Q & A with MycroBurst co-founder Joe Witte
Joe Witte is the co-founder and Executive Vice President at MycroBurst, a crowdsourcing site for companies and individuals who want custom logos and designs. Reuters Small Business interviewed Witte about building a tech startup and how Mycroburst balances work with clients and designers.
First off, can you briefly describe MycroBurst? How it works, etc.
I’ve always described MycroBurst as an eBay for design services. We have a community of more than 35k designers representing more than 100 countries. They participate in design contests for our customers (aka Project Holders), who require anything from a brochure, postcard, website or logo design. What makes our marketplace so powerful, is that a Project Holder will typically receive dozens, and typically more than 100 design concepts from our design community to choose from. And that’s in one week. Our platform makes it easy to communicate with all the designers, and easy to review the concepts side by side.
Where did the idea come from?
Previously, we had a design team that provided services to our clients via online transactions. Many of our designers were leaving in order to freelance for sites like eLance. And after seeing this model work for other crowdsourcing sites, we felt that this was where the future was with sourcing design services. After we shifted in 2009, it was apparent that everyone was happier. Our designers had freedom, and our clients received far greater choice, and flexibility in a faster delivery method.
MycroBurst relies on a crowdsourcing model that actually helps pool talent for clients. Are there any other sites that you think are operating a similar model (not necessarily with design), and how has that affected MycroBurst?
We are actually a member of a “Crowdsortium” which had more than 100 crowdsourcing companies such as UTest, CrowdFlower, and GeniusRocket. Some of the other services that are crowdsourced include videos, website/application testing, content writing, labeling, research, translation, and the list goes on.
Entrepreneurship a “series of failures”: Babson study
Failure shouldn’t be a dirty word for entrepreneurs.
That’s one of several new findings by Babson College, in collaboration with The Business Innovation Factory, a nonprofit research group, as part of an in-depth look at American entrepreneurs and their attitudes toward business.
“We found that entrepreneurship is just a series of failures,” said Heidi Neck, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and director of the Entrepreneur Experience Lab at the Boston area college, which is known for entrepreneurial studies.
“You need to prepare for failure, you need to tolerate failure and you need to learn from failure,” she said. “Maybe we need to start talking about it as intentional iteration.”
The Lab recently completed the first phase of its examination of 250 startups in several areas around the country, including Boston; Austin, Texas; and the San Francisco Bay Area, part of a longer-term look at their experiences on a day-to-day basis.
“This is a really deep dive,” Neck said. “It’s grounded in ethnographic methods, meaning we observe them, we interview them in detail.”
Will startup visa boost entrepreneurship?
– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
The immigration debate continues: Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar have reintroduced a startup visa bill into Congress.
The bill, which has been modified since it first burst onto the scene last year, is designed to encourage partnerships between U.S. investors and immigrants in a way that benefits the national economy. The Senators hope that the StartUp Visa Act will attract innovation and innovators to the country, creating jobs and propelling the United States back to the top in the realm of technological development.
Will the startup visa bill have the desired effect?
Under the proposed bill, a foreign national living abroad will be given a startup visa if he can raise $100,000 from a U.S. investor to start a business. If the immigrant is already in the country on an employer-sponsored H-1B visa, or a recent graduate from a U.S. university in math or science, and has an annual income of at least $60,000 along with $20,000 from a U.S. investor, a startup visa will also be granted.
Those with startup visas must created a certain number of jobs and meet certain revenue/financing requirements within two years to maintain startup visa eligibility.
What’s interesting about this bill is that the U.S. investor must be a qualified venture capitalist. This means that the citizen must have invested $50,000 every year for the previous three, explains TechCrunch. This requirement means that those seeking startup visas are tapping into an already existing entrepreneurial market – this does not increase the investment pool.
This start up visa bill could really do a lot for the US economy and technology environment, currently lagging behind other markets in the world.
