Reducing Stress to be More Productive

Sticking with the theme of the passed month of Grad school, I wanted to share some techniques that I’ve found useful to help reduce stress.  Starting a new venture may be, although extremely exciting, the most stress filled time of your life.  Reducing this stress will help you be more productive and feel better about the product or service you are creating. 

A common misconception in modern workspaces is adding elements of fun in the work place, such as a game corner or a basketball court, reduces stress and makes employees more productive.  This might not actually be the case.  So when you take a break by diverting your attention to another completely engaging activity will extract precious mental energy that you will need to complete the important tasks for you new company.

My main suggestion is to find a different activity to do for ten minutes every hour and a half that involves a) standing and walking, b) occurs outdoors, and c) is low in intensity.  By standing and walking you are freeing up the blood that has been pooling in your legs therefore sending more oxygen to your brain and increasing your heart rate.  This will make you more attentive when you return to your workspace.  A good activity to accomplish this would be to just simply stretch outside.  Vitamin D from the sun and fresh oxygen will help suppress stress reactors in your body. 

Further Research: 

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/heart/articles/2008/06/23/time-in-the-sun-how-much-is-needed-for-vitamin-d

http://voices.yahoo.com/10-stretches-relieve-stress-3465445.html

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-surprising-truth-about-workplace-happiness.html

Maximum Productivity: Re-design Your Office

            When starting your business you will be spending a lot of time working out of your basement, garage, or home office.  The problem with this is the comfort of your own home may easily distract you.  Walking through your living room seeing your big comfortable L-sofa will remind you of all the lazy Sundays you’ve spent watching football or hanging out with your significant other watching a movie. 

            However, since starting your business, this once relaxation haven is now HQ for only the most productive of activities, so it is paramount you redesign a space in your home that oozes creativity, motivation, and planning so your business takes off.

The standing desk: Working while standing may not work for everyone but it should keep you more alert.  Getting a raised desk where you can affectively stand straight up while checking on your computer will help keep you focused and on your toes, literally.  I recommend this for everyone.  I can’t describe how much more productive I am when I work while standing versus sitting.  Check out this desk that took this idea to the extreme by fusing his treadmill and his desk so he can walk while working.  Brilliant.

http://www.cnet.com/news/my-life-with-a-treadmill-desk-e-mail-and-browsing-at-2-mph/

Windows:  Choose a room in your house that has some window access.  Not only will this improve lighting in your space but by opening the windows you allow yourself fresh air with out having to get up and walk outside. If you are stuck to your garage as your workspace, make sure that lighting is optimal.  This will increase attentiveness and alertness to keep you moving through out the day.

Task/Bulletin Board:  Create a massive bulletin board.  Use this space for everything and customize it to your needs.  By having important documents or inspirational images hanging in front, and around you will help you keep your eyes on what’s important.  Keep your to do lists here as well as a constant reminder for what you have left to do that day or in the long run.

Does Your Company Need a Mobile App?

Probably not.   The process of getting an app designed, developed, and tested is not a short or necessarily easy process.  That still doesn’t include submitting it for approval to be placed into an app store.  What you may be asking now is ‘Why did you even bring it up then?’  Well, what you could probably use is a mobile web app.

Here’s the difference, the former is what’s called a ‘native app’ that is downloaded on to your device. Think Angry Birds or Candy Crush.  If you’ve ever used Chrome, Safari, or Pandora on your smartphone then you’ve used a mobile web app.  In it’s simplest terms a mobile web app is your website in an ‘app wrapper’ using the devices’ browser.

If your website is designed to be viewed on a mobile device, (which it should be!) then you can get it wrapped up as a mobile app.  Anyone visiting your site on a mobile device can be given the option of placing an icon on the home screen.  Then ‘Boom!’ there’s a link to your website on their device and it has all the appearances of an app.  Once it’s opened it has the appearance of a regular mobile app but it’s actually a website being seen through the device’s web browser.

What Can Fiber Do for You?

If you haven't heard, Google is going after major internet and cable providers with their own service, Google Fiber.  They've already reached Kansas City, Provo Utah and Austin Texas and have targeted 34 other cities to release the product as well.  The main perk of Fiber is clear: speed.  By switching to this product you have three package options but the main feature is the gigabit per second download and upload speed.  That's 100 times faster download speed and 1,000 times faster upload speed!  The reason I'm talking about this today is that in the few locations that Google has released their product, small pockets of start-ups are swarming these areas.

Kansas City is most notable in doing this and has developed the Kansas City Start Up Village, a community of start-ups that have banded together to promote each other's businesses, and it has been getting a lot of attention.  In a discussion with Matthew Marcus, a leader at the start-up village, he confesses that Kansas City had already begun growing a pretty substantial entrepreneurial focused community but Google Fiber contributed to the explosion.  Most notably, he explained, is the effect that Fiber has had on sportsphotos.com and similar companies that rely on fast download and upload speeds.  By being able to accomplish a task that used to take days and now takes an hour, they are far ahead of any competition.  sportsphotos.com moved from Springfield to Kansas City to utilize fiber.  

Marcus also shared his experience trying to "break the gig" where he tried to run an extraordinary amount of tasks on his computer to try and overload the Google provider.  What happened was astonishing.  His computer crashed, meaning the hardware was actually the issue, not the other way around, something that no other broadband provider would able to accomplish.  

So what does this mean for businesses?  Because Google only allowed residences access to Fiber it is an absolutely perfect, and in some cases essential, for small businesses to get a piece of Fiber.  The scalability alone allows your small household run business to produce the same amount of activity that medium sized competitors produce.  Another benefit is the community of people that will surround you.  Kansas City has become a hub for successful entrepreneurs to get started fast and beat competitors to the punch and Marcus talked about the ambitious nature of the community. Imagine starting a business with a secret weapon that none of your competitors have and the startups surrounding you share that same secret.  It would be an infectious environment of excitement and stability. In these types of business situations thats half the battle.  You want to have the best product and be the first to have it.  Google Fiber greatly improves your chances to solve the latter part of this dilemma.

