What Can I Do to Build Referrals?
Consulting is a referral-driven business. Here are four things you can do today to build referrals.
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Startup Stages
What was Heroic Must Become Routine
I gave a talk on October 16 of last year at the KASE/KIN Entrepreneur Academy on “After Launch, Now What.” My answer was “What was once heroic must become routine” (podcast is here, it’s about 16 minutes if you would like to listen).
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Paul Graham’s Six Principles for Making New Things
This article compares Paul Graham’s “Six Principles for Making New Things” with Bob Bemer’s “Do Something Small But Useful Now”, Gary Hamel’s Innovation Hacker, and Peter Drucker’s list of seven places to search systematically for opportunities.
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Focus On Your Prospect’s Pain Not The Brilliance of Your Product Idea
Many entrepreneurs find themselves in the grip of an idea, captivated by its seeming brilliance. But success comes from understanding a prospect’s pain.
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Three Tips for Minimizing Misunderstandings Among Co-Founders
Here are three tips for minimizing misunderstandings among co-founders: get clarity on the problem before arguing over solutions, maintain full transparency about spending, and work from a one-page operating plan.
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Fostering Technology Adoption: Early Customers & Early Revenue
Software companies typically have to convince prospects to adopt new technologies based on their shared history, their service track record, and their ability to accurately predict and deliver real results that overcome the cost and friction of adopting new tools and methodologies. There are a number of lessons we draw on to help startups fostering
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Seeing The Elephant: The Entrepreneur’s Challenge of Integrating Advice
To “see the elephant” entrepreneurs must work toward a holistic perspective by integrating advice and conflicting views from a variety of sources.
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3 Tips for Entrepreneurs Planning a Startup
How do you plan when you are in a small software startup? Big company methods are not a good fit. Here are three tips for planning a startup.
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Social Networks for Running your Business
Here are the social networks I participate in. I find them a good source for practical advice for running my business. LinkedIn www.linkedin.com Intuit’s Jumpup www.jumpup.com Bank of America Small Business http://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com Bootstrappers Breakfast www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com Check me out, my screen name is tshafer.
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Quotes on Operational Excellence
I collect quotes for entrepreneurs, here are a set quotes on operational excellence. You can follow @skmurphy to get quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog
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First Customers: Targeting The Right Customers To Build And Sustain Your Business
My two key takeaways from “First Customers: Targeting The Right Customers To Build And Sustain Your Business” were that nothing happens automatically with a launch and your true first customer is a stranger.
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Mike Lanza: Starting Companies Without Venture capital
Francis Adanza recaps key points from a talk by Mike Lanza at SDForum about “Starting Companies Without Venture Capital.”
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Startups Should Sign Their Work
Anonymous Coward landing pages don’t inspire trust or confidence in prospects, as a result few contact you. Startups should sign their work. Requiring a signed NDA before providing basic information also deters inquiries.
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Prioritizing Your Target Market Niches
Cheryl Downing suggests you explore three market niches to find your target market niche.
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Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the Product to Market
Francis Adanza recaps the Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the Product to Market event at SVPMA on July -11-2007.
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Can you recommend an accountant?
Francine Tyler, CPA francinetylercpa@gmail.com 831-419-9812 See also Q: Can you recommend an accountant for business taxes? Our Answer used to be You can’t go wrong with Ogden Lilly at Boitano Sargent and Lilly. Odgen has done my taxes on the business side for more than a dozen years and helped on the personal side for
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One Google Hiring Policy Startups Should Avoid
Don’t imitate Google: there are many criteria to consider in a hiring policy for a sales person, but college GPA has to be one of the least useful indicators of future success.
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Silicon Valley: Not as Nuts as 99…Yet
Entrepreneurs prowl Silicon Valley for a Venture Capitalist to listen like a department store Santa to their list of needs and make their dreams come true.
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Getting Early Feedback
Getting early customer feedback is critical to fine tuning your product so that you can scale up. The temptation is to use a on-line survey tool to save your time, but I think for your early customers a questionnaire may only give you the answers that you are looking for, not the information that you need.
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William Feather on “Perseverance Rewarded”
In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail).
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