Google Apps - Both Tatango & Derek Medai live on Google Apps. Google has made it so easy for any company to manage their email accounts, files, tasks and even calendars, it’s scary to think what I would do without Google.

Freshbooks - If you are looking for online invoicing, I couldn’t recommend a better place than Freshbooks. We use Freshbooks for invoicing clients at Derek Media and tracking part time employee hours at Tatango. The service is extremely simple and flexible enough for any type of company to use.

GeeTasks - If you use “tasks” within Google mail, you have to get this app for your iPhone. It allows you to sync all of your to-do lists, which is a must for someone on the go all the time.

TweetDeck - I use this app both on my computer and iPhone religiously to follow the many conversations happening on Twitter. I would die without this app.

Basecamp - Do you have a lot of projects with a lot of different clients? Use Basecamp to manage everything, it will make your life much easier.

Highrise - Have you wondered how we provide such great customer service at Tatango? Look no further than Highrise. This application allows our account managers to make notes, store emails and make our customer interactions top notch.

Box.net - At Derek Media we are constantly sharing files with clients and other employees, Box.net does it all. Great customer service too!

Tungle - Hate the back and forth while trying to schedule a phone call or meeting? Tungle is your answer, check it out.

Lighthouse - Want a simple ticket tracking tool for you to submit bugs to your engineers? I haven’t found something as easy to use at Lighthouse.

Skype - I don’t make many phone calls through Skype, but I do video chat it up on there.

Bit.ly - Want to shorten a link and track how many people click on it, well here you go, it’s that simple!

Google Alerts - Want to know when someone mentions your name or company on the web? Google Alerts sends you an email whenever anything pops up!

RingCentral - Skip the expensive phone systems and get a 1-800 number through these guys and they can route it to everyone’s mobile phone in the office. You can even set special rules for during and outside of normal business hours. (like there is a difference…hahaha)

Mailchimp - Want a sexy, simple, and best of all inexpensive email newsletter? Check these guys out. We use them here at Tatango for our monthly newsletters to users and Derek Media uses them for many of their clients.

FratMusic - Like music while working, check out all the fist pumping playlists here.

1. Do your own bookkeeping. It’s amazing how much you tighten the belt if you are entering each expense into your accounting software yourself.
2. Every month look at every expense and ask yourself how you can eliminate or decrease it. Think about sharing resources, sub-letting, outsourcing, etc. (See our first business card below, two names, one card, half the cost)
3. Give your monthly cash flow statement to your employees and see if they have any ideas on how to decrease or eliminate expenses. Getting everyone on the “tightwad” bandwagon can significantly cut expenses at any company.
4. Every quarter, call all of your suppliers and ask for a better rate. If they don’t give it to you, go somewhere else. It’s amazing, every time I do this with AT&T they are able to magically find a few savings that they missed last quarter.
5. Don’t spend money on stupid shit.

This used to really bother me, until I was able to develop a plan for myself. The plan is the following. I will spend 3/4 of my time on this earth trying to be the best entrepreneur I can, while building up as much wealth as possible. Then I will spend the last 1/4 of my life, working to give away that wealth in the most efficient ways possible. Both challenging and rewarding ventures.

Why did I write this blog post? I heard somewhere that you are much more likely to achieve your goals if other people around you know what you have set for yourself. So there it is.

You heard me right… the business plan is dead. From this point forward, I will never write a business plan, review a business plan or even think about a business plan, I’m sick of them. In college we were instructed to create mock businesses, by generate a business plan. These business plans were graded on a highly sophisticated scaled, based on how many pages the plan included, 10-20 pages C, 21-50 pages B, 51+ pages, A. So guess how many pages my business plan was? Just barely 51 pages, no more, no less. That business plan was the biggest piece of crap that I created in my college career, littered with over-explained concepts, pointless graphs, and ridiculously big words that served no point expect to take up additional space. What a joke!

So what in my opinion is replacing the business plan, the “slide deck”. The slide deck is a 10-16 slide powerpoint presentation. A good example of how to structure a “deck” (this is what most people call it) can be found by downloading the Seattle Alliance of Angels Pitch Clinic here. One of the most important benefits of a slide deck is that it forces an entrepreneur to describe their business, market, operations, team, execution, etc. all in a very small amount of words, hence cutting out all the bullshit usually found in a typical business plan. Secondly, who the hell has time anymore to review a 50+ page business plan, besides teachers. In my short career as an entrepreneur I have not once had someone ask for my business plan, it’s always slide deck, slide deck, slide deck. I’m baffled at why colleges even make their students create business plans, doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s another blog post.

