In the spirit of Matt Cutts, I am considering taking up one of these 30 days challenge. Any advise which one makes sense to take first:

• run for 45 minutes every day
• no caffeine for 30 days
• blog 1 article every day for 30 days
• no sweet or processed / industrial food for 30 days
• read 15 books in 30 days
• burn 10 pounds in 30 days
• no meat for 30 days
• take 1 picture every day for 30 days
• go without tv for 30 days

 

www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf This is recommended reading for any executive who thinks SEO is strategic for his/her company. The guide does not  contain actionable items as much as they are about the approach and guidelines you need to mange  your SEO team. At 25 pages or so, it will not take much of your time (I read it while doing my laundry). I have only recently started learning about SEO and after spending some time on blogs, forums and some books, my view is that there is lot of fluff out there. About 90% of what you will hear from "SEO experts" is useless and perhaps another 9% is illegal. However, Google, surprisingly provides a lot of information on SEO that works. This guide is a good place to start with that.

This is the list of app that I use almost everyday at my current startup on my iPhone and recommend to my team internally.

1. CardSnap ($14.99 for pro or $0.99 for base version) - Great way to scan visiting cards into your addressbook. Take a picture from the iPhone (works only with 3GS) and the app does the rest.
2. Yahoo Messenger (Free) (or Beejive at $9.99) - Both of these apps have built-in push notifications. Great way to stay in touch with your team when you are out of office. Beejive works for MSN, AIM, ICQ, gtalk etc besides Yahoo IM.
3. Evernote (Free) -  the best notes taking app there is. I do not know if there is a better way to capture notes. Use it to capture notes during the meeting, take pictures of the whiteboard after the meeting and to digitally capture all the odds and ends that life throws your way. Works from your iPhone and your desktop.
4. ScannerPro ($6.99)- This applications can scan any paper document (multiple pages) and save it as PDF. The PDF can then be emailed, send to evernote or send to dropbox. It also mounting of iphone as a network drive to allow quick transfer of documents from a Mac or PC.
5. Google Analytics ($2.99 for Pro or Free for base version) : You need this if you are a web startup. You need to know all the time how visitors are doing on your website.

Other apps that I have on iPhone but I realize I do not use as much as I thought:

• LinkedIn - I do not do enough contact research on iPhone I guess
• TripIt - Might useful if you do many trips but not otherwise
• Skype - great app. good voice quality. but very slow for voice. I think I would use it a lot more if it has push notifications.
• JiraMate - I need an app for my Jira. Unfortuately, this is not a good choice today. I have blogged about lack of a good Jira app on iPhone.
• Snatch - Great way to control your slides and presentation from iPhone. Unfortunately, its a little clunky and immediately brands you as a dork in a new group.

When we were raising our first round for hCentive, Manoj Agarwala - our finance wizard - helped us create a very solid business plan which was well-appreciated by many VC. When I noticed Thanasis over at NAV fund talking about what VC want from your Series A business plan, I thought I should  try to provide a template  that we used when presenting to them and other VCs. First of all, the plan should be created in excel and then distilled into a small 6-slide deck. Secondly, you should always try to present it in person rather than just sending it and hoping they will make sense of it themselves. If you have to send it, send the deck but ask permission to present it in person (or at least over phone) Your 6 slides should be:

1. Overall business model. (how you get customers and how you make money)
2. Final revenue and goals (things like when you break even, how much you burn till then, whats your end goal)
3. Base Assumptions  (built bottoms up) and their justification
4. Bread Crumbs (how your assumptions lead to final numbers).
5. Key Drivers (and how they compare with the rest of the industry)
6. How much  money you need now and where will it get you

Thats it !! The six slides should be straightforward and simple to follow and should be backed by a model in excel that you can use to answer any questions that might come up.