Neal Schaffer on Entrepreneurship

Recently we had the opportunity to talk to social media specialist Neal Schaffer, author of the book "Maximize Your Social" where he lays out a guide to getting the most out of social media tools to promote your business.  Neal has been all over the planet revolutionizing and studying how people communicate on different social media platforms and has mastered the ins and outs of how people use these communication tools.  As an entrepreneur himself, Neal answered what characteristics make up the best entrepreneurs.

1. Perseverance - Neal says that great entrepreneurs "...never give up." Only the most driven entrepreneurs will weather the storms of ups and downs  and be able to come out on top.  One way to do this is to stay positive and remind yourself why you got into the business in the first place.  Most entrepreneurs are very self motivated and are able to persevere through tough times.

2. Experimental - Trial and error is really the only way to make progress as a young company.  It's impossible to have the answer to every challenge if your company is unique.  The only way to know what decisions to make in every situation is if you were duplicating the processes of another company. A lot of first time entrepreneurs have a tough time pulling the trigger on a decision and they miss opportunities.  Great entrepreneurs make decisive decisions good or bad and will learn from mistakes and strike gold on good decisions.  Being experimental will help you not hurt you.

3. Recognizing best practices - Learn from your competitors and companies that have already made it.  There is a right way to do it.  Successful entrepreneurs are mainly very ethical business people and the ones who aren't won't be successful in the long run.  Make good choices and choose the best business model that makes sense for your product or service.  Don't reinvent the wheel.

4. Outgoing - Very social people make very good entrepreneurs because people want to be around them and are very willing to give them their money.  Neal talked about how keeping company with good talent and surrounding yourself and your company with good talent will create a successful company.

Don't worry if you do not have all these characteristics.  They can be learned and taught!  If you're an introvert that doesn't mean you can't stay in touch with people and if you don't typically like to take risks you can still be experimental.  Just experiment more wisely and more cautiously just be decisive.

Investing Time to Save Time

Have you ever given thought to how much time is spent searching Google for a specific subject or item?  How many times have you tried to find a golden nugget of information only to come up short wondering if your using the wrong wording or maybe Googles just broken right now?

Now imagine you see a picture of a building and you want to know the phone number of the office occupied by the unseen person taking the picture.  Sound impossible?  Actually it’s not if you know the correct steps involved.  As an entrepreneur starting out Im sure the sound of saving time at every opportunity is a good one.

I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Dan Russell the Űber Tech Lead at Google’s Search Quality & User Experience Research.  His background includes a PhD in artificial intelligence but he moved away from that because “I wanted to learn how to enhance human intelligence.”

He now is the primary instructor at the Power Searching with Google Academy.  This is a free online course that teaches people to how to search more efficiently and effectively for information however granular it may seem.  What I soon came to realize was what they actually teach is the skill of saving years of time over the course of one’s life.

His talk centered around eight key skills that search experts use when they dive in to the Google search pool.  What he explained was that an effective search depends primarily upon using the correct language.  All too often we try to type in a search using our own language and expect a computer to understand exactly what we’re saying.  Truth be told, a computer is actually a very stupid machine and only operates on the commands it’s given, (at least until Google starts cranking out their A.I.’s that know our feelings by our expressions.)

It’s far too long for me to explain in a blog post but some of the key skills include:

-Knowing which tools to use and when.

-Understanding the terms, concepts, and genre for your search.

-Knowing how to use different media types in a search.

-Knowing what’s possible to ask.

-Using multiple resources.

While the thought of taking out time now to do an online course may seem like asking a bit too much, I can guarantee that the time invested now will save you exponentially more down the road.  I will be enrolling in their free program very soon and hope that you will as well.  If they could only teach me how to get back all the time I wasted on previous searches, well then that’s when I start shelling out the bucks.

5 Funding Sites to Avoid That First Pitch

In a post from yesterday we may have scared you from ever making the jump out of your garage and in front of potential venture capitalists.  If that was the case don't worry because there are other options and no not just Kickstarter or Indiegogo.  Here is a list, in no particular order, of 5 funding sites that you can turn to if you find yourself in a unique financial situation.

1. MicroVentures - It takes very little work on the business end.  The way its set up is you tell them your idea they research it and ask further questions.  Then they relay the information to investors and they make an offer.  Sounds simple enough.  My only knock is that you have to give up equity in your company unlike Kickstarter or typical crowd funding sites.

2. Angel List - I know I've mentioned this and you may or may not have heard of it.  Anyways it's different then most funding websites because you already have to have $100,000 worth of funding to even get on it.  But if you manage that feat its phenomenal.  You immediately get in front of some of some great investors.  After you gather those investments your portfolio then attracts young people looking to get hired.  It's a great way to streamline your business toward success and it seems like you barely have to lift a finger.

3. SoMoLend - This is a really interesting crowd funding concept.  The idea behind it is that you prey on the locals around you that may know you and you set up a lending plan and you get funded.  Pretty basic I just don't know if I trust it, or if people will trust you.

4. Razoo - This site is really not strictly geared toward businesses more toward causes.  However, they do allow businesses that work with causes.  So if you have an idea that is catered more toward social entrepreneurship this could be a great start considering the claim they've raised close to 1 billion in funding.

5. Appbackr - Pretty self explanatory.  This is one of those niche funding sites that caters towards just applications.  That might narrow your competition so you don't have to compete with the big dogs like 

the Oculus Rift.