My new blog & a twitter username swap

In a move that I’m sure will please my higher ed readers, I’ve created a spinoff blog called Startup Failure and you can get there via 307ceo.com or ronbronson.com

The idea here was to create a place where I could really dig deeper into issues that affect solo startups or people who are just getting started, as well as those who’ve been in “the game” a while.

This blog will try to gradually bend itself back towards higher ed more, though to be honest a lot of my insights are focused largely on how much we shoot ourselves in the foot in the higher ed world and how we make it harder for people to really succeed. So I’ll be focusing on the success stories and the interesting things I see in the field. Maybe I’ll branch out in other ways, too. I have some ideas, but I won’t give them all away.

Save for the backposting I did when I first started the blog, this blog is really only a year old this month. So I’m proud of where it’s gone in that time span and what it’s been able to do for me. Had I started it three years ago, who knows where I’d be now.

So I’m excited for what’s next and I do hope if you’re interested, you’ll check out the other blog too or pass it on to someone else who might be.

I changed my twitter user name from omnivoredotus to 307ceo. I have a love/hate relationship with the public timeline, but it’s public so people can find me for now. I’ve been pondering shortening the name for a while, I created the original one when I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with Twitter and just went with something I could get. With the new domain/blog, it just made more sense.

So there you go. Chock full of updates.

Finding a partner in hustle

Since this blog is supposedly also about entrepreneurship, let’s talk about something that’s been on my mind for years now.

The myth of the partner.

The person who you meet, who is fired up about an idea and is the technical hacker brain behind something you’re building, while you’re the guy coming up with everything else. Now that’s a really bad explanation of it, but…if you have sales/marketing/development as the three things you’re splitting up, really you just want someone you can lean on to bang something out and then you can start hawking it and improving it as you go.

I’ve just always wanted a hacker who I could work with and who was just as insane as I was — or more — to help build something from scratch. I mean, without my talents applied to it, their product won’t really mean anything, but I can give life to something useful and I have the ideas and the vision to inspire someone to create something awesome.

But finding said people? Just ain’t easy.

I’m fine with giving up equity. I’ve got lots of contacts and a really strong team of folks already.

All of the people I have now are professionals. They get paid for work they do or their skills aren’t useful for what I need. As they should, to be honest. Everyone one of us is working on our “own thing” outside the group and so, I’m trying to rapidly move development further, because we’re at a place now where we just need something to get us into the race.

I don’t want something for nothing, but I do want to get to “something” faster than bootstrapping alone allows and as a result, it leads me to end up in this infinite loop where I’m literally trying to build something ‘faster’ to get the cash to do something ‘better’ or ‘better suited’ to my skills and those of the folks I’ve got.

I’ve got a good working plan of what we’re building here and I’ve worked through A LOT of barriers since I started doing all of this 5 years ago, but…now I find myself sorta in the same place I always am and now I’m just at something of a loss to know precisely how to get to Point G.