Selling to Small Businesses

You have to watch this video to get an idea of the gulf in attitudes between American and European entrepreneurs.  The world may be flattening, but not everyone in Silicon Valley has heard the news. It’s a panel discussion that took place at a Paris Web conference called LeWeb.  As a panel discussion it’s a complete train wreck — [...]

The Website Doctor raised an interesting discussion about startup costs. He pointed to a Paul Graham article, where Graham suggests that the costs of starting a business today are lower than 10 years ago: “… [E]veryone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four [...]

Steve King points out a new website with free research capabilities. The Edward Lowe Foundation launched YourEconomy.org. It’s a free research website that allows users to examine and use small business data. The data comes from the Nets database, which is based on D&B data. Although not all of the YourEconomy.org site is yet functional, [...]

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy is once again doing something that has a laudable purpose. We’ll see if this time around it results in broader applicability to small businesses — and not just limited to a small handful of special interests. The program is called the R3 program (the “Small Business Regulatory [...]

In the typical growth path of a small business, certain functions, like information technology, end up getting handled part-time by the owner as the business grows.  How do you convince the business owner that it’s time to bring in professionals and upgrade equipment and software?  Many business owners don’t have the technology background to know what they may be [...]

I am surprised — amazed even — at how quickly businesses of all sizes are jumping on board Twitter.com.  The uptake has accelerated in the past 6 months. Twitter has been around for 2 years, but I believe interest by businesses has grown much faster in Twitter than it did in blogs, MySpace, Facebook or any other social media I can [...]