At hCentive, we are big users of Jira Studio. Its been a big help for our distributed team. Unfortunately, I am yet to find a good app to use Jira Studio from my iPhone. Features I need in my Jira Studio iPhone app (in the order of priority) are:

1. Works with hosted Jira Studio
2. Shows me what has changes since my last access
3. Allow editing of jira issues and their workflow transitions
4. Ability to add comments to issues

Features that are desirable:

1. Allows creation of issues (directly in greenhopper views)
2. Shows me Greenhopper boards (Planning Board and Task Board) for my projects.
3. Allows saving of favorite filters and projects
4. Integrates confluence activities in the same screen
5. Text based search of issues (and possibly confluence data)
6. Caching for offline access
7. Allows fisheye view of SVN (read only)
8. Supports custom workflow transitions and custom fields.

I have looked at JiraMate and iJira. The developer for both the applications are apparently slow to respond and both the applications are not being frequently updated (neither of them is compatible with OS 3.0) JiraMate seems to be richer in features with ability to save favorite filters and projects and ability to comment. However, it does not support any editing of issues or any workflow transition. iJira, apparently, does not work with hosted Jira and crashes when a project has large (>1000) number of issues. It allows editing of issues and sorting on many fields. Neither app provides any integration with confluence or fisheye. There seem to be some confluence apps available and mini confluence actually seem nice but I think an integrated jira+confluence+svn app can be very useful for many developers and small teams. I am just surprised that there are no good apps here. Is there no market for an iPhone version of Jira Studio?

What should you do after you make an offer to hire an A+ player from a big company for your small startup? Mark Suster - as part of his startup series - talks about how bigger companies roll out the red carpet when a good employee resign to keep him/her from leaving. This is an all too familiar phenomenon. Companies do not do enough for their A-players (due to the fear of antagonizing others - most likely, B-players) till the person resigns and then suddenly everybody from CEO down wants to meet in person and convince him/her to stay promising big raises and perks. At hCentive - my current startup - we have seen it from the other side of the table. When we make an offer to an excellent engineering or business person from a bigger organization - they are usually given royal treatment from their current company as soon as they tell them about it. Meetings with CEOs are arranged, salaries are raised and sometimes offers to fire their immediate boss are given in hushed voices. What should be your role as a small entrepreneur who has been able to attract this hotshot engineer or business guy but now his current company is making him an offer he cannot refuse? Here is my list of things we all should be aware of:

1. It ain't over, till its over. The selling does not stop just because somebody has accepted the offer. Be prepared for the fact that if he is any good, his current organization will try to do everything they can to win him back. You have to continue to woo him and keep the selling hat on - at least till he officially starts working for you (and may be a little later). Peter Harrison - CEO of my last startup - knew this game very well. He would invite potential hires to our office and his home continuously - making sure they are engaged and excited about their work, their boss and the team. He would continue to be close to them (directly and thru common friends) trying to see if there is anything at all that can derail the deal.
2. Negotiate a win-win deal. This is a lesson I learnt the hard way. Just because somebody is excited to join you is not a good reason to offer him less than what he or she is worth. It is true that you are a small startup and you should be careful about where you spend the money. However, the best way to spend money in a startup is to spend it on your A++ players. Offer them good money - always more than they are making now (or at least a time-bound promise of reaching that level). People get used to the money they are making and adjust their living standards to it. It is very hard for them to cut back even when they are excited about their work. They might say they can live on less but as time passes and when a sweet counter offer comes in (and, trust me, it will come in), that excitement may not be enough for them to stop from reconsidering. You got to pre-empt that. Yes, I know, YOU are willing to live on Ramen noodles and on cheapest health insurance for your dreams. But, there is a reason why you are an entrepreneur and the person you are hiring is a salaried employee.

To be fair, I think most hires will have a lot more maturity and will not consider going back regardless of the sweetness of the counter-offer. Afterall, the love is already lost and they will be forever tainted and remembered as someone who was willing to leave, but could be bribed to come back. But, this is something you do not want to bet upon. Bottomline: it never hurts to be too careful and offering a little extra when hiring the people you know will make a difference to your company.

Robert Scoble has a great article today on his take on mistakes startups make. You really should read his whole article but two things stand out for me.

• FOCUS ON USP: You should be able to say in one tweet why anyone should buy your product
• SMART AND GET THINGS DONE: You company is full of smart people but you know when to say "no" to them.

