You don’t need to hit home runs. 10% weekly growth will get you where you need to go.

Here are some of this best startup articles I read in 2013:

A narrow value proposition does not equate to a narrow market opportunity, it's just harder to build.

Every time I go out to move a pile of firewood, I think this is hard labor, but it's not hard work.

Artists, labels and rightsholders, tell the nerds the Internet is already broken. The web is balkanizing around huge ecosystems run by giant companies and paranoid governments.

Facebook is positioned to become the world's attention banking infrastructure. We live in an attention economy where the capacity to attract attention is given, sold, bought and traded daily…transparently and otherwise.

Over the years, I have quit caffeine for years at a time. I slip back into the habit when I forget how unnecessary it is to functioning at a high-level. A big desert after lunch…coffee. Too much booze the night before…coffee. Not enough sleep…coffee. Lots of time behind the desk and not enough time at the gym…coffee. Staying out extra late…espresso martini. Not making time to meditate…coffee. Not enough fruit…coffee (beans). Caffeine paves over bad habits, and conversely, the absence of it makes living...calmer.

Art requires investment, as somebody always has to pay the bills.  Investing in artists has to appear attractive on a cost-to-scale analysis basis.  Every attempt: legal, cultural or otherwise, to weaken copyrights is an assault on every artist's capacity to scale via minimal incremental investments, and thus the capacity to compete for investment dollars.

When it comes to music and advertising, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for some artists will not work for others, and vice versa. However here’s one thing I can tell you for sure: too many artists are using advertising as a blunt force instrument. Simply dropping a picture of yourself, your band, or your album art into an ad unit and then indiscriminately campaigning nationwide for clicks will rarely generate the advertising ROI you need to justify spending on another campaign.

What do you call the person that has decided to surrender an email address, follow you on Twitter, or Like you on Facebook? If the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, or as someone said last week: “a fan is someone that buys all your stuff”, then we need an intermediate descriptor that sits between a potential fan that has yet to learn about you, and a fan or fanatic that is already buying your stuff. ‘Pre-fan’ seems like it will work, but why bother? As more and more labels and artists use advertising to bridge the gaps between social media islands, it’s essential to get the advertising return on investment (ROI) calculation correct. If a potential fan is not yet a fan, and if a pre-fan is not really a fan, then you need to apply TWO conversion rates to your ROI calculation.

Creating album art? Thinking about advertising your band? Over the last year, I have been working within the intersection of behavioral targeting, the music industry and ad design. I can tell you that artists everywhere submit images for inclusion in banner ad campaigns that are less appealing, more boring and exceedingly less mysterious than a box of Cheerios.

This post demonstrates why it's essential to use advertising and strategic PR to 'bridge' potential fan groups that have overlapping music preference profiles but remain entirely disconnected from each other on the Internet.

One might be misled into believing that the equation: decent artist + solid business support = success. However this formula is about as a sound as building a table that only has...one leg. If you are ever thinking about financially backing or supporting an artist, you should know that there are two other legs of the table that are of equal or greater importance. In fact, if these first two legs are solid, the third leg, the business leg, almost organically grows itself.

In my experience, dividing ownership equally is mistake. Without fail, things always happen that prevent or enable project participants from contributing more or less resources than they originally pledged.  You want a plastic (cable of expanding and contracting) ownership structure that enables participants to contribute as much or as little as their ever-changing (financial, time, family, health, etc.) situation dictates.  A plastic ownership structure, governed by an ownership earn-in formula, is the best way to align motivation, commitment, value delivery, timing and expectations.

Even with overlap, at one thousand fans per artist, one million artists cannot acquire one billion true fans.  All the music lovers in the world are never going to accept and process billions of artist-initiated emails, status updates and text messages.  Pushy self-promotion doesn’t scale.  If everyone is doing it, nobody is going to do it effectively; the same applies to fundraising; fans are going to tune these messages out.  Collectively, artists and their managers are running the risk of appearing like financial planners at a cookout…occasionally invited, but often avoided.

It’s safe to play the middle, but power comes out of the ends of the battery. I use this analogy when I am talking about what to create or how to say it. Some creators have an inclination to attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience by splitting the middle. In my experience, the middle is never as large or as powerful as either end. If you are building an audience, consider appealing to the ends. Power comes out of the ends of the battery, not the middle.

When we put our minds to the task of making the most of the space between, it’s not all that surprising to learn what we can accomplish during a long commute to the office. What’s really surprising though, is to learn what we can accomplish as a bag of popcorn expands in the microwave. Small spaces are the biggest part of our days.