For advice and news helpful for all of these new entrepreneurs coming to America, please visit http://takecareof.biz/
How to “Startup America”
– Daniel Isenberg is Professor of Management Practice at Babson Global and founding executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project. Dr. Isenberg has been an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, consultant, and educator, having taught at Harvard, Columbia, Technion, INSEAD, and Reykjavik. –
The White House recently convened an unprecedented consortium of public and private entities to announce the launch of Startup America. The purpose was to galvanize a coordinated effort to define and implement President Obama’s vision and strategy to foster entrepreneurship and provide more push to the United States’ economic development.
Startup America has a lot going for it: a broad group of influential entrepreneurship stakeholders, real entrepreneurs at the heart of the dialogue, a sincerely committed president and an independent convening S.W.A.T. team who are making entrepreneurship a top priority and a powerful, well-connected, smart board with a smart-looking interim CEO. In my book, Startup America has gotten the basics right; I don’t take this lightly – my observations of more than two dozen countries is that very few have done even this.
But like most entrepreneurial ventures driven by ambition and a strong sense of purpose, this one has a very long way to go. As plan and reality diverge, like most startups, Startup America will need to revise its business model, change or enhance its leadership, and deal with disappointments, and an ever-changing landscape.
So the launch on January 31, 2011 was just the opening shot: to turn this initiative into real results, a lot more has to happen. Here are a few suggestions:
- Be crystal clear about Startup America’s objectives. For every 100,000 or so residents, each major city (or region) should be generating annually, one new high-aspiration venture with at least one real, paying customer. This measurable goal will focus attention and galvanize stakeholders into action.
- Translate Startup America into hyper-local activities. Cities and counties should become the foci of intense activity, not the nation. Entrepreneurship is hyper-local in that all “species” of entrepreneurs gather around extremely small “watering holes” to draw from the resources (people, ideas, capital, customers) they need to start up and grow. One size does not fit all, so you need to help each locale cultivate the entrepreneurial culture that best fits it.
- Infuse Startup America with a global perspective. Entrepreneurs don’t need to help America “beat” China or Brazil; they need to partner with Chinese and Brazilian entrepreneurs to sell to customers everywhere. To be more global, we must also encourage entrepreneur immigrants; the Startup Visa proposal is only a drop in the bucket.
- Publish a “sell-by” date for Startup America. I propose December 31, 2015, which gives us almost five years for measurable results. A sell-by date will force the Startup America team to focus on achieving self-sustaining results. Success breeds success, and a powerful way of knowing if a program is successful, is to remove the props and see if it stands on its own.
- Encourage financial innovation. We need innovative financing models for the startup sector, because debt or equity providers support just a tiny, select minority. We must help innovative entrepreneurs develop profitable financing mechanisms targeted to a much broader base of deserving startups.
- Have a map of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Without a map, we won’t know if we are headed in the right direction. Here is a simple version of an entrepreneurship ecosystem map with 13 elements, all of which must eventually exist for Startup America to achieve its goals. Encourage and empower each of the hyper-local initiatives to cultivate all 13 elements of their own entrepreneurship ecosystem, in ways that are unique to them.
These principles, and others, will help translate the great intention of the entrepreneurship stakeholders you have brought together, and to drive the Startup America to actually achieve concrete results.
Daniel,
You said,
“Encourage financial innovation. We need innovative financing models for the startup sector, because debt or equity providers support just a tiny, select minority. We must help innovative entrepreneurs develop profitable financing mechanisms targeted to a much broader base of deserving startups”
We couldn’t agree more so we built it!
If you want to Startup America here is how you do it.
