Entrepreneurship
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I have been relatively silent recently regarding ReservationHop. We have been doing a lot of exploration (or in startup lingo, “customer discovery”) as we try to find a good niche for innovation in restaurants that benefits consumers and optimizes some part of the dining experience. Consequently, in the last couple of months, we have built and…
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It has been a crazy holiday weekend. In three days we went from relative obscurity to being the punching bag of the entire tech industry. I suppose some might envy me for all the media attention I’ve received for a side project I built in my underwear one night after waiting in line for a…
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This morning I put the finishing touches on, and launched, ReservationHop.com, a site where I’m selling reservations I booked up at hot SF restaurants this Fourth of July weekend and beyond. I built it over the weekend after waiting at Off the Grid for 30 minutes for a burrito from Señor Sisig, and realized that there’s…
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We all feel unproductive at times, some of us more than others. For me, personally, I have high expectations of myself and what I’m able to do, so I feel unproductive frequently. It’s very rare that I put in a solid 10- or 12-hour day of work and feel good about it. Sometimes it’s because…
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This is a layperson guide* for what the guy you meet on the plane to Vegas means when he tells you “I have a startup.” I’m building a Chrome plugin that lists all the parks in Salt Lake City on top of all Mormon-operated blogs using a proprietary Google search algorithm I work full time as a…
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Note: I sent this email today in response to the news that the City of Chicago’s “consumer protection” bureau is about to shut down the Uber black car service in Chicago. I hope someone in Chicago reads it! Dear Mayor Emanuel, Rosemary Krimbel, Michelle Smith and the City of Chicago, I was disheartened to hear…
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Recently, I was putting together a project proposal for a client when I stumbled across a fairly common problem. Embarking on a new venture, for any startup, is risky, but for tech startups, perhaps, the risk is hedged by relatively little overhead and a short timeline to development. After all, a new website can be…
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I have had the pleasure in the last week of becoming intimately familiar with Mailchimp, the Web 2.0 version of Constant Contact. My overall impression of Mailchimp is that it is not only fun, but satisfying to use. That’s what a Web 2.0 product should be about. To summarize, Mailchimp is an email program which…
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It occurred to me recently that web companies, more so than non-tech companies, need to keep in mind that the scalability of their application can go beyond its intended locale. Facebook, for instance, was rather shortsighted when it came to scaling its product internationally. It took several years for them to develop an international, translated…
brian mayer 