Building a vision is THE most important thing to do for an entrepreneur. A vision is a cause, a statement of your product (in larger sense, it’s you as the founder, inventor) that speaks directly to the heart of your users. No matter how big or small of a problem you aim to address, the clarity of your vision will make everything comes more naturally: mission statement, product development, marketing, etc..

Step 1: Understanding Vision

Everyone understands vision differently, I personally think vision comes in three forms.

1. Personal Vision: it comes from founders’ personality and behavior pattern. Legendary visionaries/entrepreneurs  like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, all  found their calling because their non-failing pattern of  doing things their own way, Steve being the innovator, Bill being the problem solver, Sam being the one who is “for people”. Many generalist entrepreneurs found their vision by simply doing things they naturally are inclined to do.

2. Industry vision: it comes from deep expertise. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information”. A generalist can not build something like Google. They might be able to build Dell, but not Google. Google vision comes AFTER two Phd students founders discovered a new way for more effective search that was built on scientific research. Many technology companies with a B-2-B model were founded by industry veterans who have been around certain fields long enough to deeply understand the “pain”. These types of companies are usually started by researchers or industry veterans.

3. Opportunity vision: many companies were founded to solely target one narrow area, such as many online ad networks, facebook/twitter apps, even lot of iPhone apps. They are stripped down version of industry vision because it requires less industry knowledge, hard skills to get it off ground. Many social web 2.0 phenomenons were also products of such visionaries, including Digg.

Step 2: Find your own vision

Since finding vision is so critical for you to happily, rightly go on your entrepreneurial journey, you must find who you are, and what your vision could be.

Since I am still at the early stage of evaluating and planning my startup, I have thought about projects of all three types of visions. I thought about using my professional background (search engine marketing, web analytics), or academic background (mathematical modeling, data mining), I also looked at short term projects such as some twitter or facebook apps; In fact, I spent about 6 months last year building something off twitter API, could it be accepted by some people and maybe sell for half a million dollar, it very well could be if I continued. But I could not find the passion to continue, I could not find the reason “WHY” I was doing it, I quickly gave up that effort.

Today, I am focusing on being myself, learn from my own mistake, look at my past, behavior patterns to see what my “heart” tells me to do. The following is some of the findings (I am still searching, not finished yet)

1. I am not type A (aggressive) business man, nor am I a scholar.

2. I am easily influenced by my environment, more so, by my friends. In fact, most of my achievements (if any) I did it because some of “smart friends” did it before me and I didn’t want to fall behind. I am almost elevated by my environment, because of it, I gained confidence, I aimed higher, I obtained the desire to be original, inventive. Without environment and people who I am exposed to, who I know, who know me, who I admire, I would not be able to dream high.

3. I am an average person: meaning, I like attention, I am not a great listener, I offer unsolicited help but I know the boundary and limit, I can work harder but I am slightly lazy.

4. I am always optimistic (or laid back), I have become ambitious.

5. In real life, I am the “go-to” funny, party person among friends, coworkers, etc., in fact I might be easily a stand up comedian, IF, I don’t speak bad English, which I do. And I am obviously self-obsessed, and can be shallow…Arn’t we all?

6. I like to know what others think about me, in fact, I care a lot what others think of me.

Knowing who I am, Would it be nice for me to invent tools to facilitate my own personal growth? For example, making it easier to be exposed to the motivated environment, quality people? Would it be nice to know what others think of me and make it easier to grow to be better person? Whatever I am inventing, I want to invent tools that I feel deeply connected to, only then I can feel passionate about it and devote to it.

Step 3: Refine your vision

Enough about myself, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, try step 1; Depending on your vision type, you might need to go through different “self discovery” for step 2 when you are looking for your vision. I think the key is to refine your vision constantly till you are fully convinced. This process may take just a spark, it may take months. Never give up, always pay attention.

Don’t forget, it’s extremely important to think your steps out loud, write them down, because it actually helps you organize your thoughts and get to where you want to be quicker. There is an old Chinese saying: sharpening your axe before cutting the trees.

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Damon Horowitz (BS. Columbia, MS MIT, PHD Stanford) Cofounder of Aardvark.com spoke at TEDxSoma on Jan. 22, 10. He said “..the primary goal of technology should not be replacing human intelligence, rather, facilitating human interaction..”

