There are many different resources out there which can give you ideas on how to run a lean startup.

I came across an article on Under30CEO.com that had some great tips. I wanted to share a few of them here.
(Link to the full article below)

Definitely read the whole article, but even just with these points you can find many ways to not only reduce cost, but increase productivity and income.

Q. What’s one tip you have for keeping startup costs under control in the early stage of a new company?

A. Hire People With Scrappy Attitudes

Bring on employees that have a high risk tolerance and are committed to keeping down costs. You need people that are willing to take lower salaries because they see the upside of getting a lot of equity in the company. All employees also need to be resourceful in stretching available resources.

Ben Rubenstein, Yodle

A. Leave Room for Flex

Most startups only look at how much their variable costs affect profits, and many business owners forget to factor in all the little things that really add up and make their business lose money, such as office supplies, Internet fees, website maintenance, etc. If entrepreneurs set a flex budget for their miscellaneous costs, then they leave room for error, like running out of pens and notepads!

Danny Wong, Blank Label Group, Inc.

A. Find Income ASAP

Conventional wisdom is that if you’re building a great product, you can wait to eventually monetize. Don’t believe it. If you can get an income source in place — even if it’s only offering a service to set up your software for bigger customers — it’s infinitely easier to run your startup. That income source may be a limited-time offer, but if you can put something out there, do it now.

Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

http://under30ceo.com/14-ways-to-keep-your-startups-costs-down/

Rafferty Pendery

I came across a great article talking about the explosive growth of mobile and the importance of factoring this in to your web-based applications.

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/23/mobile-web-performance-unlimited-data/

Read this article, then read it again and figure out what you are doing to accomodate the ever growing mobile market.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO

Why not?

I’m up now at 3:47am, super happy, was able to catch up on somethings, worked out the new look for our Rethink Training case studies a few hours ago with Bryce (designer), working out a new layout for the help sections on our systems, wife is asleep, loving life and writing the longest sentence ever that shouldn’t be a sentence.

Lesson Learned

There is a time when certain things will and will not get done during the day/night. I used to try to force those cycles to get done when they didn’t naturally fit. It took me a little while, but then it dawned on me that there are certain things I love to do at different times of the day. I could either change the order that I did things during the day to make sense or reorganize a bunch of things in life to get to the point that I COULD do those things earlier in the day.

I chose to do the things I wanted to do when they actually made sense to do, which also happened to be when I wanted to to do them.

One example, laying out completely new services, totally a night time task with my headphones blasting music.

Alrighty, back to loving life.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO

We’ve added a few new features to Rethink Training to ring in the new year.

Copy Course

Users now have the ability to copy a course. By clicking the “copy” button on the management dashboard, a manager can easily create a new course with the exact structure of an existing one. This includes all sections, steps, and checkpoints. All that’s left to do is upload any attachments and assign the course to students!

Rich Text Multiple Choice Quizes

We found that some of our customers could benefit from the enhanced flexibility of rich text multiple choice quizes. Now, multiple choice questions include a rich text editor for better formatting and most importantly, embedding photos and images into questions.

This feature is powerful for creating stronger quizes with interactive course work that, for example, might require students to identify a photograph.

Guided Tour

Another new addition to the platform is the guided tour. It will walk new users with management accounts through the process of creating their first course and explain the basic features of Rethink Training. The guided tour can be accessed from a user’s “My Account” page.

Bug fixes

We’ve fixed a bug in the course assignment area that was preventing courses from being assigned to a group of users properly. Courses can now be assigned to groups.

There’s also been another performance improvement, this time on the student training side. Student training now loads faster and performs much better during heavy system usage.

More to come!

Casey Kinsey
Developer, Rethink Training

It’s been a busy month for Rethink Training.  We’ve added over 15 new features and streamlines to improve performance and make online training even easier!

Direct Messages to Students

Instructors can now send messages directly to students from the progress board by simply clicking on the user’s name. It’s a great way to check up on a student’s progress and find out how their training is going.

Student messages now also trigger email notifications, so your communications are always delivered–no login required.

Faster and Easier

Many of this month’s improvements went into the overall speed and reliability of Rethink Training.

The Progress Board has been completely rebuilt with simplicity in mind, so it works well whether you have five users or five thousand! We’ve also added tools to simplify course creation, like the ability to easily “Paste from Word” when transferring Microsoft Word documents into a course.

Other improvements include enhanced performance in Internet Explorer 8/9, and better MP4 video support for uploaded video content.

We have many great improvements to come–but until then, happy training and happy holidays!

