Followers on the Twitter will know I've been banging on about the new "coffee club" Kopi recently. I guess the easiest way to describe it is to compare it to a wine club. You pay a monthly fee and get high quality gourmet coffee sent to you each month. All the coffee is hand picked by the Kopi experts and if last month's is anything to go by, is very lush.

Anyway, the kind people there have given me a special code where everyone can get a free packet of November's coffee, whoch apparently is one of the top 5% most rarest coffee in the world, fact fans. All you have to do is click here and sign up. Then free coffee is on it's way to you. Easy.

Disclaimer for the tin foil hat brigade: I am writing this post because I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Kopi. I have no stake in the business, I'm not getting paid for this, nor am I getting any referral fees. I'm simply writing because I think everyone should use this service and it's awesome.

I've been meaning to redesign this blog for some time now and make it a bit leaner and up to date. So here it is!

Massive thanks to @grabbins who as usual came up trumps with his excellent design skills.

And as for my infamous "what I'm listening to right now" posts, you can now see what's playing over there on the right :)

A couple of blog posts crossed my desk today which in turn have inspired me to write my own. The subject is startups and getting things done. The first post which I urge all startups/entrepreneurs to read is elegantly entitled "Fucking Sue Me". I've reproduced a bit of it below but the essence of the story is how a young entrepreneur lost a contract worth $340k because he spent too long sweating the small stuff, in this case legal paperwork. When there's the chance he may lose another deal he asks his Dad (a lifelong entrepreneur) for advice on what to do when it comes to the legals, his response was:

“Just sign it,” he said, calmly.

“But it has all kinds of crazy stuff in it!” I replied. “It says I’m personally liable if anything goes wrong! It says I owe them money if it’s late!” and so on.

“Just sign it,” he said.

“But what if something happens?? What if the site crashes? What if I’m late? What if..??”

“Do you think any of that stuff is going to happen?” he asked.

“Probably not. But what if it does?”

“Then you know what you do?” he said. “Tell them, ‘fucking sue me.’”

He was right. I got the job, they paid, things went well, nobody got sued.

I then got sent this post from New York Magazine that rambles on a bit but it has some fascinating insight into how some tech entrepreneurs go about lanching a product. Read this:

Feross Aboukhadijeh likes to tell the story of how he got famous. It happened last fall, as he was beginning his junior year at Stanford. Google had just unveiled a feature called Google Instant, which shows search results in real time, as you type. “I thought it was kind of gimmicky,” says Feross. But it gave him an idea: If Google could pop out instant search results, why couldn’t YouTube produce instant videos? He bet a friend he could slap something together in an hour. “I lost the bet,” he says. “It took me three hours.”

Three hours. I know startups that have taken over a year to launch. I also know startups that are still debating whether to launch or not. When I was a mentor for the Difference Engine last year I was struck that some of the startups didn't have a product. They had an idea, and that's fine because the whole purpose of an incubator is to nurture ideas into startups. But what amazed me was that some startups had flipcharts, whiteboards, note books full & whole walls of a room quite literally full of post-it notes...but still no product. "We're still researching" was the answer I was met with when asked why they hadn't built anything yet. Now while there's value in research it should be there to help you not hinder you. These guys were drowning in data, opinions, analysis and quite frankly crap. What they should have done is just gone with their gut and built something.

When I first had the idea for ShareMyPlaylists.com I had no research, my walls weren't covered with post-it notes and I didn't own a flipchart (still don't). All I had was a gut instinct so I wrote a one page spec sheet of what I wanted the site to do and look like, sent it to a developer I know and agreed a price. £500. A couple of weeks later the site was built and SMP was born. Sure it was far from perfect, was built using WordPress and hosted on a less than reliable server but it was out there. It was live, it wasn't confined to a sheet of sticky paper or written on a whiteboard. Over the weeks and months I refined it, added features, built upon the user experience and look where we are today; well funded, over 2.5 million page impressions a month and generating 10,000 playlist plays a day.

Another great example of this is from my good friend Paul Smith's startup, appysnap. Paul launched appysnap with (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) hardly any features. It was quite basic, but it did the job and since then he's added a ton of more cool stuff to it and there is a lot more to come. If Paul and his development partner Jon had waited until he had the app perfected then it wouldn't be launched today and he wouldn't have tens of thousands of photos shared and be a part of the white hot scavenger hunt space. But he is and appysnap is going to be huge. Trust me on this.

The moral of the story is don't spend too much time researching, conducting customer surveys, analysing data and anything else you can get your hands on, writing business plans, doing forecasts & anything else that stops you from just getting something out there. Instead go with your gut, launch it and launch it quick before somebody else does. It doesn't matter if it isn't perfect at least you will have a product. Which is more than I can say for all of those startups that are still sticking post-it notes to a wall. And that's what I'll be telling Ignite 100 candidates too :)

With thanks to @Shak and @DrRichEx for the blog posts.

What I'm listening to right now: Piano House

This weekend was the Think Visibility conference and as always Dom and the team did an awesome job. As people who know me well know, I go for the networking and a catchup with friends old and new as well as the odd cocktail. The event attracts a really nice crowd and it's a pleasure to mix with everyone involved....apart from Al Carlton that is, who after mysteriously disappearing after cocktails was later found convicing people to have their photo taken with my (stolen) lanyard. Fair play though, I was impressed with the dog photo. You can see all the photos here and Dom has of course made a playlist to accompany the images :) P.S. Extra special thanks to Dom for arranging X Factor to be shown on the cinema screen. What I'm listening to right now: Acid Jazz Hispano September 2011

I'm a massive fan of all US TV of all genres but especially sitcoms, quite simply they do them better than us. I've been meaning to write this blog post for years, the problem has been that the no.1 and no.2 slots often change in my head. However on reflection I think the no.1 spot should deservedly go to Frasier, it's characters, warmth and quite often slapstick storylines still make me laugh out loud to this day. Don't get me wrong, Friends is brilliant but Frasier ever so slightly has the edge in the funny stakes.

And before anybody complains saying that the US Office is inferior to the UK Office it's not & you're wrong. Ricky Gervais agrees with me too so no arguments.

So, here we are...

1. Frasier
2. Friends
3. Everybody Loves Raymond
4. Cheers
5. The King Of Queens
6. The Office
7. How I Met Your Mother
8. Spin City
9. Modern Family
10. 30 Rock

Almost made it into the top 10..

Just Shoot Me
8 Simple Rules
Will & Grace
Rules of Engagement
The Big Bang Theory - thanks to Simon for reminding me in the comments

Yes I know there are lots that I have left out, most noteably Seinfeld & Curb Your Enthusiasm, even M.A.S.H but for my money the definitive top 10 is as above.

What's in your top 10?

What I'm listening to right now: Future Funk

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