Claudio and I have been working on a new project lately and we needed a logo and a name, but didn’t want to spend much money for it. We ended up getting a catchy name and a cool logo for just $30! This is how we did it:

1. We went to fiverr.com. If you don’t know the site yet, Fiverr is a platform where people offer services they’re willing to do for exactly $5. You’ll find the weirdest stuff there, but also useful services. We’ve used it lots of times for different small tasks.
2. We looked for people who were offering name creation and found three with good reviews, so we hired them. When you hire someone for a gig, you have to be very specific about what you’re looking for. In our case, the criteria for a good name are the following: It has to be short (less than 10 characters), the .com domain has to be available, it must sound good in English, German and Spanish, it must be easy to remember, and most importantly, if I tell someone the name over the phone, she has to be able to write it down without misspelling it.
3. We got lots of crappy names, but also some good ones. We used those as inspiration and ended up with a great name which was a slight variation of the best suggestion we got.
4. Once we got the name, we hired three more people for the creation of the logo. This is more difficult than getting a name, mainly because explaining someone what you want is not that easy. We briefly presented the nature of our project, the target group and the color pallet we were thinking of, and then we declared what’s important for us in a logo: It has to contain the name and it should have a part that could serve as favicon.
5. The crap/good stuff ratio is higher for logos than for names, but some people are willing to receive feedback and do a couple of more rounds until they grasp what you’re looking for. We mixed ideas from the best three logos and photoshopped them until we got it right. The Fiverr logos served more as inspiration than anything, but they were valuable nevertheless.

As you see, we could have got the job done even for $10, but we wanted to get the name and the logo fast, which is why we run three gigs in parallel for each task. The whole process took us about a week, with about 4 hours of actual work. Cool, isn’t it? Let me know if you’ve also tried something similar for your startup!

Conozco gente que necesita muchísimo tiempo para tomar decisiones poco importantes, y me parece divertido que no se den cuenta del costo en que incurren. Si necesito 30 minutos para decidir qué combinación de micros me conviene tomar para llegar de A a B, probablemente lo mejor sería elegir la combinación que conozca mejor, sin pensarlo mucho.

Yo siempre he predicado un modelo de toma de decisión que llamo (en inglés) “minimum cost decision framework”, o sea un modelo que minimiza el costo de la toma de decisiones. En términos simples, el modelo plantea lo siguiente:

“Teniendo dos opciones, si no es viable conseguir los elementos de juicio para elegir la opción óptima, elige cualquiera.”

Viable en este caso significa que el costo (económico, de tiempo, de stress, etc.) de averiguar cuál es la mejor opción no debe sobrepasar los beneficios derivados de elegir dicha opción en vez de elegir cualquiera.  

Un ejemplo en que el uso del modelo es útil:

A qué bar vamos hoy en la noche? Bar A o bar B?

Asumamos que la opción de ir a los dos no es posible (quedan en extremos opuestos de la ciudad), y asumamos también que uno de los dos bares es efectivamente mejor que el otro. Finalmente, asumamos que nunca hemos ido a dichos bares ni conocemos gente a quien podríamos pedirle su opinión. Si elegimos un bar al azar, tenemos un 50% de posibilidades de terminar en el bar correcto. Para aumentar dicha posibilidad a un 100% tendríamos que incurrir en los siguientes costos:

- Buscar en internet información sobre ambos bares: 30 minutos

- Comparar las informaciones obtenidas: 15 minutos

- Llegar a un acuerdo respecto de las conclusiones que se pueden sacar de la comparación: 15 minutos

En la mayoría de los casos no se justifica tomarse una hora para saber con certeza qué bar será mejor. Es probable que el bar peor no sea tan malo tampoco. Por lo mismo, en este caso lo adecuado sería ir sencillamente al bar que quede más cerca y tener una hora más de fiesta.

En qué otros casos conviene usar este modelo?

Last February, Facebook beta-launched its virtual currency, called Facebook Credits. With it, users of the social network can pay for stuff in games and other applications that work inside Facebook. The company is currently taking a 30% cut for every transaction made with Facebook Credits. That means that, if you sell something on Facebook for $100 and accept Facebook Credits as payment method, you actually get $70. I believe that Facebook’s pricing strategy for its virtual currency is short-sighted. In this post I’ll try to explain why.

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This week I got accepted to the Founder Institute, a 4-month long program for entrepreneurs that is being held for the first time in Berlin. In the weekly sessions, successful CEOs of technology companies will share with us their knowledge about, well, how to become successful CEOs of technology companies. The subjects that will be discussed range from branding to product development to fundraising and so on. In order to graduate from the program, you have to found a company, which I think is a cool way to define its character; it’s not an academic degree, but, as Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute, puts it, it’s an apprenticeship for founders.

