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Steve Spalding

Steve Spalding on Untemplater

Steve Spalding is the founder of How To Split An Atom, a blog about building better businesses. In his ample free time he also acts as managing partner at Crossing Gaps, a marketing and design firm that specializes in helping creative companies use the web to tell better stories.He has experience building start-ups, working at them, tweaking, fixing and developing campaigns for them as well as speaking to dozens of their Founders and CEOs. His work has been cited by the LA Times, Forbes, Mashable, RWW, as well as Geoff Livingston’s marketing and new media book, Now Is Gone.

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Ideas Don’t Matter

By Steve Spalding on October 12th 2010 in Business Leave a comment!

This isn’t a post about ideas being a dime a dozen. While that might just be true, I wanted to pose a slightly more radical thesis — that not only are ideas as common as badly fitting promotional t-shirts but that individual ideas have little baring at all on whether you create something great. Think [...]

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No One Wants Your Ideas

By Steve Spalding on May 3rd 2010 in Entrepreneurship 7 comments

The truth of the matter is that the idea mongers in the audience are doing little more than wasting their time. Unless your “idea” amounts to dressed up arbitrage (a fancier way of saying gambling on your ability to time trends) then no matter how many times you tell it to me there is little chance that I will be able to execute on it as well as you can.

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Building Your Runway

By Steve Spalding on March 30th 2010 in Entrepreneurship 18 comments

Entrepreneurs tend to dream of the millions they will one day make, and the ignore the fact that millions very rarely brings happiness. What does bring happiness is peace of mind, knowing that to the degree that you can be, you are safe, secure and generating the income you need to live the life you want to live.

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You’re Pretty Much Always Right

By Steve Spalding on March 4th 2010 in Entrepreneurship 7 comments

In order to survive in business you need to be right, all the time. You need to be certain that your vision is clear. You need to be certain that your revenue model is sound. You need to be sure that you have a marketing, promotions and growth plan which will allow you to maintain a positive cash flow. You need to be right about your risk of unforeseen crisis, and you need to be right about your responses to these crisis’. If any of these things go wrong, you will find yourself on the street.

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8 People Who Should Never, Ever Start A Business

By Steve Spalding on February 8th 2010 in Entrepreneurship 24 comments

Should you start a business? Probably. If you are asking the question that proves a couple of things to me. The first is that you have the pioneer’s spirit, that you are at least vaguely interested in getting out on your own and making something of yourself gosh darn it. The second thing it tells [...]

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Let’s Talk About Social Media

By Steve Spalding on January 20th 2010 in Business 6 comments

Social Media wants to answer two questions: 1. “What half-way productive thing can we do with 1,000,000 people sitting in a room talking to each other all day long?” and 2. “How can people who sell things exploit these millions to sell more things?” Social Media is about the most effective, efficient and psychologically painless [...]

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You Are Probably Insane

By Steve Spalding on January 6th 2010 in Entrepreneurship 21 comments

If you analyzed psychology of your average entrepreneur, you would discover a person in serious need of some rather comprehensive therapy. We are overconfident, risk seeking, gamblers with half-cocked beliefs in our ability to overcome the near statistical impossibility of surviving in business. Add to this the compulsions that drives us to work 60-100 hours [...]

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