That is why I think the focus on entrepreneurial pursuit should be the web application sifting through people’s social graph: application should be naturally similar to human interaction and inspire humanity. I think Aardvark.com has done a great job on that, as such, Google acquired it.

Read more on “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” published by Aardvark, the paper was accepted by www2010. This paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.

The interview is NOT done by me.

With twitter and facebook, now google buzz become mainstream media, it’s a matter of time for more “status update” ad network. I have written about “how to make money with tweets” through this type of ad network such as revtwt.com, but I have not come across a legit ad network focusing on facebook status update. Facebook has been very aggressive on shutting down any ad networks that serve “sketchy” ads, and I can’t agree more with that. Just take a look at revtwt.com which is the #1 “tweet” ad network you will find many advertisers are really sketchy. For a new ad network to succeed, it has to add value to facebook eco-system using the core of the facebook platform: social graph. There also has to be a quality control system in place to preselect the advertisers, only allowing the formats and contents that are in par with Facebook.

Who can build that out?

Rose started Digg with $1,200 and an insight about the changing nature of news. Thanks to cheap broadband and easy-to-use blogging software, there was suddenly an endless stream of news, gossip, and rumor about pretty much any obscure topic — say, new versions of Linux or 9/11 conspiracy theories — spread across millions of blogs and websites. Rose and others like him were spending hours digging through these stories and then passing them around to their friends. What, he wondered, would happen if someone harnessed that energy?

Rose signed up for a cheap hosting service and hired a Canadian programmer he met online. He designed the site himself, giving it a utilitarian — even ugly — look. It had no graphics, but it did offer something special: a way for anyone to get his or her news in front of lots and lots of people. In addition to his promotional efforts on TV, Rose started talking up his venture on his blog, which had nearly 10,000 registered users. In January 2005, he described Digg as “a friend’s site and one of my favorite technology news websites.”

Just a month later, a hacker somehow managed to download and post the contents of Paris Hilton’s cell phone address book, and a link was submitted to Digg. Within a week, the site saw its traffic quadruple as the Hilton story wound up in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Digg had its first major scoop, and Rose realized for the first time that he was onto something. He left television the following month, with a plan to make Web videos for fun and to pay for his life by selling advertising on Digg using Google’s AdSense service. “I’d always liked the idea of being independent and working for myself,” he says. “I was sitting in my room thinking, If I can just make a few hundred dollars a month in ad revenue, I’ll be able to support myself, pay my rent, and have a good time.”

The site grew faster than he could have imagined. Rose rounded up $50,000 in angel funding, hired a real designer, and started getting acquisition offers. That summer, just months after Digg’s founding, Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, offered Rose $4 million for the site. Rose said no. Instead, he persuaded his mentor, Jay Adelson, the founder of a data center company called Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX), to join him as an adviser and then as CEO. The pair raised $2.8 million from Greylock Partners and some angels. “Jason could have had it, if he had been cool about it,” says Rose. “But he was pressuring me so much that I kind of stepped back and said something isn’t right.” Calacanis was so taken with Digg that, after he sold Weblogs to AOL, he started a copycat site under AOL’s Netscape.com brand. He even offered Digg’s most active users $1,000 a month to defect. (The effort failed: Traffic was flat, Calacanis quit, and the Digg clone was moved off the Netscape homepage in 2007.) Digg’s traffic, meanwhile, exploded. By late 2006, the site had 11 million users.

ps. This article was originally posted on INC.com back in early 2008.

There are quite a few twitter ad networks in existence who claim to let you make money doing what you are already doing: tweeting. Some promise to pay you while you tweet about the links they provide, others simply pay you to tweet about stuff, stuff from advertisers in the ad networks. To avoid the negative “soul selling” public images of “tweeting for money (a.k.a, spam tweets)”, 3rd party twitter ad networks have been getting sophisticated on its ways to give users options to choose what to tweet, when to tweet. Although small, TweetROI.com is very particular about it, founder Brian actively blogged about ethic sides of tweeting for money. The two kinds of twitter ad networks, big or small, old or new, are differentiated mainly by the transparency they give back to twitter-er. Following is the a list of such ad networks that worth looking at. (notice that I left out tweetbucks.com, due to its affiliate commission payout mechanism being completely different from other players listed below)

Leading twitter ad networks: RevTwt and TwittAd
1. RevTwt.com

Previously known as TwtAd, RevTwt is the biggest twitter ad networks to date. RevTwt lets you tweet about info and links from advertisers in its network. For example, one ads offered to me is “World of Warcraft – Auction House Mastery ($0.050/click): World of Warcraft – Get Mayley Winter’s Warcraft Auction House Mastery 34pg Free Report Here!”.

