I’m sure you’ve heard of Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow: Transform your business by being Remarkable.

If you’ve heard of it and read it, congrats! If you haven’t, I strongly advise you to go ahead and buy it.

Briefly, the books talks about the fact that consumers are no longer interested in your business / product or service. You have to be remarkable in order to succeed, you need a Purple Cow in your company, you need to create value in order to catch consumers’ eyes.

Here’s a quick checklist that will get you on the right path:

1. Identify a problem. Don’t create one just to have a business. Make sure the problem really needs a solution, or else people won’t buy.
2. Make sure you really want to solve that problem. You have to be passionate about it. Really!
3. Make sure you have the know-how and expertise needed to solve that problem.
4. Make sure the problem you found will also exist in the future. There’s no point of solving a problem that will not exist in 2 years time anymore.
5. Check if there are other people that want to solve that problem. Partnerships are always good.
6. Create an outstanding product. Solve a complex problem by using a simple solution.
7. Don’t try to do everything. Pick a niche and stick with it.

Make sure you check off all the above items for your product / service / business and you have all the chances of being remarkable.

I am asked very often here at Brainient how we manage to work on so many projects at the same time and still deliver top-notch products, on deadline.

It’s oh so simple!

Let’s see what usually happens with teams.

You have five people. Five personalities. Five brains. Five different freaking projects from five freaking superstars. Their work is good, but not outstanding, to the super-freaking potential you seek.

What to do, what to do?

It’s two things you want:

1. A shared vision. Your team has to be united. They must have the same purpose, share the same strategy, speak the same language.

2. Kick-ass goals. Your team members needs goals. Take the following scenario:

- John needs to improve sales by 5% until 2009
- Mark needs to improve sales by 200% until 2009

Which of the two will try harder? Right on! Mark’s the winner.

Even more, your people need to share these kick-ass goals, and work together to improve and deliver. One at a time.

Have a vision. Set goals. Share them. Let it fly!

So you have a startup. It’s a gazzilion dollar idea, of course. Therefore, you start throwing in cash like it’s not yours to keep.

After all, it’s a million dollar idea, right?

Big no!

A million dollar idea is worthless without a million dollar product, service, business, whatever you call it. Really.

Try selling an idea to a potential client. He’ll say: I want to try it out. You have to options:

A. You have a kick-ass product. Client loves it. Client buys.
B. You have a shiny office, a Versace suit, a nice conference room but your product sucks. Client doesn’t buy.

You lose.

The Basics:

A. Focus on your product. Put most of your cash there. Make sure it’s a state-of-the-art, top-notch, outstanding product.
B. Have a goal. Where do you want to be in 2, 3, 5 years?
C. Keep a tight fist on all your expenses. Only buy what will help you reach your goal.

A few things you DON’T want to spend on:

1. Expensive office space. You can easily start from your home, outsourcing all the work.
2. Cheap & unreliable developers. What you pay is exactly what you get. A ‘cheap’ product.
3. Expensive hardware. Apple computers are great, yeah. But you might consider Dell instead, until you start cashing in.
4. Brand names. They’re usually repackaged generics.
5. Conferences & workshops. They’re usually expensive and don’t bring much value, besides the networking. Try going in by trading services for an invitation. It works, most of the times .

Save up! You’ll definitely need it in the future.

What you see above is a quick server clustering infrastructure schema we put together in a 5mins brainstorming session today. Looks ugly, eh? Here’s why:

Here at Brainient we believe light planning, heavy testing & often review is the way to go. We don’t spend hours on specs, docs or other mumbo-jumbo. We rapidly put together something that we can understand and get it rollin’.

The good thing in the above image is that our sysadmin guru perfectly understands what it says . He’s a genius, we know.
And yeah, the sun on the top right is part of the schema. Can you guess why?

The future’s bright here at Brainient. Here’s some flash news, to see what we’ve been up to:

1. We’re moving to a new office this weekend. Bigger, brighter, closer to downtown Bucharest. We’re finally gonna have space for a gaming room. Pics, soon.
2. Request’s for Brainient’s services are piling up. I’m actually thinking about putting a 90 days waiting list notice on the homepage .
3. We’ve got new colleagues and one more awesome Project Manager, Andrei.
4. Skimbit, one of our biggest projects got techcrunched.
5. Just got an Xbox, a Wii, and we’re waiting for the ping-pong and foosball tables to be delivered.

Oh, and one more thing. We’re hiring more devs. Four of them, to be more precise.

One of the people I admire the most in this world, Steve Jobs, said a very interesting thing some time ago:

“In order to be doing something like this, you have to really, really love what you’re doing. Otherwise it just doesn’t make sense.”

So we decided to twist things a bit in 2008 and only focus on what we love: building innovative, high-scale web applications.
It’s gonna be fun!

Oh, and one more thing: Happy New Year!

Great news! Last week, Jeff Barr (senior evangelist over at Amazon) posted about Amazon S3’s new Service Level Agreement - which if you happen to run services on the platform (like we do here at Brainient) is a pretty good piece of news.

Looking forward to see a similar SLA for EC2, but I guess that won’t happen until it comes out of beta .

here’s a list of brands that made it to the Oxford Dictionary. I don’t see Google anywhere, though. Ah, yeah… Google protested against it when it almost got in, last year.

Paul Farnell from Litmus (a pretty cool compatibility testing webapp) writes a pretty interesting article on how to price web applications.

Read here.

Here’s a list of companies outside the US and entrepreneurs under 30 to keep an eye on

via