Founder: Sean Murphy’s advice to “zoom in for traction” encouraged me to shift my focus from a region to a single city. This allowed me to generate references that encouraged other prospects to sign up.” […]
Rob Fitzpatrick, author of the Mom Test, offers some evergreen advice on mistakes bootstrappers should avoid in 2021 (especially if they have not made already and won’t see them coming.) […]
Work with trusted partners open kimono: disclose relevant financials, plans, and internal processes to increase synergy. Play a long game. […]
This is a practical overview of social capital, an essential concept for bootstrappers 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. […]
The Cult of Done Manifesto offers thirteen principles for getting things done. I found them useful to avoiding procrastination and perfectionism. Here are the principles along with my commentary and suggestions for entrepreneurs. […]
Business leaders today are faced with business challenges and a level of uncertainty that is unprecedented in recent memory. Established approaches and well-tried options no longer work, forcing us to make business decisions in uncertain times. This article collects some useful tips for making better business decisions that I have [...]
Alan Marnett published eleven “Rules for a Scientist’s Life” in 2013. It’s a good list that can be applied to entrepreneurs as well. […]
A collection of practical suggestions for getting work done curated from a roundtable conversation among entrepreneurs at an Oct-25-2019 Bootstrappers Breakfast. […]
David Jeske divides the agile principles into high level, individual empowerment, and contract development. He embraces the first two, rejects the third. […]
Paul Tyma defines the Old Man’s Business Model as taking the sure way, even though it may be longer than shortcuts that may not work. Tyma calls a “trade-off of investment up-front versus brute-force hope.” The “old man” makes an investment up front instead of hoping a quick and dirty [...]
Jason Roberts 2010 “Luck Surface Area” model explains the need for entrepreneurs to combine time spent doing and developing expertise with time spent communicating with others. It’s a very useful and actionable insight. Unfortunately, the diagram he chose to illustrate the model assumes that entrepreneurs have an unlimited amount of [...]
A selection of quotes from Naval Ravikant's tweetstream on "How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)" inverted as advice on how to avoid bad luck. Naval Ravikant On Avoiding Bad Luck Earlier this year Naval Ravikant posted a tweet stream of tweets on the theme of "How to Get Rich [...]
My longer answer to “Do you ever get the feeling that everything you know is wrong?” The short answer is “yes, every few years.” […]
It’s been 17 years since the Sep-11-2001 attack and almost 77 years since the Dec-7-1941 Pearl Harbor attack that started World War 2. Both attacks achieved strategic surprise and had substantial long-term effects. What follows are some excerpts from the forward by Thomas Schelling Roberta Wohlstetter’s book “Pearl Harbor: Warning [...]
Two folks in different Mastermind groups added newborns to their households in the last few months experiencing all of the joys and anxieties and frustrations and insights they bring. I thought it would be fun to compare a startup’s first product with a couple’s first child. […]
Key points from Mary Sorber’s presentation on “Qualitative Research: Problem Exploration for Lean Startups” at Lean Culture July-31-2018. […]
Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel, shared a candid assessment of mistakes he made in the first 18 months of the six startups he has founded in “The first 18 months of starting a company: it’s life or death.” Here are 7 key pieces of advice that highlight mistakes first founders [...]
David L. Akin is the Director, SpaceSystems Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He is also the author of “Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design.” He lists more than 40 laws: I selected ten when I blogged about “Applying Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design To Startups” here are six more that [...]
This blog post is an overview of a series of blog posts on “The Shape of Firms to Come.” It’s an attempt to outline what I believe are key values that businesses will embrace to endure over the next 25 years. […]
Safia Abdalla (@captainsafia) wrote a list of 24 “Things I Learned in 2017.” Here are ten that really resonated with me. […]