Moving Cash Into & Out of Your Bootstrapped Startup
Here are five tips for moving cash into and out of your bootstrapped startup.
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2 Open for Business Stage
Innovation Needs Starvation, Pressure, and a New Perspective
Successful innovation results when entrepreneurs manage their own shortcomings, find a problem they care about, and approach it from different angles with small safe-to-fail experiments. Dave Snowden on Culture and Innovation Dave Snowden has a thought provoking post on Culture and Innovation where he identified three necessary, but not sufficient conditions for innovation to take
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Common Mistakes in New Product Introduction Demos
A baker’s dozen of common mistakes that I have seen founders make preparing and delivering new product introduction demos and presentations.
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The Business is Everyone’s Business (Part 2)
To grow the business founders must assess the task relevant maturity of each employee’s experience with a particular task to manage them effectively.
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The Business is Everyone’s Business
Startups face time pressure and resource scarcity, they need to cultivate effective collaboration among everyone on the team to compensate. They need to act as if the business is everyone’s business. Jack Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” offers some useful models for fostering a shared understanding of the current challenges to enable effective joint
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Early Proposals: Avoiding Consulting for Free
A lot of bootstrappers start out by selling their product or services to friends or people they know and/or have worked with in the past. One of the early thresholds a team crosses is making the transition to “selling to strangers” (see the “Startup Maturity Checklist” for some relevant questions) and they can get tripped
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Early Bird for Jan-2010 “Idea to Revenue” Ends Next Week
Just a quick reminder, the early bird rate ends next week for our Jan 12, 2010 Idea to Revenue workshop in Redwood Shores, CA. If you are in formation or the early days of your startup this is a good opportunity to spend four hours on your business with your team members. We help you
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George Grellas on Insightful vs. “Window Dressing” Advisory Boards
George Grellas offered some great advice on the difference between insightful and “window dressing” advisory boards on Hacker News I have reprinted here with his permission
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Time is the Limiting Resource for Bootstrappers, Not Money
I think a bootstrapper’s true scarce resource is time. Determining how to be most effective with how you spend your time is more important than spending too many cycles on trying to save nickels. As a side effect of cutting out ineffective activities you will tend to cut unnecessary expenses. “Lost wealth may be replaced
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Eleven Work Weeks–Or Less–Left in 2009
I blogged about end of year issues last November in “6 Work Weeks or Less in 2008” and I thought I would issue the “Warning Dates in Calendar are Closer Than They Appear” a little earlier this year because a lot of new businesses need to take action in the next few weeks to get
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Sign-up for Software Startup Checklist Seminar at Silicon Valley Code Camp
With Athol Foden‘s encouragement I have submitted the following session (links added) for this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp: Software Startup Maturity Checklist This session is for both aspiring and active entrepreneurs. We will walk through a 36 point checklist that covers Product Development, Customer Development, and Business Operations. You will leave with a better
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Website Peer Review at PATCA June 11
We are facilitating another website peer review Thursday June 11 at PATCA. At our April 17 website peer review, we were asked by Jerry Rice to produce a similar event for PATCA and were happy to oblige. Theresa is a member of PATCA and regularly attends their events. She blogged about “Three Reasons to Attend
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Athol Foden at Friday May 8 Bootstrapper Breakfast in Milpitas
Athol Foden of Brighter Naming is our guest speaker Friday May 8 for the Bootstrapper Breakfast™ at 7:30am at the Omega Restaurant in Milpitas. Athol has over 16 years of experience helping clients name companies, products, services, and taglines. Athol’s opening remarks will be followed by a question and answer session on developing the right
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Fewer of You Will Be Listening To Someone Else
I worked at Monolithic Memories from 1984 until 1988, in 1985 Irwin Federman, who was CEO at the time announced that the company was informally banning meetings on Fridays. It seemed reasonable to me and I thought it would probably make us more productive. A few weeks later he announced that the company was going
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William Feather on “Dead Business”
William Feather’s “Dead Business” details the stark differences between a going concern and all the agreements and understandings that have been reached to make it viable, and a bankrupt one.
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5 Tips For Writing a Startup’s First Backgrounder
Focus on establishing your team as trustworthy and dependable. The biggest question in a prospect’s mind is how your team will you perform when things go wrong. Stress earlier engagements with the problem you help your customers solve. Make this “phase two” of efforts to solve these problems, building on earlier relevant experience and accomplishments.
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Cisco Presents Collaboration Technology as Sufficiently Advanced
I worked at Cisco for more than a decade in two stints between 1990 and 2003–taking time off from 1995-98 to work with a number of web startups–so I was intrigued to see John Chamber’s picture on the cover of the December issue of Fast Company. In the feature article by Ellen McGrit titled “Revolution
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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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Unfamiliar Pain
I had an unfamiliar pain recently. It was sharp, sudden, and unexpected: I ended up talking to my doctor about it. I have been trying to understand why it was more frightening, even though it was less painful than many other problems I have experienced.
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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