Kevin’s Blog

1. Track Record - Your successes.
2. Proof of Concept - Your product.
3. Team - Your people.
4. Idea - Your vision.

… in that order

… in Serbia.

(Source: Milos, a cool guy who managed to sell a food service startup in Serbia.)

Jack Po, an experienced entrepreneur and local friend of mine, just posted some tools startups might find useful. While I agree with most of what he has to say, some healthy horizon-broadening is in order.

I’m new to the startup scene, but I’ve always been a tech guy. Here are my tools:

Website Registration: 1and1 has free private registration that you can toggle on or off. $7 is the base fee for a .com.

Website Hosting: Engine Yard (for rails), SliceHost (for custom stuff), Media Temple (for shared hosting), Google App Engine (easily scalable, but has had hiccups…)

DNS Hosting: I stick with whoever hosts my site. I’ve never had any problems.

Email, Calendar, Wiki, Internal Messaging: Google Apps

Actual Website: Ruby, Java, or Plain old HTML/CSS/jQuery

Phone: Skype, Grand Central (but GC keeps deleting my old messages… boo!), iPhone

Conference Calls: Skype - easy and free.

Surveys, Spreadsheets and Documents: Google Docs - The coolest part of this suite is the real-time collaboration. Plus, there’s a form-filler mode for the spreadsheet app that you can use to conduct surveys.

Newsletters: Google Groups (for continuous conversations) or Gmail email aliases with BCC (for periodicals).

Project Management: Lighthouse, Github, Google Code, Sourceforge, or just plain old face-time. I’m actually itching to build a way more intuitive project management system. But for now, I can live with these. (I used to use Basecamp, but it can be abused too easily…)

Website statistics: Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google Sitemaps

Code Tools: Linux Shell, TextMate, Eclipse

Computers: Apple Macs.

Presentations: Apple Keynote

Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Omnigraffle