First you need to be able to see who the entrepreneurs are, where they are located, and how much capital they need to launch and succeed, so we built a digital map showcasing Startups Across America.http://startupsacrossamerica.com Now anyone launching a new company in the USA can stake their claim for a piece of the American Dream on the map and broadcast their funding needs to a nation of possible investors. The number of start-ups and the funding dollars they are trying to raise is totaled by state and showcased on the map so everyone can see where the opportunities are and the money that is needed. We can no longer wait for or depend on conventional forms of capitalization, i.e. small business loans, angel and venture capital to provide access to capital to get us out of the economic crisis. Last year the number of applicants who got venture or angel capital was shockingly low, and too many great ideas, products and inventions never saw the light of day. We must provide another option. To achieve a more level playing field for access to capital, wealthy individuals need to take a more active role investing in entrepreneurship and innovation to help rebuild the American economy. But they can’t do that if they don’t know where the need is, where the pioneers are, and how much capital entrepreneurs need to launch and succeed. And we need to remove certain regulatory roadblocks that for too long have limited access to investment. We hope entrepreneurs everywhere will join our campaign and encourage startups to sign up onto the map as a first step in a new process to create an expanded flow of investment capital and a new way of clearly seeing the promising Startups Across America.
Second part:
So that everyone can get down to business together and fully understand the business model that their funding is needed ,we created the Funding Roadmap
http://fundingroadmap.com
on the cloud accessible from a smart phone, which provides detailed step-by-step questions to which investors and lenders expect answers, and guides entrepreneurs through a comprehensive pre-qualification and reporting process to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their particular funding request well ahead of time. Multiple-choice selections are designed to educate applicants to take the steps necessary to correct any deficiencies before their presentation. The platform aids startups to mid-sized business owners through the process of preparing a Funding request document to present to lenders and investors across the state or across the country to “get funded faster (and not waste everyone’s time when they are not prepared or provide boiler plate business plans that never get read,) and provides a polished online presentation that stands out for review by lenders, VCs and angels, as well as friends and family investors. Along with its comprehensive profile of a proposed business, Funding Roadmap features a streaming video feature for elevator pitches. The presentations are available 24 / 7 on-the-cloud to potential lenders, investors and partners, and can be kept current for everyday guidance and ongoing funding needs. Users can save months of time, money, and frustration while increasing their chances of getting funded faster.
Ruth E Hedges CEO
Taking the entrepreneurial plunge
– Jeff Bussgang is a partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and the author of “Mastering the VC Game” and the blog “Seeing Both Sides“. The views expressed are his own. –
When to become an entrepreneur is a common quandary for many. For whatever reason, this issue has come up a great deal recently (recession-driven workforce dislocation?), so I thought I’d share a few thoughts that might help frame this critical decision.
I have concluded that being an entrepreneur is an irrational state of being. If human beings were purely rational, evaluative, value maximizing individuals (see Harvard Business School professor Michael Jensen’s paper on self-interest and human behavior), they would not start companies. If they sat down and did the expected value calculation by laying out the probability weighted outcomes of being an entrepreneur as compared to taking a safe job, it would not pencil out.
Yet, entrepreneurship is not simply a rational journey. It’s one that is defined by passion and personal satisfaction that transcends purely financial analysis. And, of course, there is always the hope for the big payout, no matter how long the odds.
Despite popular wisdom to the contrary, age is not a major factor in the decision to start a company. The Kauffman Foundation reports the median age of founders is 39 – right at the midpoint of a typical professional career – and 69 percent are 35 or older. Another study by Washington University professors of 86,000 science and engineering graduates showed that age was not a significant predictor of becoming an entrepreneur.
So when should you become an entrepreneur. Here are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself:
1. Do you have an idea that no one can talk you out of? When you bounce your start-up idea off your spouse, friends and trusted advisers, are they able to raise enough objections that you begin to doubt whether the idea has merit. Getting honest, objective advice can be hard because the people you are likely to go to care about you and may be afraid to tell you what they really think for fear of offending you. Thus, you need to get feedback from objective parties (e.g., advisers, experts, prospective angel or VC investors with whom you don’t have a deep personal relationship).
In my opinion, the notion of a great business built around a great idea may be a fallacy.
How a company approaches the process of idea generation determines its ultimate success and can significantly reduce the odds of failure. A closed feedback loop converting capital to ideas to profits back to ideas is imperative to gain the insights necessary to launch revolutionary products.
You do not need a great idea to start with; you only need a sufficient margin of (financial) safety and the ability to learn quickly from mistakes to guide you to fundamental insights and great products.
