Articles

The week we were announcing Sampa closing I wrote and published a blog post telling the story from a personal point of view, meaning, how it affected my life. One thing to keep in mind when reading my blog posts, [...]

There are lots of good things I’ll miss at Sampa. Even my own family website which we used intensively for 3+ years (Site id 15, where the first 12 sites didn’t exist, 13 was Sampa’s blog, 14 was my personal [...]

It’s the story stupid! If I had just four words to describe about a strategy or vision for a family website, “It’s the story stupid” is how I would characterize it. First and foremost, people create a family or baby [...]

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently. Sampa failed, but it didn’t fail because we did everything wrong. Some things we [...]

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently.  I already talked about on Part 2: Early Mistakes at Sampa about being 12-months [...]

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently. About half-way through Sampa existence I’ve made a blog post named Top 7 Mistakes [...]

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently. I already wrote from a personal point of view and now I’m writing from [...]

It’s pretty hard to distinguish a founder from his startup. Oh, wait. Let me take that back. It’s not hard at all. It’s hard for the founders to detach themselves from their startup. It’s the “baby syndrome”. The way they [...]

[If you don’t have time for the long version read the short version] Sampa was first conceived on my mind around 2001. The story is one of those “personal pains” kind of story. I’ve been building websites for family and [...]

First of all, MG Siegler has joined TechCrunch a few weeks ago and he’s by far the best writer TC has ever had. He actually brought back my interest on reading TC after so many bad writers were ruin it [...]

I have many addictions, including a very common kind of addiction amongst entrepreneurs: data-analyctites. We do a lot of AB Tests at Sampa and last Friday we just wrapped up test number 902 and are ready to start 903 (903 [...]

I hope you all saw about the Seattle 2.0 Awards that the team at Seattle 2.0 is putting together. I learned a lot on the last two weeks about many people that I’ve come to know for years, about human [...]

After months preparing for this, I’m happy to announce the Seattle 2.0 Awards. An Award to recognize the top of the top from the Seattle startup scene. This is the first award of its kind in Seattle. Not only the [...]

A few weeks ago I saw a talk about one of those success stories after a lot of business near-death experience. For the n-th time I heard they just kept going and believing on their business, survived the downturn and [...]

If you come to a technical background, you are more likely to think that customer only value things that you did that are very complex. For example, if you create a calculator application, people might not value as much as [...]

I’ll spare you the long story of my life and how I’ve got to be above average when detecting BS on projections and assumptions (financial or not). But there are a few rules of thumbs that you can use to [...]

I write this on my twitter: EU: Just heard some of the worst advices someone can give a tech startup founder. And within minutes had a dozen people asking me what did he say.  Well, it’s not a single thing, [...]

I’ve started Sampa in February of 2005. Like on people’s life, startup’s life is also marked by a few big milestones. The first employee, the first investor, the first customer, the beta launch, etc. Today, I’m very excited to announce [...]

Seattle 2.0 was created about 18 months ago and at the time I knew it would be a resources for entrepreneur, because I couldn’t find resources for myself like that on the web. I guessed there would be more people [...]

A few days ago while having a distribution channel discussion, the topic of brand dilution came up if you don’t sell directly to the customer and somebody said “you lose control of your brand”… And an automatic trigger fired on [...]