Starting a business is like pulling off a band-aid RIGHT OFF!

Collected here are 6 immediate steps you can take to get started on your path to financial freedom.

Lease an Office

With so many tenants moving out, you can easily grab a sublease from an office and get your own unit. The trick is, to make the decision as fast as possible. The more you sit around and think about it, the less likely you’ll do it.

Get the office before you even have an idea, it’s the best motivation you’ll ever find.

Market Your Skills

Will someone pay you to do any sort of work? Test the market for your skills by posting some notices on Craigslist and respond to WTB (wanted to buy) posts online. If people are willing to pay you to work, you have an immediate income for when you get started on your new venture.

Save Your Money!

If there’s one thing all businesses need, it’s working capital. Make sure you have enough money to runway your own personal living expenses at least 6 months, and more likely 12 months. You’ll want to make revenue as soon as possible, but it’s better to be overprepared when it comes to financing.

Make Your First Sale Before You Have a Business

Are you extremely cautious about quitting your job without any guarantees? Well then start selling your product/services. If you actually land a big account, you’ll have to work your ass off to deliver on it, but you’ll have a guaranteed income coming in and the only risk will be staying in your job and losing this opportunity.

Stop Working 40 Hour Weeks and Work 80 Weeks!

Hate your boss? Hate your job? Even clock-watch until it’s 5pm? These are just a few of the motivators that help entrepreneurs appreciate life as their own boss. Working for yourself you’ll often work about 80 hours a week, but you’ll love every minute of it.

Do You Want To Be Rich?

Besides taking Government bailouts and receiving $40+ million bonuses, the best way to get rich is to work for yourself. Every day you develop your business you grow the overall value of the company, but working for someone else, you’re just helping them build up themselves, and you don’t get any long-term return.

Not all business people are rich, but almost all of them are happy.

A couple of the networks I highlighted in the last post have turned out to not be that good, so I’ll make sure to let you know the networks not to consider.

The Best CPM Ad Networks for 2009

They are our number one priority for advertising networks. You can select the campaigns you want to run, by previewing the ads beforehand and see the CPMs of the respective campaigns. The standard sizes they support are: 300×250, 728×90, 468×60, 120×600/160×600. They consistently deliver eCPMs in the $1 range, which is great, especially if you’re used to seeing crappy ads and eCPMs of $.11.

They were on our last list, and they continue to be old-reliable. They have an ad server you can use so you can deliver your other ads through their network. Their creative filtering is not as good as interCLICK, but their reports and analytics are much better, plus they have a great GUI. The CPMs we see from them are lower than interCLICK typically, at $1-2.

These guys were also on the last list. They’re a small operation that sells ads for their network, and they deliver great results. Their campaigns can get to the high $3+ CPMs when there is a campaign running and then drop down to $.50 CPM when they run through a contract. They don’t have nearly the inventory of an interCLICK or Tribal Fusion, so you should always run Technorati as a coffee filter, making them your first show ad.

I had been waiting to get on the ValueClick network, and so far it has paid off. They return somewhere in the $.50 eCPM for us, which isn’t as good as our top networks, but their ads are high-quality. The biggest thing you want to look for in a quality ad network are their advertisers. You don’t want any zwinkies, flashing ads, etc. We did have audio ads with these guys, so make sure you disable this through the creative prior to starting the campaign.

Runner-Up CPM Networks

Some of these networks can be hit or miss, or I haven’t had a chance to fully test them so I want to give you caution before you start running them. Be sure to go through these networks and disable any blinking, flashing, or otherwise annoying ads. They pay you very low CPMs and just piss off your users.

BannerConnect
PrecisionClick
BurstMedia
PubAccess

Entrepreneurs have to make some tough decisions this Holiday season, amid the worst recession we’ve probably ever seen. If we cut back too far, we’re going to lose valuable employees, and when the economy comes back around, it may take us an extended period of time to ramp back up.

However, if we don’t cut-back, the company could suffer, and there may not be any business at all.

So what is an entrepreneur to do? How can we cut costs, effectively?

7 Easy Cost Cutting Measures

The President-elect has told us we need to be prepared to living lives of efficiency. Recycling, reusing, and re-inventing ourselves is the motto of the 21st century.

Instead of layoffs, employers are looking for ways to keep the company intact, employees happy, and business expanding. Hopefully these examples below will help you in your business.

4 Day Workweeks
This can be a real blessing for parents struggling with daycare. Plus, who wouldn’t like to work less than they do now. This shaves 52 days off your payroll, and can make your employees happy as well.