It’s understandable that these ads are hardly relevant to what I usually tweet. It remains a challenge to date to find the advertisers that will fit people’s tweeting style. If RevTwt as the biggest twitter ad network can not get my favorite airline to be the advertisers so I can tweet about my last trip, I don’t know who else has more suitable advertisers. Then, of course, if I am a WoW fanatic, it would have been match made in heaven, for 5 penny though.

TwittAd.com

TwittAd is 2nd largest twitter ad network. I like its legitimacy, two options to choose.
Option1: Choose the advertiser, post their tweets, get paid
Option2: Opt-in campaign based on what interests you.

I feel Option 1 has more control for me than option 2. I will definitely give it a try just to have a taste of it.

Smaller ad networks with less options.
Twivert.com, Adcause.com

Both ad networks let you tweet for advertisers during a time slot you choose for the day. Ad cause has been around, possibly the earliest player in this space. However, either the payout amount or inherent marketplace efficiency not as good as top guys, they have quite a catch up to do.

Newcomers, reformers
I consider Sponsoredtwts.com from IZEA (still in beta, lot of hypes from TechCrunch), TweetROI, maybe Paymetweets.com new comers and reformers. All of these sites try to build a relevancy into tweets-as-ads, or recommendation tweets based on twitter-er experiences and interest. I often get a “Thank you” note from product owner accounts on twitter when I tweet about their products, for free. For example, when I twitted I saved $400 a year switching from esurance to progressive, their account manager @progressive dropped me a notes saying “Thanks for switching to Progressive! Glad to have you as our customer!”.

Having seen so many twitter apps in the past couple of months, I have not been wowed more than a few times in a week, but I was seriously wowed three times last week! Among the long list of twitter apps I was looking at, these three twitter apps will charm you. It will make you smile, laugh, or at least slightly richer, if you decide to sell a little bit of your soul. No matter how you feel, these apps are high quality, relatively well thought out, some may have bright future, I think.

My pick of the week:Streaming live from twitter!

Twitcam lets you broadcasting live from your webcam and twit about it, while you are at it broadcasting, you can also chat with your viewers via Twitter right from your broadcast page. This application is not only fun, but can be extremely useful for bloggers, businesses/brands to get one step closer to followers.

My runner up of the week

If you have been on twitter for a while, you know getting a customized twitter profile background is the next fun step that should not be hard to achieve. t.wist.it grabs your flickr’s newest set of photos and automatically set them as your profile background. It’s so easy caveman can do it! My profile had a makeover (with my fabulous photos) before I knew it. Must try!

It’s all about money, again

I have never tried but always been interested in knowing the “ad network” on twitter, there are quite a few of them. Twivert is one of the newest, and is seeing exponential growth last week. Somehow, no matter how many people are against the idea of selling “contextual” ad tweets (it’s like selling your soul, according to one of the bloggers who are against it), ad networks continue to grab a lot of traffic, although I really don’t know the # for the actual monetary transactions. In its own words, Twivert provides “value ads” which you can share with your friends through twitter. When someone clicks on these ads you get paid, thats it.

I just recently discovered when I write in a super bad or super pissed off, or super good mood, I write like Paul Carr, the newly hire at Techcrunch. While I have been away from my own blog for a while, here is the first lousy attempt for the weekly round up in the twitter app. Seriously, all I did was to dig into my previous notes (4 months old), shit load of techcrunch posts for the whole week, (seriously, the economy is bad but TC keeps hiring crazy kids, someone is getting paid!) and occasionally, I took a look at RWW, a more geeky tech blog in my opinion. I used to get my tipped off from entrepreneurs themselves and I still occasionally do but for now, let’s just be lazy.

So what are the big stories last week?: Zappo got its big pay day from Amazon; Rumors about Apple’s tablet PC (I think it will be AWESOME!, not the rumor, the iTab, oops that is just my guess of its name). Yahoo’s earning dropped 13%, Google’s earning increased by 3%, Microsoft: missed earning – for every dollar it made from online, it lost in its campaign. This is exactly like my CPC ad budget allocated among Google, Yahoo and MSN, in a slightly different proportion. Yahoo bought Xoopit (again, no idea what they do); Kevin Spacy explained twitter to David letterman, who in turn called twitter a waste of time. Twitter cracked down spam account and I lost more than 100 spam followers in one day, yeah! I was trying to lose them forever. Twitter unveiled a live-updating twitter search widget and twitter 101 for business. But what is the big deal about it? Twazzup does that live update ages ago!

