Living the Startup Life

Everyday I watch the news and feel that my country is giving me the right information.  When the media tells me that Georgia is under attack and that Russia is the aggressor and evil in this conflict, I believe them.

I forget that the media IS propaganda.  You cannot trust anything you see on the news because it has been filtered through “the man” so that we see what the goverment wants us to see.  This is no better than 1984:

Fox News is the WORST and most bias news station out there.  I hope that everyone sees how they don’t let the little girl and her mom speak because they’re telling a different side of what’s happening in Georgia.  DO NOT WATCH FOX NEWS

The original title of this post was “Check out my Wordle!”; however, that quickly changed when I tried to add my wordle html into my wordpress.  Wordle is a site that takes your entire blog or paragraph and turns it into a tag cloud.  You can change the color, font, and text style.  I guess it was kind of fun, but when I couldn’t link it on my blog, I just got upset and frustrated.  The image you see on top is what I ‘print-screened’ with photoshop.

Go ahead and give it a go; it’s actually kind of fun to randomize everything (the fun factor lasts for about 5 minutes).  According to Wordle, business and FD are the most common words on my blog.

Time for me to go, Yu-kai just challenged me to the game of life - Smash Bros Melee!!!

Truly an inspiring video…

Failure is a part of life.  It is said that 9 out of 10 businesses fail… well then, that just means I need to build 10 businesses.

Can you believe this:

Some people are just straight up retarded.

Hey VCs, I want you to…

The quintessential entrepreneur mistake:

I love fun and quirky ideas.  These two shirts were designed by StartupWear and VCWear.  There are a bunch of sites out there that give you a serious top ten list of mistakes that entrepreneurs make.  I am a huge proponent of advisors and mentors; however, there are just some things that you have to experience yourself.

When Yu-kai and I embarked on our startup journey, we projected that we would get funding within 3 months.  We actually thought investors meant it when they said that they were “early-stage investors.”  We looked around and saw a bunch of companies that clearly had no chance from the beginning and yet still go funding.  We thought, “Hey, I know it’s hard to get funding but our idea rocks and we can network our way into some funding.”

Boy were we wrong.  “Early-stage” investors doesn’t really mean idea phase.  They want to see a working Beta, traction, or at least a user base.

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I have ADD so I want to switch topics mid blog post.  There are A LOT of blog out there writing about personal or career development.  I have read through a lot of them and most of them talk about the same things, give pretty much the same advice, and some blog posts are just bad advice.  How does someone distinguish between good advice and bad advice?  Another question I have is: “Who is really reading these blog posts?  People who really need the career development help, or bloggers who are writing about similar topics that are trying to get more traffic on their site?

I have been part of the blogging community for a while now (maybe 6 months), and to be honest, I have yet to find a blog that I constantly keep coming back to because the author provides me with great, quality  “how-to” information.  I just don’t want to read “how-to” anything from a blog.  I would much rather read it from an article or an ebook.  The blogs that DO attract me are the ones that are very controversial, offer absolute opinions (hahaha, does that even make sense), or talk about relationships, sex, and attraction.

So now I’m thinking: “Should I create a blog that is super controversial, a blog offering my mild opinions, or a How-to blog on website consulting/career development?”

Stay tuned and find out 

I think the most frustrating thing that I have encountered with entrepreneurship are the technical hassles. And when I mean “technical hassles” I don’t mean anything extreme liking C++ or Java. I mean the simple things like setting up your blog, adding the stuff on the bottom like “digg this” or “stumble it”, and of course, changing main domain names.

For those of you who don’t know, you can have a main domain, add-on domains, and parked domains. So our original main domain for Future Delivery was www.fdnetwork.org. This was because Yu-kai Chou originally started a professional networking site called the FD Network. So we had thefdworld.com as an add-on domain on our host.

Anyways, I don’t want to get into the details about what add-on domain or parked domain names are. My point of this blog post is to warn you about completely nuking your website. When you “nuke” your website, it means that you are completely erasing EVERYTHING. We did this because we wanted to change our main domain name for SEO purposes. So before you nuke your website, make sure you have done these things:

1. Ask your host to back up your database
   • They won’t just do it automatically. You need to literally tell them to back up your database before you ask them to erase everything because once it’s gone, there’s no turning back.
2. Make sure it’s about midnight if you’re on Pacific Time
   • Many things can go wrong, and if you’re doing in during the middle of the day, chances are your website will be down while people are surfing the web. If you do it very late at night, then you have all night to try and get your website back up to spec
3. Back up all of your blog text and posts
   • It’s a very sad site to see all of your the blog posts that you have written in the past year go up in smoke. Make sure to back them up on your computer so that you can easily transition and post them back onto your site.
4. Write down all of the places that link back to your site and where your site is feeding into
   • One of the most important things about SEO is to have relevant sites link back to you. Once you nuke your site, your links are completely changed and you lose all SEO that you have developed. Make sure to write down every place that your site is linked from and linking to so that you can contact those places and see if they will re-link to you. Its always good to give it at least a try.

Our team member just fell to the floor in angony (in a joking manner) because the site is just not up and running like it was. We literally have to start everything over because we decided to nuke the site. So were learned a very valuable lesson: Do not nuke your site unless you truly have to. We could have figured out other ways to change our url and improve our SEO, but we were gung ho and wanted to charge! So, we paid the consequences. All experience is priceless though so I’m glad we went through it.