Shifting from Specialist to Founder
Shifting from technical specialist to founder brings a bottom line responsibility and the need to manage a host of new challenges.
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Startup Advice Column
Q: Cofounder Resigned and Surrendered his Equity
An entrepreneur writes, “After four months my talented and hardworking cofounder resigned and surrendered all of his equity. How do I convince him to come back?”
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Q: How do I tell if I am scaling prematurely?
It’s possible that you are scaling prematurely, but it’s become a catch all risk that bears more scrutiny. This conversation is condenses from a real email exchange with an entrepreneur
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Q: I Am Afraid to Take a Vacation
This is based on some emails and conversations with a successful client who had grown his business but was afraid to take a vacation because he was not delegating very effectively to his team.
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Q: How Can I Help My Father Grow His Business?
Working with family can be challenging. A young man asks “how can I help my father?” He can start by appreciating his father’s accomplishments.
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Q: I Cannot Get Prospects Interested in Conversations
There are many reason it can be difficult to get prospects interested in conversations, much less your product. Here are a few along with a suggested sequence of steps to determine their needs.
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Q: Should I Leave Medical School For a Startup?
SKMurphy startup advice column: a reader asks how to decide whether to leave medical school to pursue a startup idea.
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Q: Should I Pre-Sell My Product?
Bootstrappers can be tempted to pre-sell their product, accepting payment before it’s complete. This can work but it often leads to tears. There are more effective options
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Time to Market S01E11 – Mastering Product Demos
Sean Murphy and Etienne Garbugli offer tips for entrepreneurs to master effective product demos.
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How Founders Should Should Manage Startup Runway
Using 14 Ways B2B Entrepreneurs Can Extend Their Startup Runway to Go the Distance as a point of departure, Etienne Garbugli and Sean Murphy offer practical advice to entrepreneurs on how to manage startup runway.
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What is Social Capital?
In his book “Working Capital Vol 1: It Takes More Than Money,” Sean Murphy defines social capital as the set of business relationships established with customers, partners, suppliers, and prospects. What is Social Capital? In an excerpt from Sean Murphy’s book “Working Capital Vol 1- It Takes More Than Money”, he defines social capital as
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Q: Can you recommend an accountant for business taxes?
Need an accountant for business taxes? Here are accountants recommended by Bootstrappers Breakfast members for startups and small businesses.
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Q: How Does a First Time Founder Learn Sales?
You learn sales by doing sales: as a founder you must sell. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.
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Q: How Can I Manage the Stress of a Startup?
Tips to cut the stress of a startup: plan for learning, take time to recharge, join a peer support group, don’t compare yourself to others.
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Q: I need an attorney who works with startups who don’t have a ton of cash
If you need an attorney because you want to initiate a lawsuit, please consider the opportunity cost very carefully before proceeding. The time to hire an attorney is before you sign an agreement, not after.
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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: Free Advice and Doing Business With Friends
Doing business with friends presents a number of challenges for entrepreneurs, as does setting limits on asking for “free advice” to know when to pay.
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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.
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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