Four Movies To Renew Your Gumption
Here are four movies that I watch when I need to refill my gumption or recover my sisu: The Verdict, Apollo 13, The Dish, and The World’s Fastest Indian.
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Startup Stages
DreamSimplicity Interviews Sean Murphy
I was recently interviewed by Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity Marketplace and the interview can be seen below and on DreamSimplicity.com. We talk about how even though each startup team is unique, they have a common set of milestones they have to achieve to move from idea to revenue. We also chat briefly about the Bootstrapper
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Cool Business Cards
In the course of my networking I meet a lot of people and get a lot of business cards – every once in a while I will get a card that really stands out. Here are three cards that lead to deeper discussion about their company and products. Not only is this business card unique,
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Ken Imboden on Lessons From MMC, Candlestick, and NuSym
Ken Imboden offers lessons learned on developing software products from managing at large firms, and successful and unsuccessful startups.
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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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Finding a Co-Founder: 3 Months Is a Long Time
This post builds on my earlier “Finding a Co-Founder” and “Compromise & Get Started” posts on the challenges with finding a co-founder for your software startup. It assumes you are working at least part time with a potential co-founder exploring if you can collaborate successfully and generate revenue from a new jointly developed product or
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Finding A Co-Founder: Compromise & Get Started
Building on yesterday’s “Finding A Co-Founder” I want to identify a couple of common challenges to getting started with people you have had prior shared success with and offer some suggestions for how to compromise and get started working with them. Reconnect with Folks You Have Successfully Collaborated With I suggested the following approach: Make
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Finding A Co-Founder
This is based on both my direct experience and stories folks have shared at the Bootstrappers Breakfast® over the last few years about finding a co-founder.
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Collecting Unpaid Bills
In 1995 I did some work for one of the early web startups in Palo Alto. They had delivered a number of database driven websites using a proprietary software technology that they had developed, and had sold the technology to several firms. But they had a problem collecting unpaid bills: they had not been paid
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Tips For Modeling & Managing Cash Flow
Tips For Modeling & Managing Cash Flow There were a number of excellent suggestions from last Tuesday’s Bootstrapper Breakfast with Rick Kadet on managing and modeling your cash flow. Rick Kadet opened with some good points about common mistakes founders make in modeling and managing cash flow: They can focus too much on the current
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A Recent Experience As A Beta User
I check out a few new products every month that I think may be of use in our practice. The following is a true story of a recent experience I had experimenting with a new B2B oriented one that I will call Hotel California. I have changed the name because I signed a license agreement
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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.
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Distant Early Warning Signs of Market Disruption
Disruption is caused by the new business models an innovation enables. A disruptive innovation can be hard to spot because competitors can offer a different value proposition, not necessarily a better one.
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Focus On a Niche Increases Your Chances For Success
A market as the set of buyers who will be guided by each other’s purchase decision for a particular product. Focus on a niche market lowers your messaging and outreach costs and increases your chances for success.
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Steve Blank Plans to Crowdsource E-Schools
Steve Blank gave a thought provoking talk at the Startup Lessons Learned Conference on “Customer Development 2.0: Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” (slides here and related blog post “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” which is part of a category of blog posts on “Durant vs. Sloan“). He also referenced Robert Shedd‘s list of startup accelerators
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Jack of All Trades
It’s easier to become very good at two or three things than the best at one specific thing: this “Jack of all Trades” strategy applies both for career and entrepreneurial endeavors.
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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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Killer Instinct Can Blind You to the Value of Partners
A “killer instinct” that allows you to focus and prioritize is helpful, but if it blinds you to win-win outcomes you will not succeed as an entrepreneur. Killer Instinct In “Killer Instinct” Rafael Corrales writes: “There are no plus-minus stats to measure a player’s ruthlessness, his desire to beat his opponent so badly he’ll need
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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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