The first is strategic and the second is tactical. Strategically, you need a razor-sharp focus on why you are different and you should be spending enough time thinking about why anybody will buy your product. Then, you should be able to express that differentiation in one sentence. (Robert gives the example of Prius: "It gets better mileage than your car") Tactically, we all know the importance of hiring smart team (Joel Spolsky even wrote a book about it). Its getting-things-done part that gets sidelined. One needs to be careful about over-engineering any part of the organization. Over-engineering not just happens in engineering but can happen anywhere where very smart people exist. In my last company, we had a manager incentive plan so complex, that, famously, only two people in the entire organization understood it when it came out !! (those were the two people who designed it) The reason plan was so complex was not because creators of the plan were evil or stupid but exactly the reverse. They wanted to be fair to everyone in every situation and they were some of the smartest people I have known in my life. However, the end goal was lost. An incentive plan is no good if you cannot even understand how you are being incentivized !! At my current company - hCentive - we constantly worry about if there is anything at all on our web application that is extraneous. Something that will get in the way of a visitor's experience of buying a health insurance plan - the tool time - needs to be removed. Avinash - our UX designer - constantly comes up with yet another feature that we can add and I have to say no to many of his beautiful mockups. Not because they are bad ideas but because we want to leave it simple and truly make hCentive the easiest way to buy health insurance. Scoble gives the example of Evan Williams (founder of Blogger and Twitter) here who prides himself on NOT doing things. To summarize, if you know your goal (why customer will buy your product) and you have hired a smart team - the job of an entrepreneur is limited to just two things: saying no and moving the furniture out of the way.

In the cover story for the September issue of The Atlantic,  the author, David Goldhill, makes a very compelling case for a new kind of healthcare in this country that he calls "consumer centric". David makes the point that we are using insurance for the wrong things in this country by mostly using it for "regular" and "predictable" health expenses rather than those that are truly catastrophic or unseen. While the viewpoint is not new, David does take it to its logical conclusion with a plan based on it. The last page of his article summarizes his proposal:

• A  low-cost, true catastrophic (> $50k deductible) insurance that everybody needs to buy. This comes with no medical underwriting and a national shared risk pool. This policy should cost about $200/month for a family of 4 as per today's premiums.
• A new type of HSA account which everyone is required to contribute to fund for under-50k expenses. People can take loans from this account (if bigger expenses happen earlier in life) and they can also withdraw from this account for non-medical purposes (after a certain minimum indexed to age is met).
• Govt contributes to this new HSA for lower-income Americans. Medicare is replaced by this new type of govt-assisted HSA

David believes that this will force people to save for health insurance while at the same time letting them use that money for other things if they use it efficiently. Such an approach will lead to:

• Removal of obfuscated prices for health care as people will demand to know prices when they are paying for it themselves
• Providers will spend dramatically less time on paperwork as very little of expenses will pass thru insurance
• Patients will see "integrated" pricing for the whole service (like they see today for elective surgery like LASIK) rather than multiple bills from each provider that was part of the service leading to better efficiencies at the backend.
• Technological innovation— which often takes the form of slightly improved treatments for much higher prices—would begin to concern itself with value, not just quality. Many innovations might drive prices down, not up.

I think this is an excellent proposal however I will add two more things to it:

• We  also need to deregulate insurance sector allowing carriers to operate beyond state boundaries and letting hospitals and providers form tighter, efficient groups
• We need to limit legal liability and at the same time protect consumers against unscrupulous providers perhaps by giving FDA or similar authority some kind of jurisdiction over providers for safety of procedures.

There is only one problem: the implementation of such a process requires tremendous political leadership as all of the health-care interest groups—hospitals, insurance companies, professional groups, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers, even advocates for the poor—have a major stake in the current system. Unless, we as American public, wake up and realize who much are we paying for our health care (an average of $1.8M per person over our lifetime) and how little say we have in how it is spent, such a proposal does not even stand a chance. They say, a nation gets the government it deserves. I think its true for health systems as well. It is time we rise above our narrow interests and do what is Right.