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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Startup Stages
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
A summary of tips for modeling and managing cash flow at a recent bootstrappers breakfast briefing by Rick Kadet.
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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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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
An interview with Matt Perez on how Nearsoft leverages Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
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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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Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape
An actual dream I had of a tiger prowling a maze where some walls are iron bars, others are plexiglass, and strips of masking tape seem to bar some paths. I later realized it was a metaphor for three kinds of barriers that entrepreneurs need to navigate as they get a new business established.
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Better, Impossible, and Unthinkable Products
I think that there are better, impossible, and unthinkable products. Better products are “15 minutes ahead.” Impossible products relax one or two design key constraints. Unthinkable products restructure the design pattern or paradigm to achieve an unprecedented result.
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I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
It’s Rare That You Are Actually Bringing Fire To The Savages If you think you are so much smarter than your customers that you are “bringing fire to the savages” you will find it hard to learn from them and hard to actually close deals. What follows are three true stories. We Won The Argument,
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Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs
Update Feb-24-2011: Since I first wrote this in 2010 the Effectuation.Org site has been considerably upgraded and contains a lot more information on research on entrepreneurship by Saras Sarasvathy. Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneurs
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Sustaining Is More Important Than Starting
Bootstrappers are well served to focus on recurring revenue and charging early: sustaining is more important than starting.
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