Jason

15,819 reputation

21354

bio	website	blog.asmartbear.com
	location	Austin, TX
	age
visits	member for	3 years, 7 months
	seen	Feb 19 at 4:34
stats	profile views	3,219

Moderator of this site (with Dharmesh Shah).

I'm a founder of three companies.

I blog weekly about marketing, startups, and geekery.

Twitter: @asmartbear

	15,819 reputation	bio	website	blog.asmartbear.com	visits	member for	3 years, 7 months
21354 badges		location	Austin, TX		seen	Feb 19 at 4:34

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364 Comments

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Dec 18	comment	Why do companies acquire other companies? Even if we take your argument at face value, you've only explained why Mint wanted to sell, not why Intuit wanted to buy. If you run that down, you won't find golf courses.
Nov 18	comment	How do I “make up” rates? It's the number of working hours in a year, taking out weekends and about 2 weeks vacation.
Oct 12	comment	Grievance / removal policy for consumer reviews +1, you will never be able to make the call yourself, and you don't have time to investigate. Just let both parties make their case and let the other viewers decide.
Oct 5	comment	Can anyone recommend a merchant account? Please explain why they won't accept you, otherwise it's hard to say which provider would be OK with whatever that issue is.
Sep 22	comment	Would Google Apps or Outlook Exchange Be Better For Startups? +1. It's hard to imagine what a small startup needs that Exchange does and Google doesn't. You can always switch later!
Sep 9	comment	need help determining idea's worth +1 especially on "If we had figured that out, then there would be no risk whatsoever in starting your own business."
Sep 4	comment	Best resources for learning Wordpress? WPEngine does not restrict the plugins you can use, so all are available.
Sep 4	comment	Current best practices for blogging Or just sign up for my new startup (bit.ly/WPEngine) and you won't have to worry about speed OR security! (plug!)
Aug 31	comment	Are startup incubators (YCombinator, CapitalFactory, TechStars) a good idea? Actually some of the Capital Factory companies look like they'll be turning into nice lifestyle businesses. It's true that some of the incubators are only after deals which are destined for VC funding and require similar levels of growth, but that's not always the case.
Aug 30	comment	Advice to become a technical founder I like your handle on this site. :-)
Aug 28	comment	How much do you worry about keywords when blogging? Yup! :-) You probably saw this already, but here's my own theory of my blog's success (although now instead of 6,000 subscribers there are 16,000!): blog.asmartbear.com/…
Aug 25	comment	What is a reasonable percentage of equity Yep, without those specifics there is no answer.
Aug 24	comment	Hiring sales people as independent contractors No an outside rep must generate his own leads. That's the definition of "outside" rep. Otherwise it's inside sales.
Aug 15	comment	How can I align my business with my life goals? "Nothing life-altering can be found in a pithy quote"
Aug 14	comment	How do entrepreneurs choose MBA programs? In many studies of the effectiveness of education techniques, the only two variables correlated with long-term success are the intelligence of the student and the intelligence of the teacher. I assume it applies here.
Aug 9	comment	A few questions about Seed Funding! No, if you need to hire the best at normal salaries than you cannot do it on seed money. Hopefully you can find people who are also in a place in their life where they can trade immediate cash for future reward.
Jul 26	comment	Where to corporate if founders are temporarily in two different states? +1, Delaware is the standard, and use an S-Corp instead of an LLC. Taxes flow to your personal returns to be dealt with individually so there's no problem there either.
Jul 14	comment	Estimate Hosting Fees As an example of what Jesper is saying, my blog gets a few connections per minute during off-hours, but during the peak times of the week where I post and it gets on the front page of HackerNews it can go up to 15-20 hits per second. Big range! You have to plan for the peak time for capacity like RAM and CPU, and you have to plan for monthly run-rates for bandwidth.
Jul 14	comment	Is it a bad idea to launch a startup in August? +1, and even coverage from those sites is well known to be useless.
Jul 9	comment	How to structure business relationship with a partner company/sales channel When I say "prove" I don't mean subjective evidence that you argue about. Too much work. I just require them to log their communication (email, phone, whatever) in a CRM system. You could set up strict rules about what amount of communication "counts," but IMHO if you're having to nitpick about that it sounds like an unhealthy relationship. That's why I think the best scenario is to avoid it completely as I put in the second half.