Entrepreneurial Motivation
Tim O’Reilly offers three ways to sustain entrepreneurial motivation: work on what matters to you, create more value than you capture, and take the long view.
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4 Finding your Niche
We Don’t Encourage Individuals to Form a Startup
Real entrepreneurs don’t need encouragement to form a startup–although they may benefit from outside perspectives on their plans. Encouraging non-entrepreneurs to form a startup does them a disservice.
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Cultivating Communities to Get More Customers
Attracting new customers is at the heart of every business. Active participation in a community can make you more visible and allows you to demonstrate expertise.
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Jeff Bezos on Strategic Planning
Excerpts that I found thought provoking and useful from an interview with Jeff Bezos in the October 2007 Harvard Business Review.
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Conserving Trust in a Downturn
A lot of is written these days about how to conserve cash in a downturn. In particular the need to cut expenses by cutting headcount and unnecessary fill-in-the-blank spending. But conserving trust is equally important. If you have been bootstrapping and only increasing expenses in response to revenue (versus in anticipation of revenue) then your
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Doing Less with Less
Startups survive because they can live on the scraps of a market (a niche) that larger competitors ignore or would be unable to pursue profitably. This is doing less with less.
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Using the Downturn to Launch Your Consulting Career
The last six weeks or so I have encountered a number of folks who have decided to use the downturn to launch their consulting career. Typically they have been encouraged in this by their former employer who has given them a large check a lot of free time. But some have chafed at cubicle life
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How To Measure Your Lead Generation Effectiveness
Many start-up founders believe that the sales process should be this straightforward: Get the phone to ring (or e-mail inbox or skype or web contact form) Tell your prospect about your offering Take the order Alas it is normally not this simple, especially if you are selling to businesses. We do encounter some startups that
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Getting Your Startup Through the Downturn is a Marathon Not a Sprint
Getting Your Startup Through the Downturn is a Marathon Not a Sprint The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. Martin Seligman
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Entrepreneurial Focus: Right Layer, Right Problem, Right Time
Entrepreneurial focus means answering three related questions: what are we good at, how can we tell and how do we measure it, who wants it and how do they value it?
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Non-Customers Are Where Important Changes Often Start
There is a risk of complacency for start-ups (and even larger firms) who have achieved a level of security in their first niche. Markets change, consumer needs change, and you need to continue to explore opportunities to sell your offering to new customers–non-customers–even though it’s a much harder sales process than a renewal, upgrade, or
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Please Be Healthy
I sent the following E-Mail after a series of conversations and E-Mail exchanges with a founder struggling with entrepreneurial burnout. I encourage him to “please be healthy.” I thought it was apropos the current angst in Silicon Valley.
User Communities Are Critical For Complex Products
User communities are not just a low cost way to market and support your product, they are essential to complex technology products.
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Herb Reiter Interview on Fostering Static Timing Analysis Adoption
An interview in 2008 with Herb Reiter of EDA 2 ASIC Consulting, Inc. on Static Timing Analysis and how to introduce it into a design flow.
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Networking and Referrals
This is a guest post on networking and referrals by Steve Moore of SPMSolutions. Networking and Referrals Networking and referrals remain the primary marketing strategy for many community-based small businesses (especially those with limited budgets). In contrast, many technology-oriented small businesses rely more upon online forums, social networking sites, user groups, etc., to reach potential
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What Can I Do to Build Referrals?
Consulting is a referral-driven business. Here are four things you can do today to build referrals.
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Prioritizing Your Target Market Niches
Cheryl Downing suggests you explore three market niches to find your target market niche.
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Iterating Towards Bethlehem: Michael Sippey at SVPMA 8/2/2006
In “Iterating Towards Bethlehem” Michael Sippey addressed making the shift as a product manager. from packaged software to hosted services.
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