Author: Matt Collins
-
Realities of Small Business Websites
I spend a lot of time with people who know a lot about the web. They’re either building online businesses or they’re 30-something friends who live in London and who use the internet frequently in their day-to-day lives. That’s why I found it interesting recently to work with someone who’s outside of that circle, to…
-
How to Speed Up Web Development Using a PSD to HTML Service
Could you be saving yourself time and money with a PSD to HTML service? PSD to HTML services allow you to send in the design for a web page as a PSD file (the kind of thing your web designer will create in Photoshop) and give you back a set of HTML and CSS files…
-
Group-Buying Deals for London
Very soon, together with my co-founders, I’m going to be launching a new venture. Like VouChaCha, it’s going to offer local deals. And like MenuLover, it’s food-related. This time, though, there’s a new twist: group buying. The group buying bit works like this: When you sign up for our service, we use the bargaining power…
-
Launch48, October 2009
130 assorted programmers, designers and business folk; 6 eager teams; one crazily ambitious goal. Launch48 was back. The goal? Launch a web startup in under 48 hours. I attended the first Launch48 event back in February. It was great fun and a fantastic way to meet people with entrepreneurial flair. That time, the local voucher…
-
How to Choose an E-Commerce Shopping Cart
I recently spent some time comparing current e-commerce platforms (a.k.a. shopping carts). It’s a complicated area, so I thought I’d share my findings here in case they can be useful to others. These are my opinions and analysis based on my own research and experimentation and are biased towards sites targeting a UK market. First…
-
The Metric-Driven Startup
Here’s a great slide deck from Dave McClure on startup metrics. If you’re doing a web startup, these slides are a great summary of a lot of the stuff you should be thinking about (IMHO). Check out slides 9 and 12 in particular. The appendix at the end has some further details on some of…
-
ReceiptFarm – Easy Way to do Expenses
I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm. The idea of it is to take the pain out of doing expenses. It works like this: You send us your expense receipts once a month. We scan and input them. You get a report about your spending and a digital archive of your receipts.…
-
How to Test a Business Model
I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based. Often we’re keen to play with Excel, but less keen to check that the numbers we’re typing in are grounded in reality.…
-
Launch48 – Launching a Start-up in a Weekend
Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who…
-
John Buckman on How to be a Successful Internet Entrepreneur
John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris. He had a lot of good, practical tips about what he sees as the ‘right’ approach to entrepreneurship. His presentation is…