Seth Godin piqued my interest (there’s a surprise) with his post about a shortage of digital coaches. Seth points out a need that a whole lot of people, myself included, have: Help getting more from the technology in which they’ve already invested.

We have an interesting discussion going about Apple, technology needs, and advertising to different types of computer users. Here’s another chance to look at how people use technology and how you can use that knowledge to create better advertsing for…

...continue to read "Who Needs a Digital Coach? (I Do!)"

A few months ago, we blogged about Markus Frind, a lone entrepreneur and founder of the popular dating site PlentyOfFish.com. On a panel interview with Guy Kawasaki (watch it here if you’ve got 30 minutes), Markus claimed that he was his only employee, and that he basically spends a couple hours each day maintaining the site — that’s it — in his underwear.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Read/Write Web’s Richard MacManus caught up with the entrepreneur, who’d just hired his first…

...continue to read "How to Make a Billion Dollars in Your Underwear"

Acceller (formerly BuyTelco) has been a reference client of ours for the past 4 years. In that time, we’ve been fortunate to see BuyTelco.com become one of America’s top resources to compare Cable, DSL and High-Speed Internet options. But today, we’re especially proud of Acceller because they’ve been named #54 on the “Inc. 500″ list, with 2,250% growth. (The Inc. 500 ranks top U.S. companies based on growth acceleration for the last few years.)

Acceller CEO Steve McKean is happy to point…

...continue to read "How to Grow 2,250% While Launching a New Online Business"

Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells.

In an e-mail exchange, Tom Grimes, a great and brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices. Based on his list, here’s my own list of many of the high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It may help you make some more conscience choices of your own:

...continue to read "A Half Dozen Business Choices"

We’re not big fans of meetings and neither is Jason of 37 Signals his post has received tons of comments on the the one hour meeting:

It’s no mystery that we’re meeting averse, but here’s another reason why we think meetings are toxic: There’s no such thing as the one-hour meeting.

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of…

...continue to read "The Myth of The One Hour Meeting"

A GrokDotCom reader asked me the following question:

I was reading a blog entry done by a fellow blogger today about niche competition. I think he has a good reason for not sharing his thoughts about the niche that he is interested in. Do you have any opinion about it? If you were to be at his position, would you do the same thing too?

For the better part of a decade, we’ve published hundreds of articles, several books–including 2 New York…

...continue to read "Aren’t You My Competitor?"

It’s pretty nice work, if you can get it:

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I…

...continue to read "Guy Kawasaki on Making $5M/yr in Your Underwear…"