Archive for the ‘Running a Business’ Category


BrightMix 2.0 – Transitioning to a Product Company

January 21st, 2010 by kevin

Back when we started BrightMix, Dusty and myself set out to with the goal of one day becoming a product company. That is, a company that builds and maintains its own software products. The biggest challenge with this approach is products don’t start churning over cash on day one; you have to build them, enhance […]


Question: How to Get PR Coverage?

October 15th, 2008 by dusty

We received a LOT of positive feedback from our article in the paper yesterday, including a great set of questions from Heather Nelson, Program Manager for Entrepreneurship at Metro Community College here in Omaha. Question: Did you go through the traditional route and send in a PR announcement to get the coverage? (If so, can […]


Summer Internship Wrap Up – Part 2

September 23rd, 2008 by dusty

In the first part of this article, we talked at length about how we went about finding our interns for the summer, and how we went about wading through the sea of resumes that we received. I’ll pick up pretty much where we left off, with the interns just arriving at BrightMix .. Step 6: […]


Summer Internship Wrap Up – Part 1

September 22nd, 2008 by kevin

We’ve received a lot of questions about how we launched and managed our 2008 summer Internship project, codenamed the Feisty Piranha Project, so it’s about high time we address these quandaries. The recipe we came up was largely based on this Joel article. With that said, I’m going to lay out the steps we went […]


Top 10 ways BrightMix is not like XYZ Corp

June 18th, 2008 by erin

Kevin and Dusty have written some interesting articles about running a small business. Now, it’s my turn to throw my 2 cents in about working for one…..Top 10 Style! Adios Outlook Calendar! I adore my freedom from the Outlook Calendar, and Outlook in general. That’s not to say that we don’t schedule anything at BrightMix, […]


Seven Months of Official Business

March 26th, 2008 by kevin

This was suppose to be a six month post, but it got delayed on account of our being too busy to blog. So, here we are at roughly seven months of business, continuing to rock and/or roll… Since our last post, at three’ish months of official business, a whole lot has happened. We Hired an […]


Three’ish Months of Official Business

December 14th, 2007 by kevin

Not too long ago we had our one month of business anniversary. Well, actually… that was about 3 months ago 🙂 We were talking the other day about how fast time has started flying for us since we opened up shop and banner stands. But, on that same note, we’ve managed to accomplish a great […]


The Move-In is Complete!

November 14th, 2007 by dusty

A little over a week ago we announced our plans to move into a new office. Well, after a very exciting and lively week of planning, cleaning, and moving stuff, we’re all done and settled into our new digs. Thurs – Saturday… Cleaning! All things considered, the place wasn’t actually in that bad of shape, […]


BrightMix is Moving!

October 30th, 2007 by dusty

It’s amazingly hard to believe, considering we just had our 1 month aniversary, but it’s official: BrightMix is leasing a real, honest to goodness office space. No sir, no longer will we be running our day to day operations from the confines of Kevin’s living room. On Thursday, Nov 1st 2007, we officially move into […]


Please, No More Cubicles

October 15th, 2007 by kevin

Boo, cubicles! Simply put, we hate cubicles. Cubicles suck for jobs that require personal concentration (engineering, accounting, most computer-based jobs, etc.). As previous software programmers for both large and small companies, we’ve spent plenty of time in the proverbial dilbert‘esque office environment. They exist everywhere, and it gets old… really, really fast. Of course, the […]