This post is going to be a random collection of thoughts/events from the past week.

Video of Mint.com Founder

You might have heard recently that personal finance site Mint.com got acquired by Intuit for $170 million.  This video by the founder, Aaron Patzer, is really awesome and should be watched by all entrepreneurs I think.

Click Here For The Video

Some highlights…

• Each technical founder adds $500k to your valuation, each MBA founder subtracts $250k from your valuation
• He discusses how keeping costs low saved his company (personally I think they can be even lower), a common theme on this blog

Answers.OnStartups.com

This is a brilliant site that just came out which does questions and answers for entrepreneurs.  It is based on the software behind StackOverflow.com, a popular question and answer site for programmers which has seen meteoric growth over the last year.

Traditionally there have been 3 main types of community websites: forums, wikis, and blogs.  This format is different.  It combines elements of all three while adding some new features.  I think it is far and away the best format for a Q&A site.

After seeing this format take off with StackOverflow.com, I incorporated pieces of it into the BuyersVote.com design, such as the voting and reputation.  I think we’ll see more Q&A sites like this come out soon, so this is probably a good opportunity for entrepreneurs to start their own niche Q&A site (accounting and taxes anyone?).  I’ve put in a request to get more info on obtaining the source code for free if you want to start your own Q&A site like this.

Anyway, I think this will turn into an amazing resource for entrepreneurs.  Check out the site and start participating.

UniversityTutor.com Update

Finally, I’ve been making some interesting changes on UniversityTutor.com.  I’ve built some massive campaigns in both Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing lately to drive new traffic to the site.  They are converting (in other words each dollar spent on ads is bringing in more than one dollar in revenue) and the site is seeing some good growth right now.

In addition, I was playing around the other day and typed “tutoring jobs” into Google.  My site ranked on the 5th page of google results.  If you aren’t on the first page of results you are basically non-existent for that keyword.  Nobody clicks through to the 2nd or 3rd page.

I decided to try targeting the “tutoring jobs” keyword so I can improve my ranking in Google.  I setup this page for tutoring jobs which you can see is optimized for it.  There is a trade off here when you target a page to search engines instead of human beings.  The text I had on the page before was “Tutor Signup” with a different heading about signing up for a free account.  This was probably a little more clear to human beings than the simple “tutoring jobs” title I have there now.  But it will rank better in search engines.  So it’s a trade off.  I’ll have to see how it works out.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong