The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback (What Is Payback?, Spreadsheet Payback, Discounted Payback, Spreadsheet Discounted Payback)
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver

As you learned in our previous post, the basic math behind calculating paybacks is to simply run a sum on cash flows until that running sum [...]

Asus wins as the most reliable notebook computer. Guess which brand came in dead last — by a mile?

Our book has a fairly substantial discussion of the pros and cons of notebooks versus desktop computers. You just can’t beat the portability of a notebook, but you can add “more likely to break down” to the [...]

The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver

Since we are tightly focusing on the needs of entrepreneurs rather than standard small business owners, of necessity our epic series on spreadsheet formulas has been ushered in by the most relevant math for determining the [...]

The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver

Are you ready for another exciting chapter in our supreme geek-a-thon survey of spreadsheet formulas? I know it’s not balloon boy, but too many entrepreneurs, small business owners, and managers have these spreadsheet thingies hanging around [...]

Okay, in addition to the fact that I can have Verizon as my carrier and actually use my phone in my home (AT&T doesn’t work within 10 miles of my house, even though I live in LA), and the fact that the new Verizon droid looks like a seriously bats#$* cool phone (on sale for [...]

They say that second place is the same as last place. So is last place.

We feature Microsoft Accounting in our book, The Startup Bible as a genuinely excellent and relatively inexpensive accounting software for business, along with the much more scaled-down Microsoft Money (suitable for low-revenue, one-person businesses). Alas, neither Money (which Microsoft announced it [...]

Hope they didn’t pay for that logo and tagline!

Nearly the entire Shoestring Publications staff is busy whipping the second edition of The Startup Bible into shape for a New Year’s unveiling, so we’re also busy revisiting and re-reviewing all of the resources we recommended in the first edition. Among the very top recommendations we gave [...]

Got no money to buy a stock photo of money? This sawbuck is free at MorgueFile.com.

In our previous post, we compared photos from the number one free stock site, stock.xchng, to your quotidian stock photos from a pay site, like Corbis. Free is great on a shoestring budget, but, as we demonstrated, you get what [...]

Everyone wants a pair of fancy duds, even on emails.

We here at Shoestring Venture try out many services geared to small businesses and startups, and once in a great while, our staff trials result in a find which makes it into our book or our blog. One part of our book that we’re greatly expanding [...]

Facebook has a slightly different definition of “mouse click” than the rest of us.

Think again.
TechCrunch is reporting massive click fraud on the Facebook site. As a result of these blogs, Facebook is admitting to the fraudulent clicks and claims to be working on a fix. However, their initial response to advertiser complaints was silence and [...]

Ever since its release, the Kindle has allowed users to download blog feeds. Admittedly, the service has always had the glaring fault of charging users for something they can get for free just by firing up a browser or downloading a fee, but anyone who pays almost 400 bucks for a Kindle probably isn’t a [...]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, along with 32 member groups including Google and Yahoo!, have released official standards for counting “clicks” on cost-per-click Internet advertising. If you are an entrepreneur or business seriously considering Internet advertising, then it behooves you to familiarize yourself with these standards before you jump in.
What this means for those who haven’t [...]

As social networking — particularly Twitter and similar short-form messaging services — becomes more and more important to disseminating product and service information across a wide audience, we’ve seen an explosive growth of “URL shorteners,” services that are intended to take those long http-colon-slash-slash-tonsofgobbledeygookydogpilesfromyourcontentmanagementsystem and make them short-form friendly. Since we’re adding an entire section [...]

How fast things move! Our book, Shoestring Venture is about to celebrate its fourth month and already our section on Web advertising is a bit out of date. The book helps you out with networks such as AdSense, Yahoo!, and Ask, but our section on Microsoft LiveOffice is now officially a dinosaur as the second [...]

The second edition of our foundation book, Shoestring Venture, is nearing completion and we have just added a section on getting paid through Twitter. While this market was dominated by TipIt, a decidedly problematic solution, TipJoy has just released an API for asynchronous payments through Twitter. Right now, the application is most suited to people [...]

Readers of this blog and our book, Shoestring Venture, know that we love nothing like we love “free.” And we invest basketloads of time tracking down the best “free” deals. (Best free deals? Well, just as in mathematics, some infinities are “larger” than others, in the biz world some “free” things are more free than [...]

Anyone who’s read our book or followed our blog know that what we’re all about is helping entrepreneurs manage their business like the biggest corporations and, at the same time, stretch every dollar — even when there are no dollars to stretch. For that reason, we are fans of Clare McDermott’s blog, SoloPortfolio’s Idea Workbook [...]

Just when you thought old media was dead, Hewlett-Packard rolls out an on-demand magazine printing service that makes it possible to cheaply print small-run magazines. I’m talking four-color, full-bleed, decent weight glossy paper magazines as good as anything you see in a bookstore (provided you have a good designer) for TWENTY CENTS PER PAGE. A [...]

In my last post, I include a quote about “hope” from Thucydides’ Melian Debate. But since I really couldn’t pop it out from memory (I could a couple decades ago — in the original Greek, no less!), I googled it for a translation. There, to my surprise, sitting in the number one position of almost [...]

If you think there’s money to be made in protectionist sentiments stirred to a boil by hard times, then an Arizon start-up thinks there’s money to be made off you. My American Jobs, for a pretty hefty yearly fee of somewhere between $2,200 and $5,000 will certify your product as American-made. Recognizing the realities of [...]