Memorial Day 2011
On Memorial Day 2011 we commemorate those who died in the service of our country. I offer three quotations related to men giving their lives in battle for you to meditate on.
Actionable Insights For The Entrepreneurially Minded
SKMurphy’s Book Club for Business Impact provides actionable insights for the entrepreneurially minded, whether you are trying to bring change to a market or an organization. It’s a webinar / call in with a panel that has a roundtable discussion with the audience. Everyone will have a chance to contribute their experiences and lessons learned
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Giving Up Too Soon, Persisting Too Long
I took part in a number of great conversations at today’s Startup Lessons Learned Conference, probably the most common–and most vexing–issue that was discussed was whether to give up in the face of modest success. I had perhaps half a dozen conversations around “We’ve come this far and have paying customers but are not sure
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SLLConf 2011: Three Talks I Am Looking Forward To
I will be at the Startup Lessons Learned 2011 conference tomorrow. If you are there in person please say hello, I am always interested in meeting one of the baker’s dozen who read my blog. At this point the conference is sold out but it is being streamed to something like 100 locations, see http://www.sllconf.com/streaming
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George Grellas on Leadership
George Grellas left a great short essay on leadership in a comment on Hacker News. Writing in response to “Wash the Dishes When Nobody Else Will” This is reposted with his permission (re-formatted from a single block of text).
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Price, Value, and Your Prospect’s Perception of Risk
Here are a couple of rules of thumb you may find helpful in thinking about price, value, and your prospect’s perception of risk.
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Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities
Startups see fluid opportunities in dynamic environments, but no certainties before opportunities pass or the “situation changes.”
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Tristan Kromer on Businesses Models
Tristan Kromer suggests that there are many viable models for a business, all have advantages and drawbacks. Services are easy to start but hard to scale. Despite surface appearance, a software business still inventory of people, key assets in the form of ideas, and a manufacturing process in the form of software release.
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Users, Businesses, and Hobbies
I will often hear folks say “I think I can get a lot of users, I know that there is a market for this.” I worry because a market requires customers not just users: you can tell who your customer is because they pay for your product or service. When you say to yourself that
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Interview Prospects To Find Unmet Needs, Persistent Problems, and Goals at Risk
Customer understand when they have unmet needs, persistent problems, and goals and risk. They are normally very good at describing their problems and constraints on a solution but less accurate in fully specifying a solution.
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Webinar: Practical Insights From “Back of The Napkin” May 11
Whether it’s in a conversation with your team, with prospects, partners, or customers, the ability to sketch and to encourage them to collaborate on a sketch of the issue that you are discussion can be very helpful. It can be on a white board in a conference room, on a sheet of graph paper, or
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We Use a Wiki to Organize Customer Interviews
“The only certainty is a reasonable probability.” Edgar Watson Howe, “Country Town Sayings” We help clients to interview prospects in the early market for customer discovery purposes, we also help them have serious conversations with early customers periodically to capture their evolving perspective on the client’s offering. Sometimes we will do this on the client’s behalf
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Tom Van Vleck’s “3 Questions” Complement Root Cause Analysis
Tom Van Vleck has a great collection of software engineering stories on his site. One particularly good article is “Three Questions For Each Bug That You Find” which offers the following key observation: The key idea behind these questions is that every bug is a symptom of an underlying process. You have to treat the
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Quotes for Entrepreneurs–April 2011
You can follow @skmurphy to get them hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
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Stoking the Star Maker Machinery Behind The Popular App
To many of the current incubators seem focused on “on hit wonder” startups designed to be acquired quickly. Apps are the new pop songs and the incubators are the music labels, stoking the star maker machinery.
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Georgi Dagnall on Steve Blank’s Visit to April Bootstrapper Breakfast
After every Bootstrapper Breakfast® we E-mail all of the participants and ask them for “one thing you learned at the breakfast.” Georgi Dagnall left a nice comment after Steve Blank visited on Friday (I have added some links for context) Sean suggested that I read the book, Four Steps to the Epiphany written by Steve
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Larry Lang on Managing Incentives
[Note this post was written in 2011]. The recent troubles at Cisco have prompted a lot of commentary on the Cisco alumni e-mail list. One of the more thoughtful analyses was posted by Larry Lang (@llang629), who spent more than a decade at Cisco in a variety of positions. His last was as VP and
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Making the Trains Run on Time: Software Release
I recently took part in a small reunion of folks who worked on the “router software release” team at Cisco in the early years and I took it as an opportunity to jot down some rules of thumb I learned, mostly the hard way, about managing software releases. There is always a strong reason to
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Conversations Entrepreneurs Remember
We had a great Bootstrapper Breakfast® in February in Milpitas with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, speaking very candidly about the challenges of Bootstrapping Central Desktop and some lessons learned. Bob Gerughty mentioned after the meeting that he had run into someone who remembered him from a comment he made at a breakfast almost
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2nd Place in a Market vs. 2nd Place in a Lawsuit
Second place in a market can still allow a company to be profitable and growing. Second place in a lawsuit can impact not only profits and growth but viability.
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