I met White at the Social Media Clubhouse, where I stayed at SXSW. Moonfruit sponsored one of the summit events at the house.  (Note: As I disclosed in the Inc. piece, I received no specific compensation from Wendy or MoonFruit, and SMC is a filed-for non-profit.)

Her story is really inspiring, as she had to take steps as radical as firing family members to keep the company solvent. I hope you enjoy the story.

Last week I wrote about the Elevator Pitch, Reloaded. Today at the Expo, I got a hallway elevator pitch that hit many of the important points in that article. The person didn’t know I was a blogger for Inc., or that I wrote the article. She just gave a passionate pitch that really hit all the points for me, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to show you an example of someone doing it right.

pitching, elevator pitch, inc.com, howard greenstein, howardgr

“Making love to customers is not a campaign, but a lifestyle,” says Saul in his talk. What does he mean? “Making love to your customers is not something that you can do for a certain amount of time–it is a company commitment. You can’t run this like an ad campaign–customers will sense when it is over and leave you. Over-exceeding expectations means treating your customers better than any other company relationship your customer has ever had.” This is something the Nordstrom executive or a manager at the Four Seasons would smile knowingly and nod at.

Saul’s company, Freshbooks.com, where he’s Chief of Magic, spends time, effort, people, and resources on creating relationships with customers. The central assumption in these relationships is that Freshbooks employees love their customers–even if the customers have something bad to say. Saul considers this a great opportunity to turn a detractor into someone who realizes how much Freshbooks loves him or her.

Read the rest over at Inc.

Chances are, if you’re not an early adopter type, you may not have heard of Twitter, the online community that is a kind of instant-messaging social network. Users send updates of up to 140 character (about 2 sentences) out to their followers–people who choose to receive their messages–and read the messages of those they follow.

Read the rest at INC’s Startup Blog.

If you have ideas on companies or tech I should cover that will benefit startup businesses, please get in touch.