Keeping the Ball Rolling With Prospects
Keeping the ball rolling with prospects requires a mix of empathy for their situation and a project management mindset.
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Startup Stages
Narrowcast Early Product Announcements
My bias is to “narrowcast” in the beginning. Choose websites, forums, newsgroups that are tightly focused on your target market. You attract less competition, your message cost is normally cheaper per prospect, and you often learn faster by taking part in the conversations in a focused community. It’s not so much about being stealthy as
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Quick Thoughts on Selling For Software Engineers
Some quick thoughts on selling for software engineers. Sell results, not method. Land and Expand. Get clarity on the customer’s view of the problem. Listen.
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Three Tips for Small Talk and Casual Conversation
“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.” Wilson Mizner One of the more challenging aspects of entrepreneurship for engineers is the need to be able to engage in “small talk” and casual conversation with strangers. I have three suggestions that go to state of mind more than
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Nomadic Entrepreneurs In Indigenous Markets
David Mamet in a 1997 interview with Richard Covington suggests a paradigm for entrepreneurs based on behavior of nomadic people in a new location: make a new solution that hasn’t occurred to the indigenous people because the indigenous people have been there too long.
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Build On Your Passion With A Basic Model And Numbers
What follows is a chat transcript from an hour long conversation I had with a entrepreneur recently. I have cleaned up all of our typos and removed or modified some identifying information. The basic business was for a website to arrange services for travelers. I wanted the entrepreneur to move beyond his passion for the
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Good Decision, Bad Outcome
You never have complete information, if you do it’s a choice not a decision. You have to evaluate a decision in the context of the information that was available at the time. “Good Decision, Bad Outcome” When I first heard someone use this phrase it took a few weeks to sink in. Too often we
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What To Do When An Early Prospect is Excited
Here is another excerpt from my September interview with Gabriel Weinberg. This one is focused on what to do when you encounter a B2B prospect who is excited about your product and this is only the first or second time this has happened with someone who wasn’t a friend or prior associate. The short answer
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Scope and Scale of Plans and Activities
Inspired by Eames’ “Powers of Ten” I explore the scope and scale of plans and activities based on duration. I take a one hour duration as the starting point and look at a factor or 10,000 in each direction: from 1/300 of a second to 10,000 hours.
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Entrepreneurs Still Welcome: 700 Blog Posts In Four Years
A recap of the inaugural blog post for SKMurphy blog 4 years ago and a roundup of lessons learned writing 700 posts since.
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Ash Maurya on “Running Lean”
Ash Maurya (@AshMaurya) has released the first two chapters of his new book “Running Lean” and here are my first impressions.
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Cold Calling Won’t Find Your First Business Customer
I meet teams trying to cold call for their first business customer and I just haven’t seen it work; the trust issues cripple them. Here is a relevant excerpt from Gabriel Weinberg’s interview with me for his traction book.
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The Limits of Legal Self-Help
Every bootstrapper has a limited budget for attorney’s fees. Attorneys can help you foresee problems and craft contract language, which looks remarkably similar to English but is in fact code that is executed by the legal system. Use them to protect valuable assets–intellectual property, source code, revenue streams–not create them. A small digression If you
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We Cannot Sate Your Hunger For Certainty But We Can Increase Your Odds of Success
A hunger for certainty will not help an entrepreneur make timely decisions or manage the level of ambiguity and uncertainty they need to navigate through.
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3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Target Customer is Key Initial Value
The first 3 unknowns for a startup are Customers, Features, and Message. Of these the target customer is the key variable to lock down first.
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Gabriel Weinberg Interviews Me For His Traction Book
Gabriel Weinberg is a serial entrepreneur (latest startup: DuckDuckGo), a Hacker Angel, insightful blogger, and frequent contributor to Hacker News. He is writing a book on how startups get traction and interviewing folks like Patrick McKenzie to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was delighted when he approached me to take part
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Appreciate Why Prospects Say “Your Baby Is Ugly”
When a prospect criticizes your product, or your suggestion for a solution, don’t react as if they said, “Your baby is ugly.” Appreciate their candor, make sure you understand their need, and probe for what’s wrong or needs improvement in your offering.
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Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption
A Chalk Talk on “Managing Risk In Technology Adoption” that covers some of key challenges technology providers have with getting companies to use their products.
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3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Customers, Features, Message
We posted the interview I did with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity about a month ago but in the last two days I have had two people comment to me directly and one tweet about my “three equations and three unknowns” answer: customers, features, message.
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Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups Part 2
Ed Weissman is a prolific contributor to Hacker News, this post collects some insights he has offered on B2B.
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