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Every founder struggles to find a great name for her company. Often it’s the first source of good-natured strife between co-founders. It’s an exhilarating, scary combination of having to decide who you are — what you do, the persona you expose — combined with the technical issues of being memorable, spell-able, and available as a domain name.

My name started as a whim, was almost changed for the wrong reasons, and ended up with a punch-line I would never have dreamed of.

Storytime! (Lessons at the end.)

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You probably think of “tech support” as the bottom of the food chain. “Shit flows downhill” and all that. After all:

Tech support deals with insane customers. Tech support answers the phone; a job even salesmen don’t want. Tech support keeps angry customers at bay while having no power to effect change.

Yep, that sounds lowly. Dismal too — how would you like to deal with an irate voice screaming at you when you know how to fix the problem but lack the authority to do it? This is a masochistic job for a poor slob with no other job prospects, right?

If this is your attitude, your conception ..read more

You didn’t start a business so that you could learn accounting, but learn you must! Here’s a little help.

QuickBooks lets you switch between two radically different methods of accounting with a click of a button. It’s nice to have accommodating software, but which one should you pick?

Never heard of either of these? Time to learn:

“Cash-Basis” accounting means you only count revenue and expenses that you actually have. Things that count: Receiving a check or credit card payment, writing a check to the telephone company, paying your credit card bill. Things that don’t count: Receiving a purchase order, receiving the bill from the telephone company, charging something on a credit card. ..read more

“I feel like a fraud. I’ve been at this for 16 years and I still feel like a fraud. I’m just waiting for the day they see through the façade, but they keep coming back every year.”   –Jason Young

Ah yes, the awe-inspiring words of confidence from the seasoned entrepreneur. My friend Jason intended this as soothing words of solace during (one of my) periods of personal freak-out while Smart Bear was in its infancy.

I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that ..read more

Everyone says “be remarkable” is the best marketing advice.

It’s easy to say, but how exactly do you go about doing it?

Although not planned this way, this was the main theme when I was interviewed?by Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts over at the?techZING!?postcast.

Click here to listen.

Yeah 90 minutes is a long time, but we covered a lot of ground, including some topics I haven’t written about yet, like how writing a paperback book — and giving it away for free — transformed marketing and sales at Smart Bear.

P.S. Some of you had asked for more audio content; is this satisfying your craving? Leave a comment and let me know if you’d like to see more of this.

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