Trevor Geise

Co-founder @rentshare , behavioral psychology enthusiast, designer, developer, candlestick maker

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Your Early Stage Startup Should Not Suck at Sales

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The purpose of this article is to get the wheels turning for start-ups. Hopefully it will at least get you and your team to begin considering what you can do to become more effective communicators. We have found strong selling and communication skills have been instrumental in understanding our users, building great products, and identifying issues quickly.

Why Worry About Sales So Early?

I’ve spoken to a lot of startups that basically ask this exact question. For them, and many other recently funded companies, sales is a distant concept while product development rightfully takes center stage.
Sales is almost an archaic concept, at worst solved by hiring a sales person. There is a belief, or a hope, that once the product is done it will sell itself. Sales is an afterthought, a presumption, a bridge to cross once reached.

In reality, sales is inherent in every role you have, at...

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I’m a developer, and you can too!

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How Meteor.js Made Me a God

I’m a huge fan of Meteor.js. I’m a start-up guy who’s pretty good at almost everything, which means I’m not the best at anything. I’ve been building websites for years (mostly Wordpress), but custom web apps were well above my knowledge. In fact, less than a year ago, really messy around with a database at all was incredibly intimidating. Which as an entrepreneur sucks. It means testing ideas is a huge undertaking, and instant loss of control, since I would need someone else to do it for me and be captive to their schedule.

Today I code almost every day. I’m building a sophisticated sales behavior app, my wedding registry app (I’m engaged!), and a number of prototypes for other start-ups.

Everyday I’m learning and applying something new. I am standing on the shoulders of thousands of amazing developers, and accomplishing very impressive (to me) things...

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Meteor Resources: Learning and Everyday

A quick list of the resources I used and continue to use to learn Meteor.js.

Starting From Scratch

Learn JavaScript with these resources

  • Codecademy
  • NetTuts
  • Google JavaScript Tutorials

Learning Meteor

  • Meteor.com
  • Whats this Meteor Thing - NetTuts
  • Discover Meteor
  • Prototyping with Meteor
  • Creating a Multi-Page Site with Meteor
  • Build an app in 45min with Meteor
  • Building a Web App from Scratch in Meteor
  • Just Google Meteor Tutorial and do everyone you can find

Resources While Coding

these are pages I often have open for reference while I work

  • Bootstrap
  • Meteor Docs
  • Underscore.js Docs
  • Fontawesome
  • Moment.js Docs
  • Atmosphere
  • MongoDB Docs

Advanced Meteor Stuff

  • [Eventedmind](www.eventedmind.com)
  • MeteorHacks
  • Meteor DevShop

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Get Rich Quick (or how I bought some Dogecoin)

new-rich.jpgStarting a few weeks ago Dogecoin has shown up a lot in the news. They raised some $30k to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. They managed to not take a hit like many other virtual currencies when China baulked at Bitcoin. But what really got my attention was how much people seemed to love Dogecoin. It’s quirky, it’s non-threatening (since it started from some bizarre meme that I don’t get at all), and it has some moral grounding as aspirations to be the internet’s tipping and donation currency.

Ultimately, there is something reassuring about a currency that people just love. It seems to suggest to me that it has the potential to be more resilient. After all, we buy emotionally, even if it’s currencies.

So I decided to get in on this gravy train. Here is the path I took.

First Up - Free Doge!

A quick google search brought me to a bunch of ‘faucet’ sites, that just give...

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Creating a Brand Parody in Four Steps

Screenshot 2014-01-30 14.04.06.pngI’ve begun building a registry/wedding info site for my wedding in the Spring. We try to not accumulate a lot of stuff, and thanks to hand-me-downs we have pretty much everything we need, so the idea registering at a store just didn’t make much sense to us. Instead, we decided to just ask people to give us money, but that’s pretty crass. The solution! To let people pick what we spend it on, specifically, elements of our honeymoon in Japan!

Going one step further, we wanted to give unique gifts in return, a la Kickstarter. So I decided to build out a mini Kickstarter parody site that let people pick items that they want to gift us, but to do that, I needed a nice logo.

So here is the crazy-fast process for creating a parody logo.

Find the font

A quick Google search of “Kickstarter font” brings us to daFonts.com
Easy, peasy. Just download that sucker.

Make it Web Ready

FontSquirrel...

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How to piss off customers by giving them a 25% discount

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A little follow up on the power of customer expectations

This is a bit of a follow up to the article on customer service I wrote a while ago. I thought it was worth sharing my experience with a restaurant this past weekend and working through the very strong customer service lesson.


The set up

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were headed out to brunch. There is a somewhat new restaurant in our area – locally sourced, thoughtful dishes… – and my girlfriend had not had their brunch yet. It was late in the day so we checked their times online – open ’till 3pm. It was about 1:40 so we bundled up and headed out. We got there 5 before 2pm and saw the sign outside – they close at 2pm. Ok, not a big deal. Too bad the website is not updated, but it happens. Still, we pop our head in just to check if the kitchen was still open. The waitress stammers a little and tells us to hold on. A...

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Vetting Your Start Up Idea: Research Tools

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Hands down, the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur, is prove why your idea wont work as quickly as possible.

Ideas are easy, start-ups are hard. Your start up will probably fail. That’s ok, failure is growth. You learn a lot more from failure than from success. The trick, I believe, is failing fast and mindfully. Now, there will be situations where you would fail if not for your blind, stupid, passionate or just ignorant perseverance. I’ve seen first hand companies escape failure by the sheer brute force of the founders, but it’s a crazy amount of work and you need to be driven deep deep down, and after all that you can still fail – a crushing, brutal kind of failure.

Failure is not the end. Failure is one step closer to success.


First Step – Disprove your Start Up Idea

With that in mind, attempting to disprove your new start up idea should be your very first duty. Find out...

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