Building this structured idea generation process from day one is also essential to adapt to changing market trends throughout the company’s life.
Microsoft for example did not start with Windows, they started with a single programming language called Basic which was much less likely to fail. Multiple subsequent product iterations funded the huge undertaking that was Windows with sufficient margin of safety.
from Felix Salmon:
Norway, entrepreneurial paradise
Max Chafkin has a fantastic story in Inc magazine about how to structure an economy so as to encourage entrepreneurship, full employment, and general happiness and contentment, all while drastically reducing inequality. It's easy, in fact: all you need to do is become Norway.
There's loads of great stuff in this piece, and I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. But a few things stand out.
Chafkin starts with the tale of Wiggo Dalmo, an industrial mechanic with a high-school education who chafed under his bosses, set up his own shop, and is now running a $44 million company with 150 employees. That's the kind of story which should be common in the US but is in fact rare. But ask yourself: in the US, how much would such a person be paying in taxes? Dalmo paid $102,970 in personal taxes on his income and wealth last year, which is probably lower, not higher, than the CEO of a $44 million company would pay in taxes in the US.
The reason is that there's much less income inequality in Norway. With a strong social safety net, the downside to starting a company and failing is small. As a result, entrepreneurship isn't a lottery, so much as a lifestyle choice. If you succeed, you'll get to run a large and successful corporation. But you probably won't pay yourself a monster income.
Why not? Well, for one thing, you won't need to pay yourself a monster income, since things like healthcare and college education -- even through grad school, even outside the country -- are covered by the state. Another part of the reason is that income, in Norway, is a matter of public record. And then there's the fact that money which would otherwise be going to the top of the pyramid is instead going to the bottom, where it does much more good:
In a country with low unemployment and generous unemployment benefits, a worker's threat to quit is more credible than it is in the United States, giving workers more leverage over employers. And though Norway makes it easy to lay off workers in cases of economic hardship, firing an employee for cause typically takes months, and employers generally end up paying at least three months' severance. "You have to be a much more democratic manager," says Bjørn Holte, founder and CEO of bMenu, an Oslo-based start-up that makes mobile versions of websites. Holte pays himself $125,000 a year. His lowest-paid employee makes more than $60,000. "You can't just treat them like machines," he says. "If you do, they'll be gone."
Incentives matter, of course. But not all incentives are purely financial. And there are serious problems with the US system where the incentives seem to be structured so that a large number of people are competing to become one of a very small number of monster success stories -- multi-millionaire startup founders, or sports stars, or CEOs. Most of us, it turns out, have problems with the idea of playing that kind of lottery. As Chafkin reports:
Here’s how to become Norway:
1) See to it, that most of the people read at least one daily newspaper, giving the electorate a good knowledge of political and social issues, business and a global outlook.
2) Make the journalists compete to reveal crime and corruption in business and politics.
3) See to it, that the voters elect honest, hardworking politicians, taking wise decisions for local and central government.
4) Make the government sector transparent, so, though honest, nobody is tempted to be dishonest or behave corruptly.
5) Create good relations to all your neighbor countries, even Swedes and Russians.
6) Take good care of all your citizens.
7) See to it, that almost everybody has a job.
Continue like that for at least 100 years.
Focus on what you’re good at
– Neil Patel is a serial entrepreneur that blogs about business at Quick Sprout and is the co-founder of KISSmetrics. The views expressed are his own. –
Is it me or is everyone these days trying to get rich quick? Not only am I meeting more and more people who don’t want to work hard to make money, but they are starting to get into new business ventures that they are clueless about.
I know the grass always looks greener on the other side, but it really isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, those lucrative businesses are making people millions of dollars, but it’s probably doing that for less than 0.3 percent of the people in that industry.
So before you decide to jump ship and get into a new career, just think about all the things you will be losing out on. Yes you may make some extra income in the short term, but if you put that time and energy into growing what you’re already good at and love, you’ll do a lot better.
