One of our most common mistakes as entrepreneurs is short-term thinking:

• “How do I make a cheap landing page to validate today’s business idea?”
• “How can I get traffic to this ‘business’ I started last week? I’m considering buying an expensive banner ad.”
• “I’ve been trying Twitter and Facebook for 2 weeks to get traffic to my new business. It’s not working!”

This post is inspired by Startup Edition, in response to the question, “How did you make your first dollar online?”

There’s a great scene in Netflix’s series Orange is the New Black, a dark comedy about inmates of a women’s prison. Two of the main characters, Piper and Alex, discuss their enemy, Tiffany, who has broken Alex’s glasses, stolen her mattress, and locked her in a clothes dryer. But as Piper stresses out about how to exact quick revenge on Tiffany, Alex calmly reminds her:

You gotta have a long game.

In August...

litmus test

• A test that uses a single indicator to prompt a decision

Every few days I get an email for feedback on whether someone’s startup idea is worth doing, or for help figuring out how to pick just one idea and focus on it.

It’s tough making these decisions. We waste too much time working on the wrong things. So how do we improve our chances of picking the best idea?

This post is inspired by Startup Edition, in response to the question, “How do you turn your idea into a startup?”

Folks like Tim Ferriss and Eric Ries have championed the idea of a “smoke test”: simply make a landing page selling a product that you pretend you’ve already made and then use things like Google Ads to drive traffic to those pages. If you measure enough interest (clicks, signups, etc.), make the product.

It’s a valid method for testing some ideas. I’ve even used it myself. But here’s another...

Opportunity looks a lot like hard work.

Ashton Kutcher

To which some added: That’s funny, considering Ashton was discovered by a modeling agent while drinking at a bar.

Ashton Kutcher recently won an MTV Teen Choice award. Instead of a traditional thank you speech, Ashton shared:

1. Opportunity looks a lot like hard work. No job is beneath you. And they are all stepping stones to the next thing you want to accomplish.
2. Being smart is the sexiest thing you can do.
3. All the things in life have been made by people no smarter than you. So don’t just live life; go build it.

An inspiring speech, especially for teenagers, but some were quick to point out Ashton’s lecturing about hard work, when his own career luckily began after a modeling agency discovered him drinking in a bar.

I mentioned the speech and the replies about “luck” to my wife, who wisely pointed out, “But what were...

I did a fun interview this morning with Tom and Tony of tastytrade.

“Is this a joke?” was feedback on a cartoon I drew a few years ago. Someone else commented, “Not working.”

I’ve never been good at art, composition, drawing, or even color schemes. As a kid I wore a purple sweatshirt and orange Zubaz.

To make the software I’ve been making for so many years, I’ve relied on other people designing things for me. At the first company I founded, I had a talented partner who did the things I couldn’t do or do well, like design. But in 2011, I found myself trying to start a new project. This time, alone.

Read more of my latest article at FastCompany.

There are a lot of neat new things in Draft to announce:

• Write Better webcast
• Improved merge changes view
• Snippets/templates
• Footnotes
• Tabs
• Better support for undo
• Buffer integration
• Ask a Pro message
• 100,000 document milestone reached

Write Better webcast

On August 15, 2013 at 12:30 Eastern time, I’m doing a live webcast for the first 20 Draft users to signup here: Write Better webcast. I’ll share some current things I’m doing to improve my own writing. I’ll also pick a few users from the signup form and their writing to show what improvements I might make.

If you can’t make it or missed the signup, I’ll be archiving the video for Premium Draft users.

Greatly improved merge changes view

The view to merge changes from your collaborator has gotten a huge and useful facelift.

The most important change is that the left side is an editable version of your document...

Here’s a link to the In Beta podcast I did with Gina Trapani and Kevin Purdy.

It was a lot of fun. We talked about the Obama campaign, startups, design and writing. And lots of book reviews :)

Tracer ammunition (tracers) are bullets or cannon caliber projectiles that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. Ignited by the burning powder, the pyrotechnic composition burns very brightly, making the projectile visible to the naked eye. This enables the shooter to follow the projectile trajectory to make aiming corrections.

Wikipedia

Tracer Bullet is also a private investigator, an alter ego of Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. :)

The Tracer Bullets gem makes studying the performance of your Rails app from its development log file a lot easier.

Background

Performance tuning a Rails app is still pretty damn hard. There are great tools out there like New Relic, and even Rails own performance tests, but still, I find areas where I’m tearing my hair out looking for slow bits.

On the Obama re-election campaign, I did a ton of performance...

Last week when I wrote Downward, I looked back on my life and found quite a few places where I felt stuck.

This post is inspired by Startup Edition’s question: “What advice would you give young entrepreneurs?”

I was stuck in a job after college. I was trained to be a Chemical Engineer, but really wanted to be a software developer. When I graduated, I got a non-developer position at an information technology consulting company, Accenture, recording meeting minutes and documenting requirements. I hated it.

What’s interesting about ruts in my life is how often writing got me through them.

I was bored with my job, so I’d email tons of Accenture partners ways to improve business or ideas for clients. I worried a little bit about looking stupid. I’m 21. A complete newbie. I kept doing it anyways.

Most people ignored me. But, eventually, some didn’t. And I got promoted to a position...

I saw a chart of Scribd’s website traffic the other day.

Ouch. Scribd has been a hot company. Looks like a rough six months.

I was talking with someone about a recent setback in their business. The loss of confidence was all too familiar.

My startup career over the last 15 years has had its own setbacks. I can definitively count more losses than wins.

There was the mobile database administration tool, TinyDBA, I was creating. It was supposed to be my first real business. I even spent the money creating a Limited Liability Company for it. Of course I needed the limited liability to protect myself from potential lawsuits. LOL. I never shipped anything. No one ever saw it. No one ever used it.

Things weren’t that much better in my next venture. I joined a friend to build an eBay-like auction site for industrial equipment. Spent months building out an entire platform for this...