Word of caution: Some people may think this just made their life easier. It hasn’t. Don’t think that your job is done after those 10-16 slides, you better make sure that you have additional documents that back up almost every assumption, projection and statistic used in those slides. Seasoned investors will question the hell out of your slides, be prepared.

By adding a second or even third monitor, you can increase your productivity by 9 to 50 percent. Read more…

Even Bill Gates has bought into the more monitors, more productivity mantra. See this article in Fortune Magazine about how he uses different digital tools to get through his day.

Now there is no excuse for you not to ask your boss for an additional monitor.

But Derek, your traffic is crashing… this can’t be good for your company. To be honest, right now I could care less about my Compete traffic. This is definitely a far cry from when I would wait for this information like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. You can see evidence of this from a 2009 Tatango blog post where we touted that we had made the top 100 Seattle Startup Index.

Let me give you an example of what a conversation with my team would be like during that time….

Derek - “Guys we need more subscriptions (revenue), any ideas?”

Team - “Yea, drive more traffic to the website.”

Derek - “Great idea, get to work.”

What resulted from these conversations were innovative marketing campaigns and more press, which drove more and more traffic to the website.

Looking back, we were doing things completely backwards. What we ended up with was a website and revenue model that wouldn’t scale efficiently. Why wouldn’t it scale efficiently? (Definition of efficient: performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort) Well think about it, lets say our goal was $1,000 in new subscriptions per month ($100/subscription) and our conversion rate was 5% of all new unique traffic to the site. With this example, it would take 200 uniques to meet our monthly goal. For hypothetical purposes, lets say one employee could generate 100 uniques per month, so you would need two employees to reach your monthly goal. Now if you focused your efforts on raising that conversion rate from 5% to 10%, you would only need one employee per month to reach your monthly goal. Much more efficient!

Obviously there will be a time to focus on demand, but not after you have exhausted all your options to increase your conversions. For Tatango, we still aren’t there yet. We will be though.

My responsibility as a CEO is to take actions that benefit the welfare of the company as a whole. Most of the time this means doing fun stuff like implementing new products, hiring key employees, developing strategy for the future, but unfortunately it also requires doing the not so fun stuff, like terminating employees. I’ve had to terminate my fair share of employees in my entrepreneurial life, and it’s never easy. Not very many employees are very happy when they get terminated, neither are their families, friends and if you live in a small town like I do, anyone else that is within earshot of the news.

So what do you do to deal with the heat? Follow these four steps…

1) Take the high road - Just because you Twitter, blog and Facebook every moment of your life, doesn’t mean you have to talk about what just happened. If the employee decides not to take the high road, still keep your mouth shut, even though it will be hard (trust me). What you have to realize is some people may sympathize with them, but most business professionals know that being a CEO means you have to make decisions that aren’t always fun, but are done in the best interest of the company.

2) Talk to employees - Employees are the most crucial part of any company, you will need all of their help to reach the goals you have set for the future. Make sure they are aware of the reasons for termination and be sure to let them ask you questions.

3) Talk to investors - Investors only hear what the street tells them, until you tell them. Be sure to explain the reasons behind an employee termination and re-assure them of your long term vision for their investment.

4) Get back to work - You have a company to run. By spending any additional time on someone that doesn’t work for you and isn’t sharing the same goals any longer, means you’re wasting your time.

One of the things we spent an enormous amount of time on at Tatango was generating press. For being a small startup from an even smaller town, we have received more than our fair share of press coverage. We have been covered in TechCrunch, Mashable, Wall Street Journal and a host of other very notable blogs, newspapers and even radio shows. Was this done to satisfy my ego, boost employee moral, generate links, impress investors or have something cool to hang on my wall, most likely. What I’ve realized though is that during the first couple of years, press is only good if it generates revenue. For some websites that may mean traffic (ad-supported), but for Tatango it means generating subscriptions. What’s interesting is that in regards to subscriptions created on Tatango, all the big articles combined, don’t even compare to what a small (17k uniques a month) Christian Youth Ministry blog has generated.

The lesson learned, while resources are scarce and revenue is your main goal during the startup phase, focus only on generating press that generates revenue, leave the rest for the future.