If you want to make a ton of money in business, follow these principles:
Harsh Fact No. 1: Focus on what you know
If you’re really good at something, focus on it. Don’t stray away from it. Just do that and become the leader in your space. If you don’t think you can make enough money focusing on what you’re good at, then figure out what related businesses you can get into.
Wow..great tips!! I love the tip#3..networking is the cheapest and best way to improve our business…If we are big entrepreneur we can also have multiple experts to carry out different tasks:)
Timing your startup
– Chris Dixon is co-founder of Hunch and founder of Founder Collective, and an investor in many early-stage companies like Skype and Foursquare. Previously he co-founded Siteadvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. This blog originally appeared on cdixon.org. The views expressed are his own. –
I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did I probably would have passed (which of course would have been a huge mistake). I’d been around the Web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Based on “pattern recognition” (a dangerous thing to rely on), I was deeply skeptical of the space.
What I failed to appreciate was that the prior crowdsourced video sites were ahead of their time. YouTube built a great product, but, more importantly, got the market timing just right. By 2005, all the pieces were in place to enable crowdsourced video – the proliferation of home broadband, digital camcorders, a version of Flash where videos “just worked,” copyrighted Web content that could be exported to YouTube, and blogs that wanted to embed videos.
Almost anything you build on the web has already been tried in one form or another. This should not deter you. Antecedents existed for Google, Facebook, Groupon, and almost every other tech startup that has succeeded since the dot-com bubble.
Entrepreneurs should always ask themselves “why will I succeed where others failed?” If the answer is simply “I’m doing it right” or “I’m smarter,” you are probably underestimating your antecedents, which were probably run by competent or even great entrepreneurs who did everything possible to succeed. Instead your answer should include an explanation about why the timing is right – about some fundamental changes in the world that enable the idea you are pursuing to finally succeed. If the necessary conditions were in place, say, a year ago, that might still be OK – YouTube happened to nail their product out of the gate, but if they hadn’t a company started later might have succeeded in their place.
Often the necessary conditions are only beginning to emerge and knowing when they will do so sufficiently is very hard to predict. We all know the internet will become fully social, personalized, mobile, location-based, interactive, etc. and lots of new, successful startups will be built as a result. What is very hard to know is when these things will happen at scale.
One way to mitigate timing risk is to manage your cash accordingly. If you are trying to ride existing trends you should ramp up aggressively. If you are betting on emerging trends it is better to keep your burn low and runway long. This takes discipline and patience but is also the way you hit it really big.
Golf and career transitions
- Candida Brush is the Paul T. Babson Chair of Entrepreneurship at Babson College. The opinions expressed are her own. -
For years I have been an avid golfer, spending as much time in the summer playing on a competitive team, in tournaments, or even just four holes in the evening with my husband.
As a professor of entrepreneurship, I’ve written hundreds of articles, books, and papers on these topics over the past 25 years. But, I have always wanted to write an article about golf!
With the downturn in the economy this past year, I started thinking about the parallels between transitions in playing golf and in career transitions.
Today, career management is even more of a challenge than ever. Most of us will work for an average of 10 different employers and our work will be interrupted either by choice (i.e. moving, return to school, family needs) or not (layoffs, downsizing, restructuring). Hence, the definition of career has changed drastically from climbing the career ladder to developing a portfolio of career experiences. In the words of professor Tim Hall, the new career is “boundaryless.”
Career transitions are even more uncertain given today’s environment and they engender a variety of emotions. As you move from job to job or project to project, you may miss what was, feel relief, insecurity, and have a loss of confidence, but, this might also be followed by new beginnings, exploration development and increased confidence.
Throughout it all you need to have a series of tips you can rely on to push through from one career position to the next, as you design your career in a way that makes sense for your personal definition of success. I find that golf is the perfect sport to gain insights in this area. Career transitions have a striking similarity to golf.
I think it a little strange Designcrowd & 99Designs is not mentioned like his competitor. Those are what students at my university use. I’ll check MycroBurst.