Building WordPress Websites
Three reasons I like building WordPress websites: they are cost effective, they are scalable, and they easily support search engine optimization.
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Startup Stages
A Self-Assessment: Are You Working on the Right Risks?
Take our self-assessment to verify that your team is working on the right risks. Identify the capabilities you need to develop next.
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Competitive Intelligence for Bootstrapping Startups
A summary of my personal experience and our firm’s perspective on what practical steps early stage startups should take for competitive intelligence.
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Benefits of SKMurphy Mastermind for Entrepreneurs
An SKMurphy Mastermind Group is an ongoing series of facilitated conversations among serious entrepreneurs. It enables collaboration on problems and opportunities and fosters joint accountability around effective ongoing action.
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Mastering The Skill of Entrepreneurship
Expertise in a complex skill, like the skill of entrepreneurship, requires mastery of a constellation of techniques and methods. I use an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” as a point of departure to explore the “continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.”
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Serge Toarca Offers Three Reasons To Bootstrap In a Small Market
Serge Toarca offers three good reasons to consider starting in a smaller market in “Why the hell am I building a product with a tiny market?” I offer another ten.
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Octavia Butler: Cultivate Habits That Enable Persistence and Learning
Octavia Butler rejects inspiration, talent, and imagination as essential to creative pursuits and suggests that habits that enable persistence and learning are the essential element.
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Scott Berkun: How to Translate Observations and Creative Insight Into a Solution
In “The Dance of the Possible,” Scott Berkun outlines four tests for understanding the real work involved in translating observations and creative insight into a solution.
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Innovation is the first reduction to practice of an idea in a culture
Entrepreneurs need to focus on innovation or the first reduction to practice of an idea in a culture because this is the critical precursor to customer value.
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Q: What Makes a Product Attract Early Adopters?
The following is an edited version of a recent online conversation I had with a team of bootstrappers about how to make their product attract early adopters.
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Paul Tyma on “The Old Man’s Business Model”
Paul Tyma defines the Old Man’s Business Model as taking the sure way, even though it may be longer than shortcuts that may not work. Tyma calls it a “trade-off of investment up-front versus brute-force hope.” The “old man” invests up front instead of hoping a quick and dirty approach may work.
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Q: Help! I Can Only Find Laggards in My Target Customer Segment
Entrepreneurs are often quick to characterize prospects who don’t see the benefits of their new shiny technology as laggards. Sometimes that’s the case, but often the product presentation does not present benefits that are either relevant or compelling. Laggards get a lot of bad press in the startup community, but their reasons not to change
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Q: Kissing Frogs
Finding the right customers is not just a matter of kissing frogs until one turns into a prince, but a methodical search guided by an experimentation perspective where your selection criteria are continually refined and re-evaluated.
Lee Carter on the Value of Direct Observation
A Q&A with Lee Carter where we explore the value of direct observation of customer environments to complement customer interviews. Lee shares details of a project he worked on where direct observation provided a valuable complement to a basic product specification.
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Failed Fast, Now What?
If you have “failed fast” it’s still possible to recover as long as your team has shared trust and a sense of common purpose. Failed Fast, Now What? Q: We started out with a mission that we found compelling and executed pretty well against it but now we are out of money and cannot figure
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Hiten Shah: Four Lessons I Learned Squandering My Opportunity at KISSMetrics
In “My Billion Dollar Mistake” Hiten Shah shares four lessons he learned from the early successes and ultimate eclipse of KISSMetrics.
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Learning from John Perry Barlow’s Principles of Adult Behavior
When John Perry Barlow turned 30 in 1977 he wrote a set of 25 “Principles of Adult Behavior” that he asked his friends to hold him accountable to. Here are a few I want to incorporate into my life.
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Why I Enjoy Working With Teams of Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs
A personal note on why I enjoy working with teams of bootstrapping entrepreneurs and the kinds of problems we help them solve.
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Do You Ever Get the Feeling That Everything You Know is Wrong?
My longer answer to “Do you ever get the feeling that everything you know is wrong?” The short answer is “yes, every few years.”
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Design Your MVP In Two Weeks
Design your MVP in two weeks to avoid adding unnecessary features and complexity to your offering. A two-week time box forces you to focus on essentials.
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