Extended Holiday Vacation
At the end of the year, not much work gets done on the 24th of December and on New Years Day. If you don’t already, give your employees these days off as an un-paid vacation.

Spring Break
Unpaid vacation sounds really menacing until you get to take off for 1 week in the middle of May. Finding creative ways to give your employees time off can help assuage the negative thoughts surrounding unpaid vacation. These breaks will have your staff rested, and ready to come back to work.

Voluntary Salary Reductions
If you have every employee volunteer a 1% reduction in salary, it can save the company a large amount of money, and won’t cause a huge material affect on overall morale.

401k Matching Hiatus
Yes, retirement planning is important, but keeping employees paid is also a priority. Create a deal with your employees. Suspend 401k matching for 1 year, with a promise to restore payments at the end of the year.

Turn Off Your Computers
This is perhaps one of the most overlooked. Simply turning off computers and monitors everyday can save huge amounts on your electric bill. Configure the power settings to power-down all monitors, and PCs so you can have the process be automatic.

Eliminate Overtime
Paying 1 1/2 times salary for overtime work is typically an example of efficiency that can be improved. Eliminate overtime, let employees go home early, and you’ll get more productive employees that work 2x better when they’re not overworked.

Sure, employees are any company’s greatest expense, and also their greatest asset. I’m not suggesting that you are wasting your time, thus costing your company money, but rather that your company is not getting the most out of you, by not maximizing your efficiency.

So how much money is your company wasting?

Salary X Unused Time = FAIL!

Let’s say you make $50,000 a year. This would be a nice salary for anyone not in the Bay Area, and you work only a 40 hour work week.

That’s $960 per week or $24 per hour.

For a typical work-week, if your company was able to get 5 more hours of productivity out of you, they would make:

5 x $24 per hour = $115 per week

$5,980 per year

You Gotta Spend Money to Save Money

So if we can get 5 more hours of productivity out of our employees, we can save our company $6,000 per year. If you have a company of 20 people, that’s $120,000 per year, which is quite a nice cost-savings.

During a downturn in the economy, it’s small steps like these that help the good companies survive and the weak fail, and when the economy starts turning around, these strong companies can now flourish.

So Where Can We Find These 5 Hours?

Dual-monitors are proven by Microsoft to be one of the best ways to improve your productivity.

If you assume you’ll spend $1,000 on dual-monitor setups for your employees, you can easily pay for this capital expense in about 2 1/2 months, plus it’ll make your employees a lot happier.

Let us know any tips you have for improving employee productivity.

Great minds like to work in numbers, and nobody knows that better than Pixar. They are the Hollywood-blockbuster producing Animated Powerhouse that has brought us Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles, etc.

Their first big hit came with Toy Story, where the entire core teams focused on creating this masterpiece. After its success, Pixar had to figure out how to recreate the success of Toy Story, and that’s where they looked to the power of teams.

The Power of Teamwork

From an article in the Harvard Business Review, by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, titled “How Pixar fosters collective creativity.”

It’s been obvious for a long time that no one gets very far in the movie business believing in the myth of the lone genius “artiste”. Catmull says, “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems…A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas.” Depending on one brilliant creator to come up with all of those ideas just wouldn’t make any sense; “every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

Although each movie has a core team who are responsible for the coherence of the overall product, everyone is expected “to show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew” so that “people learn from and inspire each other”.

Pixar believes in the power of what I call “collaborative webs”–networks of expertise that extend beyond the boundaries of any one organization. For example, their artists are encouraged to publish their research and talk about it at industry conferences, rather than to guard it as a trade secret. Why? “The connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed.”

And finally, Pixar’s office space is designed to foster “maximum inadvertent encounters,” just as I advise in Group Genius. The central atrium contains the cafeteria, bathrooms, meeting rooms, and mailboxes, and Catmull writes “It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.”

Gainesville is the hub of North Central Florida. 110,000 residents live in Gainesville, and 50,000 of which are at the University of Florida. And these students get hungry. They like to eat out, and they like to get delivery to their dorm or apartment or house, because nobody likes cooking.

There are a number of current delivery options for Gators, and there are also a number of startups that have been spun out of this huge Gainesville delivery market.

Gainesville Delivery is Big Business

ChompMenus
This company was started by some college students going to Penn State. They were hungry late one night, and wanted to order food, but didn’t have any menus infront of them. Their solution? Create an online menu for their college town.

