing example. Thanks Darren.
(Image credit: taken from the source post on Problogger)
If you have a chance, read through Entrepreneurs Who Launched Companies for Under $150 on WSJ.com. 
Too many people thinking about startups think it’s impossible without finding money from outsiders, and these three stories are about just the opposite.
- Kael Robinson of Live Worldly LLC sells bracelets to athletes online. She started a couple years ago with $40 and last year grossed $160,000, with $60,000 profits.
- Jeff Swedarsky started Food Tour Corp with $110 in 2007. This year he expects sales to hit $300,000.
- Marc Ringel of Floor Works, in New York, started his flooring company in 2007 with $145. He’s now doing it full time, and paying himself a salary for it.
I think we all know that these kinds of startups are happening all the time everywhere. These stories are a good reminder.
Over 100 incoming emails a day.
Four customer service representatives.
One inbox and one workstation set up to receive all the messages.
How does a company with that set up and that volume of email make sure that every customer gets responded to quickly? And that everyone is clear who ‘owns’ each conversation, from the initial contact through resolution? How do you make musical chairs an efficient part of your customer service workflow?
Those are questions Taran Lent, vice president and founder of CardSmith, had to address. A campus ID card payment solutions company, CardSmith serves educational institutions, campus service providers, as well as cardholders and closed loop communities nationwide. Card holders don’t need to have cash to get goods or services on campus, and campuses don’t have the hassle or expense of creating their own proprietary card systems. CardSmith is the market’s only software as a service provider.
“The biggest challenge for us,” says Lent about his email situation, was “not having a multi-user system and keeping track of which agent ‘owned’ a particular message.”
The solution was Email Center Pro. Students are their primary demographic, says Lent, and they prefer contacting customer service through email. “Using Email Center Pro helps make us relevant and responsive to this need,” he says.
“Email Center Pro is great. It was a snap to implement and to get up and running,” he says. “Now we can have multiple agents managing inbound service requests, and we have very clear tracking and reporting regarding our performance and resolution of cases.” Of all the features that make Email Center Pro so valuable to his organization, Lent says “the multi-user and assign features are our favorites.”
According to Lent, the benefits of Email Center are many. “It’s hosted, easy to use, and affordable. If you take your email care operations seriously, and need a single solution to support many mail boxes with multi-agent access and tracking, then Email Center Pro is what you need.”
Jay Snider
Palo Alto Software
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