Yesterday’s post about the Google-Groupon deal generated a lot of views and comments and two important lessons. First, on a “meta” level there was a lesson about blogging. While I had known this to some degree before, for stimulating dialog it is far better to write about a current topic and take a one-sided approach. The important lesson though that I am still learning is that one then needs to be open to actually engaging with the comments. Disqus is a wonderful tool for doing that as I can...

Yesterday’s post about the Google-Groupon deal generated a lot of views and comments and two important lessons. First, on a “meta” level there was a lesson about blogging. While I had known this to some degree before, for stimulating dialog it is far better to write about a current topic and take a one-sided approach. The important lesson though that I am still learning is that one then needs to be open to actually engaging with the comments. Disqus is a wonderful tool for doing that as I can...

I have had a number of conversations with entrepreneurs recently where it became clear that their own personal dislike for email/twitter/Facebook/mobile notifications stood in the way of growth. It would be nice to think that you could build a service that is so awesome that everyone who discovers it will (a) instantly get all their friends to use it and (b) keep coming back all the time. But that rarely happens. Instead, there is a lot more evidence to suggest that it is much harder to err o...

I have had a number of conversations with entrepreneurs recently where it became clear that their own personal dislike for email/twitter/Facebook/mobile notifications stood in the way of growth. It would be nice to think that you could build a service that is so awesome that everyone who discovers it will (a) instantly get all their friends to use it and (b) keep coming back all the time. But that rarely happens. Instead, there is a lot more evidence to suggest that it is much harder to err o...