I was under a common engineer misapprehension that BFE [Big Freaking Enterprise] sales requires playing golf, inviting clients to steak dinners, and having budgets beyond to reach of small businesses. This is not 100% true: you can hack the BFE procurement process to your advantage. Let's dig into how.

Zero Click is a dead easy payment protocol that will allow users to pay for resources online in the simplest way using Bitcoin. We came up with the idea when we noticed that the HTTP 402 payment required status code was unimplemented. We used Bitcoin because it allows us to transfer money with no registration and no lengthy approval for the person receiving the money.

Sekai Menu (meaning “World Menu” in English), provides multi-language localization of food and beverage menus via QR codes placed around partner restaurants. Users can simply scan the code and place their order via smartphone or tablet, ensuring that neither party gets lost in translation.

While .tv brings in millions of dollars each year for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and .me benefits Montenegro, the people of the British Indian Ocean Territory, or the Chagos Islands, have no such luck. Indeed, profits from the sale of each .io domain flow to the very force that expelled the Chagossian or Ilois people from their equatorial land just a generation or two ago: the British government.

Production Manager/Brewer for MadTree, and friend of the blog, Matt Rowe recently started a Twitter hashtag #SoYouWannaBeABrewer. I’ve dug this since the first one and they’ve only gotten better with time. Matt is providing us with insight into the boring doldrums, disgusting grime, and exciting joy of being a craft brewer. I’ll shut up now and let Matt and his tweets take it from here.

Designed to fit alongside the appliances in and blend into the décor of your kitchen, Grove Labs’ device lets you grow fruits and vegetables hydroponically, without leaving your house. The whole setup includes the hydroponic chamber, which you can monitor through the transparent encasement, as well as a mobile app to keep track of growing conditions and link up to vendors to replenish your materials. The Grove Labs team calls the contraption a grove, not to be confused with a greenhouse.

I’m going to show you exactly how I ranked a site on the first page of Google in just a couple of months. My intention here is to be transparent, and to show you everything. It seems like there is a lot of information about SEO floating around the web. Sometimes it is conflicting. Sometimes it is just plain wrong. Too much information can be paralyzing. I hope through this case study you will get some ideas of what you can do to help your site rank better.

I relaunched again 3 months ago and within 48 hours, I had 1,000 targeted users on my email list. What I didn’t mention is that I had barely started developing it when I relaunched. All I had was a landing page with a one-paragraph benefit statement of how my app will help them, an email signup form, and a fancy teaser screenshot.

We work a 4-day week (M-Th, 9-6) because we think that information work isn’t like manufacturing. Another hour at the MacBook won’t yield another $1,000 in profit. We believe that smart folks can get five days of work done in four days. Simple as that.

Ten tips and concepts that I personally value very much about being a startup founder, managing a team and a product.