Start With a List of Customers and Problems That Build on Your Experience and Relationships
Identify what is unlikely to change: e.g. problem area, type of customer. Build on experience. Join communities that focus on these.
Startup Stages
Michael Ellsberg: Four Reasons Why Passive Income Is a Destructive Fantasy
It’s hard work not passive income that allows you to find your life purpose. I make a distinction between wanting to move beyond running a services business where you bill by the hour to either selling results or selling a product and entrepreneurs attracted to the passive income fantasies of the “Four Hour Work Week.”
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Ten Mistakes Early Stage Bootstrappers Often Make
Ten Mistakes Early Stage Bootstrappers Often Make: In the last eight years I have moderated several hundred Bootstrappers Breakfasts. After doing a hundred or so and working with many clients who were bootstrapping I came up with a checklist for common mistakes bootstrappers and bootstrapping teams make in their first year or so.
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Cultivating Mindfulness
Cultivating mindfulness requires you to maintain situational awareness and realize when your reflexes may trigger a reaction that is not as thoughtful as the situation requires.
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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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Tools for Buzzword Compliant Business Models
A collection of humorous tools that generate buzzword compliant business models.
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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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Discovery Kanban Allows Firms to Balance Delivery and Discovery
I believe that Patrick Steyaert’s Discovery Kanban offers a critical perspective on how large organizations can cultivate lean innovation methods for product delivery beyond isolated spike efforts or innovation colonies.
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A Simple Checklist for Introducing a Collaboration Application
We work with several teams who have launched or are launching an application that makes a team or group more productive. Here are a couple of suggestions for things to consider. Be compatible with the status quo if at all possible Collaboration or workflow applications that require at least two people to adopt in order
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Successful Bootstrappers Are Trustworthy Salespeople Committed to Customer Satisfaction
If you want to be a succeed as a bootstrapper, start with what you’ve got: you have an insight into an opportunity, a marketing edge, a particular problem where you’re going to bring distinctive value.
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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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Dan Scheinman’s Blue Ocean Venture Strategy: Target Entrepreneurs Over 35
Dan Scheinman (@dscheinm) graduated from Duke Law School in 1988 and went to work as an associate at DLA Piper before joining the Cisco legal department. Once inside he worked his way up to General Counsel, then ran corporate development which included managing minority investments and acquisitions, and finally was general manager for Cisco’s Media Solutions
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Ten Principles for Trust and Integrity from Adventures in Missions
Shared trust and integrity form the basis for the key resource in a bootstrapping startup: morale. Founders must foster actions and behaviors that build trust in the early days if they hope to create a startup with a culture that will enable it to prosper.
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Bootstrappers Turn Time Into Resources and Possibilities For Customers
In “Our ‘For Impact’ Culture Code,” Possible Health outlined a number of operating principles and cultural values that are also very appropriate for bootstrappers.
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D. H. Lawrence’s “Escape” Offers a Vision of the Entrepreneur’s Journey
D. H. Lawrence’s “Escape” Offers a Vision of the Entrepreneur’s Journey
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Advice on Crowdfunding from Matt Oscamou, Mark Palaima, and Noah Dentzel
Some advice from a couple of founders that ran successful crowdfunding campaigns: Matt Oscamou, CEO of Frontier Bites, Mark Palaima, Distinguished Engineer at Avagent, and Noah Dentzel, CEO of Nomad Goods.
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Q: How Much Attention Should I Pay To Potential Competition?
Instead of looking left and right for potential competition, I would walk around the table and look at the situation from your prospect’s perspective.
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Q: Can We Launch First and Ask Customer Discovery Questions Later?
Don’t do a big launch before you have get answers to your customer discovery questions or you are running a very expensive test of your key customer and market hypotheses.
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Building a Business Requires Building Trust
One of the hallmarks for success in a business-to-business market is the ability to form personal relationships as well as professional business relationships. Both require building trust. I am always dismayed when I read advice that advocates bait and switch or other forms of con games that erode trust and make it difficult for any
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