In the twitter app world, following is a mix of new and old relevant apps.
1. twitterAround.com
2. Buddy Media’s “ultimate twitter client for brand management”, think cotweet for brand marketing.
3. Localbunny.com: problematic, but smart idea helping small business stay on top of market pulse through keyword identification and in time response.
4. tunein.com: find relevant information through people you care
5. tweetlinx, twitRollr, tweetMixx.com, retweet.com: all trying to do similar things as tweetmeme
6. Izea’s sponsoredtwts.com: ad network for twitter, similar players like twittAd.com, tweetROI, adcause.com, magpie.

That is the quick lousy update for the tech world. Thanks to the inner hard working me trying to get myself back on track on a foggy Sunday night like this one. Cheers!

People, Help me out on this: is it true that any companies with more than 1 “z” in its name are somewhat successful? I can think of Zazzle, Twazzup.com (best twitter search engine, btw) etc., now we have a relative new comer called Trazzler.com, a travel site with a personal and “twittery” approach. There are many things special about Trazzler.com, mostly hand crafted by users (not just user generated), Trazzler thinks “online travel should inspire” – inspiring us to desire a place to escape to, to disappear into. As to its founder, veteran of the online travel industry Adam Rugel, the first thing I noticed is his twitter username @adam! 30 million twitter users, 155,474 Adams later (search “Adam” on tweepz.com), Adam Rugel can have @adam, like Adam and Eve from garden of Eden, not Adam Carolla, not Adam Saddler, Not twibe’s founder Adam loving. There says a deep link with twitter itself. It turned out there is. Being an accomplished industry veteran, Adam replied to my interview request surprisingly quick, let’s read it through.

1. How did you come up with the idea for trazzler?
I used to work at Odeo with Jack, Biz and Evan. Odeo is the company that preceded Twitter. During a conversation over pistachio nuts in the original Twitter kitchen, Biz suggested a crazy idea involving “virtual teleportation.” It didn’t take Adam long to realize Biz was on to something: Online travel should inspire. Trazzler places you emotionally into specific moments and locales all over the planet and helps you explore the limitless travel opportunities our world has to offer. It started a as Facebook App. (Previously, I worked at AOL Travel in the 90s. I also started a site called 71Miles.com.

2. How is your professional/personal background serving up this venture (your background, your vision for trazzler)?
I have worked in online travel for some time. I’ve also done a lot of traveling with Lonely Planet books and I came to realize that I didn’t really use the whole book… instead, I dog-eared a few pages. Trazzler “trips” are bite-sized… bits of information that we hope more accurately represent the amount of information want about a place.

3. How long did it take you to launch the site. Are you bootstrapping or full blown start up with funding?
We are bootstrapping. Our little teams eats a lot of beans. We also got a $250,000 grant from the fbFund (details: http://blog.trazzler.com/2008_07_23_archive.html).

4. What is the core technology And product strategy behind trazzler? What do you use twitter for?
Trazzler is a website that helps you answer the question, “Where should I go?” by recommending hand-picked trips unique to your location and Travel Personality. We’re developing some sophisticated science on the other side of your screen that will personalize the browsing experience with a lite touch.

We also have a site called Trazzler Buzz — a series of “Best Of” lists created from the volumes of information being transmitted to Twitter every second about 10,000 spots in 50 cities, plus festivals and outdoor destinations all over the world. We rank the list according to a formula that measures volume and recent activity on Twitter. Ultimately, we use Twitter for distribution… we have 32 subaccounts that are targeted geographically (http://www.trazzler.com/twitter). We use Twitter OAuth to help connect people with the right Twitter sub-account to follow.

5. What part/feature sets of trazllar are most heavily used and why?
Folks seem to like to browse trips our site. We average 10 page views per visit which is way above average for travel sites.

6. If there is one thing, what is it that you think will be the key to trazzler’s success?
The uniqueness of the content. We believe three rules that we follow will separate us from other travel sites:
1. Start from the premise that the quality of the content matters.
2. Rely on a combination of free and paid writing.
3. Surface the best writing
We also commit to pay out 15% of our budget to writers, the same as the New York Times.

