A Holistic Approach to Launching a Bootstrapped Startup
We outline the process of launching a bootstrapped startup, from creating an idea, to forming a team, to proving viability.
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3 Early Customer Stage
A Practical Introduction to Social Capital for Entrepreneurs
This is a practical overview of social capital, an essential concept for entrepreneurs despite being hard to measure. I offer suggestions for growing your business network, and enhancing your reputation, explaining why increasing social capital creates value for your startup.
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William Eleazar Barton: The Parable of the Icebergs and the Fog
There are several insights for bootstrappers in William Eleazar Barton’s “The Icebergs and the Fog.” It’s a “Safed the Sage” parable published in 1925
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40 Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews
This post on B2B customer development interviews builds on one of my most popular. If you would like help preparing for customer development interviews or reviewing results from recent interviews, contact us. Here are my lessons learned from taking part in interviews where the startup planned to offer a product or service to a business.
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Mary Sorber: Raw Pasta is Not Enough
It’s easy for the product team to fixate on the core technology that enables a product and lose sight of what’s needed for the “whole product.” This article is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Mary Sorber that started with her metaphor that raw pasta is not enough to create a successful Italian restaurant.
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Competitive Intelligence for Bootstrapping Startups
A summary of my personal experience and our firm’s perspective on what practical steps early stage startups should take for competitive intelligence.
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Benefits of SKMurphy Mastermind for Entrepreneurs
An SKMurphy Mastermind Group is an ongoing series of facilitated conversations among serious entrepreneurs. It enables collaboration on problems and opportunities and fosters joint accountability around effective ongoing action.
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Octavia Butler: Cultivate Habits That Enable Persistence and Learning
Octavia Butler rejects inspiration, talent, and imagination as essential to creative pursuits and suggests that habits that enable persistence and learning are the essential element.
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Q: What Makes a Product Attract Early Adopters?
The following is an edited version of a recent online conversation I had with a team of bootstrappers about how to make their product attract early adopters.
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Q: Help! I Can Only Find Laggards in My Target Customer Segment
Entrepreneurs are often quick to characterize prospects who don’t see the benefits of their new shiny technology as laggards. Sometimes that’s the case, but often the product presentation does not present benefits that are either relevant or compelling. Laggards get a lot of bad press in the startup community, but their reasons not to change
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Q: Kissing Frogs
Finding the right customers is not just a matter of kissing frogs until one turns into a prince, but a methodical search guided by an experimentation perspective where your selection criteria are continually refined and re-evaluated.
Lee Carter on the Value of Direct Observation
A Q&A with Lee Carter where we explore the value of direct observation of customer environments to complement customer interviews. Lee shares details of a project he worked on where direct observation provided a valuable complement to a basic product specification.
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Failed Fast, Now What?
If you have “failed fast” it’s still possible to recover as long as your team has shared trust and a sense of common purpose. Failed Fast, Now What? Q: We started out with a mission that we found compelling and executed pretty well against it but now we are out of money and cannot figure
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Why I Enjoy Working With Teams of Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs
A personal note on why I enjoy working with teams of bootstrapping entrepreneurs and the kinds of problems we help them solve.
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Do You Ever Get the Feeling That Everything You Know is Wrong?
My longer answer to “Do you ever get the feeling that everything you know is wrong?” The short answer is “yes, every few years.”
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Concierge MVP or Service-First Forces You To Be Your Own Test Pilot
A concierge MVP or service -first approach delivers the benefits that your product offers as a service or consulting first, charging for the result not your time.
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Professional Services Innovation: Customer Insight, Expertise, and Technology
Professional services innovation requires deepening your understanding of customer needs and emerging problem areas, deepening expertise, and incorporating technology and specialized tools into service delivery.
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Q: How Do I Plan for Pivots or Even Shutting Down My Startup?
It’s useful to explore several paths in parallel and have a default list of pivots ready of your first few efforts don’t bear fruit.
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College Graduation: From Traveling Station to Station to Navigating a Borderless Sea
David Brooks offers a metaphor for college graduation as a transition from traveling station to station to navigating a borderless sea. The same can be said for making the transition from employee to entrepreneur.
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Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement
In February 2010 Derek Sivers gave a great talk on “How to Start a Movement” that offered some important tips for leaders and but offered the surprising conclusion that concluded that the most important and underappreciated key to a successful movement was the follower’s courage to follow and ability to show others how to follow.
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