One of the first questions people ask me when I talk about SyncPad is “did you guys raise money?” Now, while I’m not against raising money at the right time if needed, I find it sad that there’s a constant association between building a startup and raising VC/angel money. The beauty of today’s technologies is that you can build a profitable product with very little money. Thanks to things like cloud computing, low bandwidth costs, tons of freely available knowledge, people can build businesses investing just time and few thousands dollars. You don’t even have to quit your job to start a business if you don’t have savings/credit and you are really passionate about what your are building.

I found this video on the Kauffman Foundation website, and I found it very interesting. I highly recommend watching it.

This is a very rare footage of Steve Jobs during the early days of NeXT. What I find very fascinating is to see Jobs dealing with the same problems we startup entrepreneurs struggle every day. It is comforting to see that even what his considered to be the greatest entrepreneur of our age is hustling in order to meet impossible deadlines and pinch and scrape in order to lower their burn rate just like every other startup.

http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-59af4dcd-4a1a-429c-8730-86419fe6b989.html

If you understand Italian, you can’t miss this documentary about two of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world history.

We had a great speaker at last night’s Refresh Miami: Matthew Wensing, co-founder of Stormpulse.com.
Here are some of the things people can learn from his story:

• Success doesn’t come overnight
• The amount of traffic you can get doesn’t matter if you can’t monetize it properly
• Try to leverage companies that already have a distribution channel in place
• Don’t undersell yourself
• Try to identify the hole left in the market by your competitors and go after that
• Identify your shortcomings but focus on your strengths

About a week ago we launched SyncPad, the very first iPad whiteboard app for remote collaboration. This was the first time we released a ten-dollar application, and things were different than usual. Here are a few of the things I learned:

• They will e-mail you: For most of our previous applications, most of the feedback we received was via reviews on the App Store, but when it comes to a business-oriented application that cost $9.99, expect to receive e-mails. Luckily for us, most of them were very nice e-mails with positive comments and a lot of suggestions on how to improve our product.
• Users love great human support: It may sound like an obvious thing, but it’s not. A lot of companies still don’t understand the value of great support. Good support solves problems. Great support creates evangelists and enthusiasts. Here are two examples:
  

  Thanks for the email, I know you guys are busy, taking the time to send an email was enough for me to buy your software. I’ll let you know how it goes. Try to keep the human touch as a simple email went a long way.
  Regards,
  Dennis

  or

  That is great to hear.
  I also want to let you know I appreciate your feed back and will be sure to mention that in a positive way when I rate the app on iTunes.
  I know it is not much, but so few developers reply it is great to find one that does!
  Brian *****

  Try to reply to all the customers within 3-4 hours;  they will love it!

• Be yourself: If you are not a corporation, don’t reply to your customers like one. If your users see that on the other side of the e-mail there is a person who cares, their attitude will immediately change, and they will start caring more about your product. They will feel as if they are supporting you instead of feeling as if they just bought a product from Walmart.
• Learn from your users: When we came up with the idea for SyncPad, I mostly envisioned how I would use it myself. Well, apparently that’s not how our users want to use it, and we couldn’t ignore that. Most of the people who contacted us are using, or planning to use, SyncPad more for presentations than actual collaboration sessions, and they had a specific set of features to improve the app.

  It’s important to know how to say “no” to your customers, because you can’t add every requested feature, but at the same time you need to know when you just have to follow their lead. In our case, we took those features we thought would make SyncPad a much better product, and you will see them in version 1.1.

Being on the front-line of support really connects you with your users. I’d recommend that anyone with a startup or a product try it for at least one week, and I assure you that you will learn more in that week of dialoging with your users than in months of researching.

For more info about SyncPad visit mySyncPad.com
or download SyncPad from the AppStore

I must admit, some of the heads are kinda creepy, but overall this is a great collection of quotes for entrepreneurs. More at http://StartupQuote.com →

Last night at Refresh Lauderdale someone asked where to find or buy informations about a specific market. Using Facebook ads could be a cheap way to determine how many people could be interested in a certain topic or industry. Of course this system might not work for everything and it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s definitely a good starting point. And it’s free.

Check out this screencast to learn how you can do it as well.

Lately I’ve been pretty busy, especially thanks to FOWA and the upcoming SXSW, and my RSS reader is literally exploding; so I had to dive in for a little bit and I came back up with these seven pearls. If you are (or you want to be) an entrepreneur, you will learn a lot from these article:

• Customer Development for Web Startups
• Entrepreneurship, It’s Personal
• How to Save Money During the Early Days of a Startup
• The Entrepreneur Thesis
• Angels vs. Venture Capitalists
• Two different discussions about exits
• How to raise money without lying to investors

Do you have any article you would like to share about entrepreneurship? Post it in the comments!