How Can I Make This Blog More Useful  for Entrepreneurs?

This was my 2010 plan for making this blog more useful for entrepreneurs. (I have updated it Apr-8-2023 to reflect my progress thirteen years later.)

How Can I Make This Blog More Useful  for Entrepreneurs?

I started blogging on this site October 1, 2006  with “Welcome Entrepreneurs” and have written almost 600 blog posts since then. My opening paragraphs are still applicable to today:

This blog is dedicated to entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey.  Both as individuals, in teams, and collectively we all hope to create a better world for our customers, our employees, our stakeholders, and our children.

My focus is helping startups find early customers for emerging technologies. This is very different from the traditional sales and marketing at established firms. Correctly identifying early customers who can be references to others is key to introducing emerging technologies.

Although emerging technologies change the rules and often enable far reaching growth most early adopters are focused on near term risks and benefits, and it is to those concerns entrepreneurial teams need to speak to get a foothold. The decision to act as a “beta” software site or early user of new software tools often resembles a hiring decision (does the prospective customer want to “hire the team”) more closely than a technology adoption decision.

Emerging technology marketing is a distinct domain from classical product marketing, most of the traditional market assessment techniques are not effective: focus groups, surveys, etc… Emerging markets require a strong commitment by the founding team to

  • appreciating the prospective customer and customer’s view,
  • rapidly evolving the product specification in response to feedback and customer experience,
  • ongoing refinement and delivery of customer focused solutions.

Frankly I think that there is a lot of content that entrepreneurs would benefit from if only they could find it.  One approach to addressing this need is to convert this blog into a book or two. Here is where I can use your help.

I am currently re-reading the blog from the beginning with an eye to extracting some key themes that would serve as a focus for a chapter or two.  I think I want to use our “Startup Stages” as one model for organizing topics, here are three others:

  • Looking at Team, Technology, and Traction as the building blocks for a bootstrapped startup.
  • Looking at “Working Capital” as including not only financial capital and likely revenue but also intellectual capital (know how, experience, expertise)  at an individual and founding team level  and social capital (trust, connections, social navigation skills) at an individual and team level.
  • The importance of customer development proceeding in parallel with product development until the startup  can make the transition to  a proven business model with the completion of customer validation and technology proof of concept.

Here is where I can use your help. Please contact me with any blog posts that you feel should be included  as part of a chapter, any entrepreneurial stumbling blocks that bootstrapping entrepreneurs need to overcome you would like to see addressed, any blog posts you have found to be useless or misleading that you would want to see omitted or reworked extensively before they were included, and any other suggestions you have for extracting a useful narrative out of this set of 600 blog posts.

Update April-8-2023: Progress Report

Progress Update on Making SKMurphy Blog Useful for EntrepreneursThe original title was “Mining the Archives of This blog” and the first sentence was “Turn this into a list of good blog posts.”  An earlier draft was titled “I need your advice on converting this blog into a book.” I have taken a number of steps to make it more useful for entrepreneurs.

  • I finished the first volume in the Working Capital Series in 2020 and am getting ready to publish the second volume in a few weeks.
  • I have added 1500 posts to the 600 posts I had completed in 2010.
  • We have published a newsletter since 2015
  • I have formalized my occasional “quotes for entrepreneurs” blog posts into a regular monthly post. I tweet the quotes all month and then collect them in round up at month end.

Please contact me with any questions you would like to see addressed or suggestions for how to improve this blog to make it more useful for entrepreneurs.

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Image Credit @LizAndMollie https://www.lizandmollie.com

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