They’ve taken this model to the University of Florida, and now they have ChompMenus. It’s a directory of online menus for local restaurants, and they charge restaurants to be a featured restaurant on the website. Simple model, but easy to execute. The biggest challenge is selling the contracts to the restaurants, but it’s definitely something that can easily be duplicated or replicated in towns across the country.

Gator Food
So you know what you want to eat, but your favorite restaurant doesn’t deliver. What are you to do?

That’s where Gator Food comes in. They also have an online menu option like ChompMenus, but take the extra step of providing a great service for restaurants. You can call it “outsourced delivery,” they provide delivery services for restaurants.

So say you just opened a small pasta shop, Lucas Pasta in Gainesville, instead of having to hire a delivery driver, get insurance, and go through all of that hassle. You can work with Gator Foods, and they take care of all the delivery for you.

This is a great model and I think one of the areas that has the biggest opportunities for local businesses. Take an aspect of a business model, say delivery, which causes a lot of headaches for business owners, and create a business strictly out of delivery.

How To Start Your Own College Company

The best thing about being in college is everyone loves the city they’re in. All you have to do is shout “Go Gators,” and you’ll immediately receive a warm reception.

Apply this same methodology for working in your college town. We’re all Gators, so let’s see how we can work together. Small business owners like to work with fellow entrepreneurs and they LOVE to see kids in college trying to blaze their own trail.

So if you come up with an idea, start setting up meetings, talking to local business owners, and see what you can accomplish. The ideas mentioned above are simple, but what they did that you didn’t do is get off their ass and start the company.

So get going, if you have an idea, act on it, and let’s start building the next great set of college busineses, big or small.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Opens The Door for Large Scale Solar Deployment

Below is the video, and is just an example of how everyone can contribute to the situation of rising fuel prices and a deteriorating environment.

We don’t need to disrupt the pristine nature of our waters by drilling offshore, we need to put more people like Daniel on the case to come up with a solution that will revolutionize the way we consume and use energy.

Click To Play

Now, these days, advertising is the lifeblood of web startups. Many startups have no other business model than banner advertising, so advertising can be an important factor in whether or not the majority of startups 1) make it off the ground and 2) actually become successful.

Just Get Points on the Board

In football, when a team is struggling, often one of the best motivators is getting some initial points on the board. Many times, when a team is driving down the field and they get down within the 10 yard line, the coach calls in the kicking team on 4th down. And, the majority of fans probably boo over this decision, the true football minds realize this is the correct move to make.

For a team, seeing a big goose egg on the scoreboard can be very debilitating, but, looking up and seeing that “3″ on the scoreboard, it makes things seem a lot more doable. Suddenly you “have a chance” in the game, and I don’t think we have to go over the numerous comebacks in history, all spurred by a simple field goal.

Like football, advertising on your site is a similar concept. With no advertisers, it may seem near impossible to get someone signed up, so you may be more desperate or lose faith more easily than you should. This biggest hurdle you need to overcome is just getting over the mental barrier of that first advertiser, and just getting 1 contract setup can change your whole direction.

Why Is the First So Important?

When trying to sell anything, it’s always easier when someone else has already gone before you. Remember the first people to buy hybrid cars? Everyone claimed they wouldn’t pay for themselves, would break down, etc. and today we have dealerships buying BACK hybrids and reselling them for their same value they had when they were new. Suddenly a depreciating asset is worth more two years later??

When trying to sell advertising, it’s the same concept. Your potential clients don’t want to be the only ones driving around these silly hybrids. They want to know someone else has already “taken the risk,” of advertising on your site, and that they won’t get burned if they choose to advertise on your site.

Also, once you already have an advertiser on board, you have an opportunity to create scarcity and drive up prices or increase urgency. Say I have 10 advertising spaces on my site, one of which has already been sold. First, I have a rational for charging a set price for the spot (whatever my first client paid), and second, I can create urgency on the client. With no advertisers on the site, my timetable for selling the ads is essentially limitless. Once I have a first client on the site, suddenly I have a sell-by date that will mean I have to begin my first client’s advertisement on a certain date.

If I have any empty spaces after that date, I’ll be losing money everyday, as the space will go unsold, and I’ll possibly open myself up to my first client asking for discounts, more impressions, etc. Selling this first space creates an urgency for myself, the startup, and also for potential clients. You tell em, “the ads are going up on oct. 1, you have until sep. 15 to make a decision or I’m selling the spot to someone else.”

Advertisers don’t know that you don’t have anyone else to fill the spot after the 15th of September, but with that beginning date, you have a timetable and create instant action from potential advertisers. Getting your first advertising sale is of paramount importance for trying to sell out your advertising inventory, so when beginning to sell ads, don’t go for a home run with the first sale, just look to MAKE that first sale, and everything will get easier from that point forward.

