Entrepreneurs starting their first business often hunt for a cookbook of recipes to make sense of a journey that is alternating between bewilderment and frustration. But startups fight for existence in a competitive and evolving environment, where changes in the technical or social substrates can invalidate their strategy or enable [...]
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. […]
This post explains the basics of intellectual property in practical terms for bootstrappers: trademarks, patents, copyright and trade secrets. An hour or two with an attorney can save you much trouble later on. […]
An exploration of the practical meaning of intellectual capital for entrepreneurs, including how to curate your experience and know-how. […]
There is a natural tendency for technical founders to base their pricing model on an engineering oriented value proposition. Looking at the full impact on business can enable higher prices, which in turn means more profit and faster growth. Wojciech Bulaty of Traffic Parrot describes the mental shift Sean Murphy [...]
This post explores meaning of financial capital for bootstrappers. It addresses the real costs of market exploration and product validation and verification. […]
New startups form in private conversations: here are some ways to make it easy for potential cofounders to find you based on the problem you are working on or customer need you plan to address. […]
Are you looking to build a business? No matter the stage you’re at, there are three kinds of business assets you will need to be successful in the long run. […]
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 [...]
Three reasons I like building WordPress websites: they are cost effective, they are scalable, and they easily support search engine optimization. […]
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. […]
Expertise in a complex skill, like the skill of entrepreneurship, requires mastery of a constellation of techniques and methods. I use an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” as a point of departure to explore the “continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to [...]
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. […]
In “The Dance of the Possible,” Scott Berkun outlines four tests for understanding the real work involved to translate observations and creative insight into a solution. […]
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. […]
Napoleon Hill wrote “The Magic Ladder to Success” in 1930. Despite being a con man and failure for most of his life, Hill was able to accurately summarize a number of common sense rules for success. I have tried to pull out some key insights in this blog post, leaving [...]
Key points from Mary Sorber’s presentation on “Qualitative Research: Problem Exploration for Lean Startups” at Lean Culture July-31-2018. […]
A Bootstrappers Breakfast is “counter-cultural” to the VC ecosystem focus at many events for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Here are seven ways that we take a very different approach to facilitating events for entrepreneurs compared to most others in Silicon Valley. […]
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 [...]
Applications that improve knowledge worker productivity have to satisfy “prepared users” not “casual users” and are especially challenge to do customer discovery and development for. With his permission, I have included William Pietri (LinkedIn williampietri) answer to a real question from an early stage entrepreneur because I found it incredibly [...]