There's lots of great advice here, and I'll add getting in the habit of sending out monthly update emails.
Pick a group of people (friends, family, maybe ex-colleagues) and once a month summarize what you accomplished in the last month, what you want to accomplish in the next month, and some goals you want to accomplish 4-6 months out.
One of the hardest part of going it alone is lacking perspective. Monthly updates are a really helpful tool in keeping you oriented.
As you're brainstorming, try to imagine what you would shout in a loud bar (remember those?) if someone asked you what your company did. It can be a helpful mental tool to strip things down to the essentials.
Two-sentence pitches are much harder than two-minute pitches.
It was a naming convention created in the early 1900s, using the Mississippi River as a rough line of delineation. Local TV stations use a similar convention.
The three latter letters are usually meaningful, but only barely. For example, there’s WGBH, a Boston public broadcasting station that stands for Great Blue Hills, which are the hills that the broadcasting antenna is located on.
You can request a call sign along with getting your license from the FCC. The process has changed over time, but many (most?) call signs have some sort of historical connection to something: e.g. KRON was broadcast from the SF Chronicle newspaper building, WRCT is Carnegie Mellon's University's station (originally Radio Carnegie Tech, from before it was CMU). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...
It seems to go in both directions: you can ask for one that has some meaning to you (which you can then potentially get if no one is using it), or you can try to make up a backronym. I don't remember good backronym examples but I know they exist. The stations will also vary in whether they prefer for people to pronounce the whole callsign, or just part of it, or spell it out. (Technically I think the callsign is always spelled out when used as a callsign, but not necessarily when used as a brand.)
As a one-man, self-funded startup where every dollar counts, maintaining status is critical. It's much more than legroom and upgrades, it's also lower fees for some last-minute fares and the ability to sometimes change flights within 24 hours of departure for zero fee.
In September I made it from the curb to the gate at Heathrow in 27 minutes--it wouldn't have been possible without the agent at the United Elite desk.
27 minutes isn't that fast for heathrow. I assume it wasn't T5? In there, even in non-business I've made it from the entrance to the gate in about 15. Entirely depends on the state of the queues, though.
Being able to do it in 27 minutes reliably would be a real asset, though. I'd never, ever bank on being able to get through that quickly as inevitably something goes wrong.
This is really the problem with all the airports. The check-in/security line is too variable, so showing up really early is the only safe bet.. Then you end up sitting around in the airport. Or alternatively showing up with the about right amount of time, and missing the flight once every dozen or so trips because the security line is wrapped around the building because of some random news tidbit that sends 50% of the precheck through the naked scanner/whatever.
UA is T2 @ LHR. Dedicated luggage drop + "Gold Track" security means you should be able to do it pretty quickly. The problem is that the UA gates are at a satellite, so you've got a min 10 min walk to get to them.
I'm a one-man startup and I couldn't disagree with this more.
If you want to "play" startup, feel free to put all your eggs in one basket. If you actually want to build something meaningful and long-lasting, and you have Fortune 500 customers, take a breath and invest time in an infrastructure that can't be destroyed by a single rogue algorithm.
After all of the horror stories we've heard over the years, how is that time investment (and ability to sleep well at night) not worth it?
> take a breath and invest time in an infrastructure that can't be destroyed by a single rogue algorithm
As in? You can have your own cage, but somebody will have a cable that connects to the hardware you own. If they pull that cable because a single rogue algorithm told them that you're most likely abusing their service, that's it.
There's lots of great advice here, and I'll add getting in the habit of sending out monthly update emails.
Pick a group of people (friends, family, maybe ex-colleagues) and once a month summarize what you accomplished in the last month, what you want to accomplish in the next month, and some goals you want to accomplish 4-6 months out.
One of the hardest part of going it alone is lacking perspective. Monthly updates are a really helpful tool in keeping you oriented.