Category: My Process

My process

I’m going to try publishing a curated monthly newsletter: join it

I’ve been writing here since 2007, and even earlier including a previous version of this site. For most of that time, anyone who preferred to check in here via email used an old Feedburner hack I made and received each post here sent to their inbox as an email.

Now I’m going to experiment with what has become a very popular move among lots of people I admire on the internet — a personally curated monthly newsletter on Tinyletter that I’m calling right now “Texts I didn’t send you.” (For now I’m going to keep the Feedburner in place but I will be transitioning the hundred or so of you there over to this replacement)

Subscribe to mine here.

I’ll be sending a newsletter monthly filled with links to interesting things I’ve been reading, my own writing and other fun thoughts, mostly around media, entrepreneurship and cities.

Like many internet-fans, I was devastated when Google Reader was sun-setted. I’m interested in whether old school email is back to being its replacement.

What happens to old customers when your prices go up

Raising prices for a product or service is challenging. One strategy is to keep the headline price but simply offer a cheaper product — fewer chips in the bag, fewer deliverables in the sponsorship package.

But what happens when you so misfired from the get go that you can’t sneak in a change? Or, what if your product or service has simply gotten far better and more competitive?

I’ve heard lots of advice on how founders and early stage companies often start off by charging too little and need to try to maximize their ask early on. Too bad I didn’t know that starting Technical.ly — because our business team still struggles with the legacy of our pricing strategy from our founding, some six years ago.

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7 events our news organization held for Baltimore Innovation Week #BIW15

For the fourth annual Baltimore Innovation Week, we at Technical.ly exercised a wide range of event formats. Years into exploring events as mission delivery and revenue accrual and marketing balance, we still need to get better. But I continue to be proud of what we accomplish.

To show that, I want to highlight a few event formats I was personally proud to be a part of during #BIW15, which featured 57 events during 10 days and close to 10,000 people — it was big, bigger even than last year. (Find a wrap of this #BIW15 here.)

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Stop worrying about having too many people at your event

You won’t have too many people for the event you’re hosting. Make a bet on it.

Many of us will host events at some point in our lives — choosing a date, creating some programming and inviting people to come. I do quite a bit of this, some 50 events a year for work, a dozen or more a year for social groups I’m a member of and maybe that many among friends or one-off special get-to-gethers.

Often you might hear someone express frustration with the delicate balance, that you don’t want too few people there but you also can’t have too many. I’m here to help you: in very nearly every case, it’s better to have too many people than too few so that’s exactly how you should optimize. Don’t waste energy worrying whether you have too many people coming.

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Great leaders sit in the audience

There’s a feeling that persists that at some point in your career, you’re successful enough that you get to the stage.

You’re handed a microphone and you begin to share what you have learned, all that you have accomplished. You move from the crowd to the curated. And once you get there, the goal is to never go back.

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Manage Your Day-To-Day: lessons from this 99U book on productivity

There is an entire industry of creative productivity self-help resources. My friend Sean Blanda gave me ‘Manage Your Day-to-Day,’ one in a portfolio of books from 99U, an effort from Behance, the Adobe division where he works.

It was a quick and energizing read. Buy it for $8.  As I like to do, I wanted to share a few of the directives I most acted on.

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What I’ve learned about running a regular professional meetup as a hobby

Organizing a regular event for peers and friends as a volunteer has become far more widespread with the power of the web, social media and services like Meetup.com for connecting like-minded professionals. It can be rewarding and relevant for both your personal and professional interests. This is what I’ve learned by doing just that.

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Ideas are easy, execution is hard

Stop taking credit for ideas you didn’t execute on. We’ve all had those moments.  When you find out about a new project or initiative and can recall with great clarity having had that very idea before.

It’s natural to want to allow ourselves that moment of validation. It’s as if a thought of yours has sprung fully formed, so it’s rewarding to take some ownership over it. But’ it’s hardly fair and certainly not accurate.

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How to do a simple lottery: randomizing entries for a contest

Here is the simplest method I know to receive submissions and fairly execute a randomized lottery for a contest.

Twice now, I have operated a lottery for those who wanted to play a video game on a skyscraper in Philadelphia. In 2013, 1,200 people requested to play pong and this April, more than 1,500 people asked to play Tetris. Fewer than 200 people got to play each year.

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