Things I Have Learned From My Children
Things I have learned from my children: “fall down seven times, stand up eight”, athletic ability flows from practice, and patience.
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skmurphy
Startup Stages: Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, Grow
SKMurphy’s Startup Stages: Idea, Open for Business, Early Customers, Finding Your Niche, and Scaling Up also map to Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, and Grow.
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Matt Wensing On Making the Transition to Growth
Matt Wensing On Making the Transition to Growth Stormpulse has gone from an idea bootstrapped on founder savings and credit cards, to a project funded by friends and family rounds, to a small business strengthened by angel money, to a company that’s raised “meaningful” capital (our last round was just over $2 million). Here’s what
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Brad Pierce: Preserve Context in Writing to Manage Interruptions
Manage interruptions by writing down enough context to continue later: organized notes must detail status and next steps. Brad Pierce: Preserve Context in Writing to Manage Interruptions On longer time scales, when you must drop something for a while, it’s important, before doing so, to leave behind enough context for yourself to swap it back
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Tools for Buzzword Compliant Business Models
A collection of humorous tools that generate buzzword compliant business models.
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We Help Teams of Experts Find Leads and Close Deals
If you have demonstrated domain knowledge and expertise, a plan for having a significant impact on a customer problem, and are in the process of exploring the early market for your offering or trying to build on a handful of early customers, we can help find leads and close deals. The majority of our clients
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Tristan Kromer: You Can Tell a Good Advisor by Their Questions
Three interesting answers from Tristan Kromer’s interview with the folks at Startup Commons Startup Commons: What’s the best way to get started? Tristan Kromer: Find someone you really want to help. Someone in pain. That’s your vision. Helping someone and solving a real problem. Find team members with complementary skill sets who are able to challenge
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Neal Stephenson on Christianity, Grace, Sincerity, and Seeing Things as They Are
I have started to reserve Sundays to write on spirituality, charity, and a higher moral purpose to our life as entrepreneurs. I was struck by the quote that Stephenson puts in Juanita’s mouth in Snow Crash and have concluded that he is performing a similar ministry in his science fiction writing. There is a sense
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Q: We Already Have a Prototype, Can We Still Do Customer Development?
Product-market fit is not a ratchet: competitive response, new entrants, changes in technology and customer preference require ongoing customer development. You will need to continue to do customer development–and customer discovery for that matter–even after you have a first prototype, an MVP, early customers, and an established niche. Markets and competitors don’t stand still, no
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John Gardner: Leaders Detect and Act on the Weak Signals of the Future
John Gardner outlines how leaders detect and act on weak signals of the future by looking beyond the horizon and planning for renewal.
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Tony Schwartz: Notice the Good, Cultivate Good Habits, Slow Down, and Do the Right Thing
Tony Schwartz wrote a great post on “Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned So Far.” Here are my top four from his list (original numbering preserved).
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Founder Story: Steve DiBartolomeo of Artwork Conversion Software
Steve DiBartolomeo is co-founder of Artwork Conversion Software, Inc., an EDA software firm headquartered in Santa Cruz CA with a development office in Manhattan Beach, CA. Founded in 1989, the company develops CAD translation programs, CAD viewers, plotting software and IC packaging software. Artwork has over 5000 customers worldwide including Alcatel, AMD, Applied Materials, Agere,
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Q: Pricing Professional Services
Q: I am starting a service business that will help clients with advertising and search engine marketing but I am not sure how to price my services. Do you have any suggestions for how to look at pricing professional services?
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Kurt Vonnegut: Replace the Code of Hammurabi with the Sermon on the Mount
Excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement speech at Agnes Scott College, May 5, 1999. He suggests we replace the Code of Hammurabi with forgiveness.
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Q: How To Speed Up Early Trials, Adoption, and Sales
Early trials allow you to tune your message, adjust your view and selection criteria for a target customer, and refine your feature set.
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Write Down Key Commitments And Questions That Need Answers
Managing key commitments to customers is essential to closing deals and preventing churn. Getting a customer the correct answer to a question is a critical sales and support skill: the first step is to write down the question when you don’t know the answer.
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Jerome K. Jerome’s View on Groundhog Day (Replaying Your Life)
Jerome K. Jerome’s “On The Disadvantage Of Not Getting What One Wants” offers a somewhat grim view the wish for replaying your life. On The Disadvantage Of Not Getting What One Wants “Ah, me!” said the good old gentleman, “if only I could live my life again in the light of experience.” Now as he
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Don’t Waste Time Painting Tom Sawyer’s Fence: Proving Someone Wrong Is A Poor Motivator
Don’t waste time painting Tom Sawyer’s fence: proving someone wrong is actually a poor source of motivation. It’s OK to ignore conventional wisdom, but don’t get trapped into doing someone else’s work (or building their platform) just to prove them wrong. Build something instead of trying to win an argument.
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Join Us For An Independence Day 2014 Bootstrapper Breakfast In Palo Alto
The first Friday in July falls on the 4th so we are going to hold our “First Friday Palo Alto Bootstrapper Breakfast” at 8am at Hobees. We are meeting on July 4 (we have done it twice in the last 7 years) but we are pushing the start time back to 8am if you want to
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Q: How Much Effort Should I Invest in Automated Testing For An MVP?
Q: I have worked on large enterprise software systems but am now struggling working at a startup creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I am a big believer in BDD and TDD, so I’ve developed an automated testing suite for the MVP that has high coverage and great specifications describing and asserting its behaviors in
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