Jason's Business By Bootstraps

  • The iPad and the pricing paradox

    Here’s something weird: the Apple iPad has managed to make cheap things expensive and expensive things cheap. The expensive part’s easy. True story: I bought my first iPad because I had a meeting and I figured that displaying the pictures on it to the people around the table instead of trying to hook up a […]

  • If I had to start over…

    Sometimes at the end of a long day my mind wanders, and I think about what I would do differently if I was starting my company today. It’s a tool for reflection, and a little bit of self-congratulation as I recognize some of the things I’ve learned in the past ten months or so. But […]

  • What you don’t do matters more

    A brief thought while watching the Toronto Waterfront Marathon this past weekend: fitness magazines focus on “do this” stuff.  Training programs, routines, and so on.  Most athletes, even elite ones, don’t do a lot to hide their regimen, and if you want to train exactly like someone else does, you can pretty easily do everything […]

  • Your weaknesses are unique

    I’ve had a sore hip all week, and it’s caused me to skip the gym.  Worse still, it changed the way I walk and now I’ve hurt the ball of my foot somehow, which causes me to limp even more, exacerbating the original problem.  And I think my chair has something to do with it. […]

  • Mike Spracklen on motivation

    [iframe width=”580″ height=”325″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/YNA-JaCkvQg?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen] Fantastic words from Canadian men’s rowing coach Mike Spracklen: We all have a point of which we stop, we give up. We all have a point where we back off. It doesn’t matter how determined, what ambitions we have, how much we want to get there, there are times where […]

  • Data hoarding update: what about “knowing stuff”?

    So the other day @benlucier tweeted “Do you organize email by folders? An IBM study says you’re wasting your time: http://bvl.co/az” [PDF] and I found myself in the middle of a “wait for a thing to happen on my computer” cycle, so I gave way to temptation. After all, I’m still one of those holdouts who […]

  • Hiding from time collectors’ calls

    As a business owner, I sometimes feel a shiver when the phone rings.  But I’m not worried about bill collectors, thankfully.  Even if I was, this category of calls is far, far worse. I fear the time collectors. If only they just wanted money!  Time collectors are people who make those calls that eat up […]

  • Cloud storage and the consumer – and some thanks

    It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend (we have it a month earlier than the Americans because it has roots in being grateful for a harvest and our growing season is shorter. Or something. Apparently there are lots of reasons.) I’m thankful for many things, but one though crossed my mind earlier as I ordered some more […]

  • Negative split testing

    In sales, primarily written stuff like web pages, emails, or old-school mailings, there’s a concept of split testing, whereby one sends out two versions of some sales material with one difference between them and then compares the response between the two.  The winner becomes the “control,” and then new tests are done to try to […]

  • Ontario Election 2011: ID confusion

    It’s election day here in the province of Ontario, which means I have to go all the way to a different floor in my building to exercise my constitutional right to throw up a little bit in my mouth.  But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s about the government messing with my mind. I […]