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I stumbled upon Tripline the other day and decided to give it a try. It allows you to put a trip on a map, with text and pictures. Here’s the tripline of my backpacking trip around Europe in 2005:

The site is still in Beta and there are some things that don’t work well yet (like uploading more than one photo at the same time), but I like the concept and hope that they get better.

Close your eyes and imagine the following. No, wait. Read this first, then close your eyes and then think about what I’ll propose: You have a smartphone that you carry all day with you. Let’s call it “OneDevice”. OneDevice has an app that lets you run a computer operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc). In your workplace and at home you have a docking station for OneDevice, which is connected to a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor. So, when you need a phone, you use OneDevice, and when you need a full-fledged computer, you use OneDevice. You’d just need one device in your life (that’s where the name comes from, capici?).

I think that would be awesome. And I think we’re not far away from such a future. Let me explain.

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Skype is looking to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering, according to an S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Analysts were expecting this to happen, but not so early after eBay sold a 65% stake of the company in November 2009.

This blog post about the news says that about 85% of the revenues come from SkypeOut, the service that allows Skype users to call regular phones for a very cheap fare. What would then happen if everybody in the world had Skype? Would it be wise to buy Skype stock? Let’s analyze this a little bit.

Imagine the world as a place populated by two kinds of people: those who are on Skype and those who don’t. Skype makes most of its money communicating people from one group with people from the other one, right? So, theoretically, Skype maximizes its revenue if 50% of the people is on one group and the rest on the other. I’ll prove it to you with an example:

Let’s say that there are 6 people in the world, some of them have Skype, some not. For each communication between people who have Skype and those who don’t, the company makes one dollar. The diagrams below show how much money would Skype make in different situations:

Once you understand this it’s easy to see Skype’s problem: As the company grows, it gets closer to the point where it maximizes its revenue, but if it grows too much, it will start making less and less money.

Of course, all of this is just theory and reality will never look like that. But nonetheless, Skype is aware of this and has been trying to explore new revenue sources for years now. This post explains the future monetization strategy of the company, which can be summarized as follows:

• Advertising
• Ramp up its Premium Features (e.g. Multiple Videoconference)

Should you buy Skype stock when if it IPOs? I’d say definitively. The company is not yet done with its job of disrupting the massive oligopoly that is the international telecommunications industry. And after it has accomplished that, it’ll figure out how to keep making money.

UPDATE: Got a new version of the file, with some minor modifications (one canvas instead of two, better descriptions of the fields. DOWNLOAD LINK. Thanks to Kevin Dewalt for the tips!

Some days ago I read an interesting post by Ash Maurya about ways to document Business Model Hypotheses. He offers his own flavor of a Business Model Canvas, a variation of the works of Rob Fitzpatrick and Alex Osterwalder which, in my opinion, fits better to the reality of web-based startups.

In the comments of Ash’s post, Dan Khan, an entrepreneur from New Zealand, posted a link to an extremely cool and simple web-based tool he developed, that allows you to write down your Business Model Hypotheses on the type of canvas Ash proposed.

The tool, as useful as it is, is not perfect yet. My biggest issue with it has to do with privacy. I don’t feel confortable documenting my business ideas on someone else’s servers. Besides that, I’d like to be able to export the canvas as pdf.

So, I decided to simply copy Dan’s canvas on PowerPoint and add the things I think were missing on his tool. The most important change I did was adding a second canvas with the same structure, but thought as the place to document the next experiments you’re going to run to validate or invalidate your hypotheses. This way the canvas can be used as a guide for project management.

DOWNLOAD LINK

Please let me know how if there’s something you would add/remove to improve it.

Facebook has been heavily criticized for its privacy issues in the past months. Some say that the privacy settings are too difficult to understand, and others say that the default settings are too open. There are also concerns about the ways external apps can manage our personal information.

I’ve always considered these worries as pure paranoia. I mean, all you have to do to be on the safe side is to set all your privacy settings to “friends only”, right? Wrong. I’ve identified two ways Facebook misuses your personal information. As I’m no expert on the matter, there are probably many other ways Facebook is fooling us that I’m not aware of. But let me tell you about the ones I found.

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My Master Thesis of the MBA did not have much to do with business. I wanted to create new knowledge about Online Communities, and luckily the Institute for Technology and Innovation Management of the University accepted the subject I proposed: “User-Generated Content in Online Communities: The Effects of Group Size and Topic”. 

Among many other things that I won’t describe in this post, I wanted to find out if people contributed more to an Online Community (OC) if the total numer of participants was higher. By contributing I mean posting content (User-generated content, or UGC) in any way. In this post I’ll try to summarize what I found, avoiding scientific jargon whenever possible.

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