I want to take a moment to share with my RSS readers, significant improvements I’ve made to the blog to improve the user experience on site. I’ve spent so much time focused on content and reaching out to an audience that I neglected proper scripting and clean design.
Everything appears to be fixed.
- Homepage archiving was broken with dozens of articles and pages of content appearing as the page loaded. This caused a significant load time and ridiculously long page. It is now limited to the 10 most recent topics.
- Category links have been moved from a site-search results method to a more friendly page segmentation that allows you to easily access sections of topics.
- You may have noticed my test of Miva InLine links; previously, a bug caused those to appear everywhere on the site. They’ve been limited to the articles.
- Removed a del.icio.us module with which the formatting corrupted the page layout
- Reformatted my search module to better fit in the design. I encourage you to bookmark and use even just the search engine I’ve created as it not only searches seobrien.com but all online marketing content. As a customized search engine your experience should be enhanced in that results are only those from relevant sites (no spam from SEO vendors when you search Search Engine Optimization).
I hope these design enhancements are well met and welcome many of you to visit seobrien.com
Related Questions
Incubators and accelerators have a serious, operationally complex job: give founders access to global mentor networks, connect them to investors, manage deal rooms, deliver curriculum, and track relationships over time. Most do it with a stitched-together combination of video tools, Slack groups, shared Google Drive folders, and spreadsheets of mentor contacts nobody updates. The program director becomes a part-time IT administrator. What an SDO actually needs is civic infrastructure; purpose-built and comprehensive enough to deliver on what it promises founders. Ironically, an incubator's job is to teach founders to stop building things they don't need to build, and then those same incubators do exactly that with their own operations
Because it convinces people who aren't entrepreneurial to pursue paths they aren't suited for, without the resources, experience, or intrinsic drive to succeed. The high failure rate associated with entrepreneurial ventures becomes an economic drain when people who want the image of a founder (the recognition, the status) pour capital and time into ventures that were predictably doomed. Glamorizing entrepreneurship as universally great ignores the distinction between the personality type and the career aspiration.
Building it themselves. The moment a founding team starts building payment processing, identity verification, communications, or payroll logic from scratch, they've made a strategic error. These are domains where the regulatory complexity, machine learning depth, and partnership requirements are severe enough that specialized companies exist for exactly this reason. The cost of getting it wrong, in fines, fraud losses, and engineering time, is catastrophic. The cost of using the infrastructure layer is a fraction of that.
Less than most founders assume. It's not geography, it's deal flow access, legal structure, and co-investment availability. Founders who solve those friction points get funded regardless of location. The assumption that geography is the barrier is often a substitute for addressing the actual problems.
A great deal, and this is where most ecosystem builders are missing something important. Cities invest in roads, water systems, and power grids not because politicians are engineers, but because those are the conditions that make everything else function. The same logic applies to startup ecosystems. Mentor networks, investor relationship management, curriculum delivery, deal room infrastructure; these are not features an incubator should build internally. They are infrastructure that should be embedded from purpose-built providers. The incubator that builds its own community app instead of embedding proper infrastructure is making the same mistake as the SaaS company that builds its own payments stack instead of using Stripe.