Monthly Archives: August 2008

An Introspective Look at Startup Killing (Potential) Mistakes

Mike McDermant, CEO if Freshbooks, wrote a great blog post today, 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks.

Mike has led Freshbooks to a great place over the last few years, having built a great product sooths a point of pain for many people, myself included. I highly recommend that you check both this post and his product out. The 7 ways? Well:

  1. Thinking we had to move faster than we did
  2. Placing my faith in a spreadsheet
  3. Thinking we had to spend more than we did
  4. Placing my faith in consultants
  5. Underestimating word of mouth
  6. Believing we could not get this far without doing “x”
  7. Doubting ourselves too much

For full details, see his post.

Thanks, Mike, for being so open about this. A lot of startup CEOs could learn from your experiences

Idée Beta Now Open!

It is my great pleasure to say that Idée has now opened their TinEye beta to the public!

Captained by Leila Boujnane, CEO, Idée has developed TinEye to be the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.

As someone who often works with images, TinEye is a dream, helping me find out where and how an image appears online, find modified versions of unmodified images or vice versa, and research the usage of editorial or stock images.

If you ever work with images I highly recommend that you sign up for the Beta.