7. What is the business model?
We will work with hotels, outfitters, OTAs, airlines, and travel agents in a variety of ways.

8. How’s growth prospect for trazzler and what kind of future plans are in the work? Technology, Partnership, product offering, marketing.etc
Our traffic doubled in April then again in May. We’re extremely excited about that. The most exciting product improvement is coming in about two weeks… our algorithm will improve dramatically.

9. Anything else you want to share with the world?
Most of the sophisticated online travel sites are run by MBA types who think about the world of online travel in terms of arbitrage. We want Trazzler to be sophisticated too, but we approach it from a different place and we hope that shows.

Not a big online video watcher, I immediately liked TwitVid.io, who wants to be the twitPic of video sharing on twitter. It’s very easy to use, you upload a video or snap up from webcam, tweet it, done. The online media from big to small immediately went nuts about this new born baby. Few realized how fast it went from an idea to prototype; To feel the energy of the people behind the project, get an idea who are the celebrities using twitVid.io, read on for my interview with TwitVid.io cofounder Chrys Bader, a fellow San Franciscan.

1. How did you come up with the idea for twitVid.io? What is the current vid-sharing landscape on twitter and how would you think twitVid.io is well/better positioned to address than others?

The idea was pretty obvious. I was sitting around with some of my peers and someone asked us why someone hasn’t done TwitVid.io yet. To which I replied, we could do it in 4 days. My friend then challenged us to do it, so we did just that. We started TwitVid.io from scratch on May 11 and launched it on May 15.

I believe we’re ahead of the game because we were first to market and we have had the strongest traction and adoption. Once we launched, competitors followed suit and it’s made it all more interesting and fun.

2. How is your professional/personal background serving up this venture (your background, your vision for twitVid.io)?
TwitVid.io is an extension of our existing video sharing platform called Fliggo (www.fliggo.com). We’ve been working on Fliggo since November 2007 and have garnered a substantial amount of experience in developing video sites. I personally have been a web developer for 10 years and have always been addicted to created websites. Our vision for TwitVid.io is to remain the #1 way to share videos on Twitter and to eventually become one of the largest video sharing sites as Twitter continues to grow rampantly.

3. What is the core technology behind twitVid.io? How long did it take you to launch the site. Are you bootstrapping or full blown start up with funding? Given video sharing could be resource-draining thing, How will you scale twitVid.io before accumulating too much expanses?
TwitVid.io is powered by the Fliggo platform. As I mentioned before, it took us 4 days to launch the site. We are a Y-Combinator funded company and are currently raising a round. TwitVid.io will be moving completely over to AWS in the next month and will relieve our scaling needs.

4. Based on your experiences, who are the people using twitVid.io and what do they say about twitVid.io?
A plethora of people are using TwitVid.io. Anything from a person just saying hello, to first-time video bloggers, to long-time video bloggers, to celebrities and brands. We’ve seen people like MC Hammer, Kevin Rose, iJustine, and Tim Ferriss using our site as well as brands and organizations like Playboy, AAA, Six Flags, the NBA, as well as various other companies. Also popular YouTubers like CharlesTrippy and FAIL TOYS are prominent users of TwitVid.io.

5. If there is one thing, what is it that you think will be the key to twitVid.io’s success?
The key to our success has been and will be our ability to attract and maintain influential users as well as providing an engaging, high quality experience for all of our users. We care deeply about the user experience on TwitVid.io, and the amount of time and passion we put into it is reflected by our strong userbase and evangelist users.

6. What is the business model?
Currently we only run advertising on the site. But we have some exciting plans for monetization that I can’t go in to just yet. We are currently working on a handful of very promising relationships.

7. How’s growth prospect for twitVid.io and what kind of future plans are in the work? Technology, Partnership, product offering, marketing.etc
I keep answering your questions before you ask them We have some exciting partnerships in the works, nothing that I can divulge just yet, but we’re eager to announce them. Our goal is to have a video posted every minute by the end of July, and we’re getting closer every day! Keep an eye out for exciting partnerships and integrations coming in the near future.

8. Anything else you want to share with the world?
I like turtles! Anyway, I just want to share my appreciation to all of our early users who have helped us test and supported our efforts. Our site would be nothing without the users, so much love to everyone who is TwitViding!