Casey Kinsey
Developer, Rethink Training

(Tampa Bay, FL)  – Rethink Training has announced that they have signed Richter10.2 Media Group as a client. Richter10.2 Media Group is a unique agency focusing on relationships that improve client sales.

“Training our people is and has been one of the biggest game changers to date.” says Robert Cornish, CEO of Richter10.2 Media Group. “We have seen through detailed measurements that it has resulted in our rapid expansion allowing us to beat and double our monthly numbers.

“Rethink Training now allows us to train our people in the cloud and from remote locations while tracking their progress. This is helping us take it to the next level.”

Online training has been approached by companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, but most do not have a ‘functioning’ solution for this. Rethink Training, a new online training tool, makes that easy. “With more and more shift happening towards online applications, it only made sense for us to provide a very simple solution to online training.” says Rafferty Pendery, CEO of Studio98 (Creators of Rethink Training).

About Rethink Training:
Rethink Training is a flexible and easy-to-use online training platform developed by Studio98 of Clearwater, Florida. Designed to meet the incremental training needs of businesses, this unique learning management system (LMS) allows companies to create and deliver customized interactive courses to every employee. A user-friendly interface makes it simple to build, update and maintain training and quizzes, while Web-hosted content ensures staff always has access to the most current information and materials. To learn more about Rethink Training, visit www.RethinkTraining.com.

About Richter 10.2 Media Group:
Richter10.2 Media Group is an entirely new kind of agency.

Richter focuses on relationships that improve client sales. They focus on making introductions to the exact people with whom their clients want to establish relationships.

The right relationships with the right people. They focus on simple, effective communication that builds strong interest and reach for their client’s products or services. No fluff.
For more information visit www.Richter10point2.com.

Press Contact

JoTo PR
Diane Stein
Joto Extreme PR 
1-888-202-4614

We’ve added a few handy new features to Rethink Training that will help you and your students stay on top your training.

Student Messages

Students will now see a “Message” button at the left side of every page.  At any point when a student is using Rethink Training, they can click on the Message tab and send a message to their instructors.  This can be a question about a particular course, or just a general note / inquiry to the instructors.

Notifications

At the top of every page you’ll see a menu button called “Notifications”.  Notifications combine responses to course assignments with the student messages mentioned above.  Items that require your attention will be highlighted on the notifications page, and a number total of the highlighted notifications will be displayed on the notifications button.

Progress Board Improvements

We’ve also added several improvements to the progress board section.   This includes the ability to respond to course assignments directly from the progress board, filter courses by groups, and other changes engineered to streamline the instructor’s experience.

As usual, there have been plenty of other tweaks around the system, and we’ll leave those for you to find!

Happy training!

Casey Kinsey
Developer

Effective training is consistent training.

As you know, in business, things change frequently. New products are released, new policies created and to be most effective, everyone needs to be on the same page with these changes.

We have found that companies are able to effectively train when they create modules to cover different topics and then assign those to the relevant groups of staff.

You are launching a new product.

• Create a short course giving the sales team what they need to effectively sell this.
• Create a course for customer support explaining how to help someone get the most use of it.
• Lay out a course for your marketing team giving them the bullet points they need to be effective.

Here’s an idea, what about using an online training tool to vet new hires?

Choosing the right employees is very important to the survival of a business. We have all made the mistake of hiring someone where there were obvious points that would make it not work.

I was recently talking with one of the executives over at a company using Rethink Training, our online training tool, and out comes the idea: “What if we use Rethink Training to have a course we assign to some potential new hires?”

Brilliant!

Putting your online training tool to use this way means you can put together an intro course that you assign to a few new potential hires and see the results as they go through it. Being able to see how long each candidate takes on each step of the course will give you strong insight.

There are many, many parts that will affect the decision of whether someone will be hired or not, this can be one piece of valuable information to help make the right one.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO

We have just completed some updates to a few different parts of Real Statistics, yay!

1. Groups. In the grey bar above your graphs, if you have Groups for your graphs, you would see a clunky Change button. We slimmed this down a bit to be (Change) in regular text. Same ol’ functions, just a little slimmer.

2. We reprogrammed the whole Summary page to make it much more friendly. Before today, you would click in the Value field, enter a number and then have to hit Enter to save it. When you are going down a list of numbers, that can be…annoying.

Now, you can click in the first one and just tab as you go down the list of stats then just click the Save button at the end. So much easier right?

p.s. The grey ones are your equation graphs and the numbers will show up after you click Save.

There were other small tweaks that you will see when exploring through the system, we’ll leave those up to you to find.

Have a great day!

Rafferty