Advertisers, Advertisers, Everywhere

So you say getting the first advertiser is the most important? Well what if you don’t have anyone in mind or for some reason can’t actually SELL the space?

Well, you can look at doing advertising trades, revenue-shares or simple bluffs.

Simply putting a free banner on your site can make it appear to other advertisers that you already have an ad deal in place. The widget above is an American Apparel promotional widget that anyone can easily insert into their site. Then, when talking to other advertisers, instead of blatantly lying and saying American Apparel bought a spot, you can simply point them to your site, tell them to check it out, they’ll see the American Apparel stuff, and suddenly they’ll get a lot more interested.

They’ll think, “what does American Apparel know that I don’t?” Suddenly the urgency might be there, and advertisers will think they might not have an opportunity to advertise if they don’t act now. Remember, the goal of advertisers is to …ADVERTISE. They need to put their banners somewhere, so why not your site?

Say you don’t want to go this route. What about your friends startup that he’s trying to launch from Y Combinator? Why not trade banners with him? You each get some value from the cross-promotional plus it looks like you have strong relationships with other up and coming sites in your demographic.

Don’t have any friends with startups? Start contacting startups that are similar to you. Ask them if they’d be interested in a cross-promotional banner exchange. Give them a limited length on contract and tell them, if you sell an ad, you have to take theirs down. Now, you have, “advertisers,” on your site and you don’t have any unused inventory, and once you sell an ad, you can immediately put it up.

Advertising is Easy, You Just Need to Learn the Ropes

Advertising can seem really daunting when you’re first starting up, but like anything, it definitely gets easier. Remember when you thought it would be impossible to convince an investor to put $25,000 into your startup? Now you’re looking at multi-million dollar investments like it’s nothing (we hope).

The same principle applies to advertising. The first advertiser is the hardest, and soon after that, you’ll have to choose WHO will be advertising on your site, and begin to turn away potential clients.

So when you start to begin your advertising sales, make sure you get the first advertiser on board, by any means necessary, and from there just leverage that first sale as much as possible.

Do you have any tips for getting those first advertisers on board?

Startups Produce a Better ROI

For startups, the biggest hurdle really is money, money and attention. Rhapsody and Napster are in the limelight all the time. They trade on public stock exchanges, Napster carries HUGE name recognition from the late 90s and eMusic has been one of the staple eTailer of music for the past decade. All of this, and iMeem is still crushing them. iMeem has no commercials on MTV, no $50 million advertising budget, no hardware support, and they were sued by all 4 major labels. Despite their best efforts to raise as little money as possible, and get sued by 4 major labels, iMeem has been able to triumph while these household names have simply fluttered.

So the question is: why is iMeem doing so well? Personally I never had heard of iMeem prior to joining the digital music revolution, and have never really seen any of their ads or widgets or really anything on any of the sites I visit. Are startups simply better at spending limited budgets and squeezing out the best returns?

Any ideas you can throw into the ring as to why iMeem is doing so well? Yes, iMeem is an internet company, but Rhapsody also points users to its Rhapsody.com site to download music (per the VH1 commercials).

I’ve stacked Grooveshark up against two of our (many) competitors, Lala and we7. Both of these have a good amount of funding, an experienced management team, a celebrity spokesperson, yet both of these sites are trailing us in traffic. While the graph used below are entirely representative of world-traffic, and I have no numbers to share with you on advertising and sales revenues for the companies, the experiment still holds merit and proves a point.

grooveshark (red) lala (blue) we7 (green)

Startup Analysis: Lala, Grooveshark & we7

Lala
Their CEO is a veteran startup entrepreneur and Lala is his 7th startup. Lala has raised ~$9 million in disclosed funding from Bain Capital & Ignition Partners. Bain Capital is behind the recent ClearChannel $18 billion acquisition and carries a tremendous amount of weight behind them.

we7
Their founding team includes Peter Gabriel, which bestows a huge amount of music industry cred on the startup. They have raised $6 million from Eden Ventures and Spark Capital (the folks behind Veoh, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).

Grooveshark
The founders just turned 21, we have raised ~$1 million, we have private friends, family, and and fools for investors. Our team has 0 experience running a startup and the majority of our developers are still in school. I happen to be on the team, so that may be the reason for the huge traffic difference (kidding).

Let us know in the comments why it is that Grooveshark seems to be besting these other two companies in terms of traffic.