Successful Entrepreneurship Is Ongoing Self-Improvement
Three variations on the idea that “successful entrepreneurship is an ongoing self-improvement” project, program, or process.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–September 2011
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Entrepreneurs Are Nonconformists
“In high school, popularity is more important than anywhere else, but popularity is not a measure of likability. Popularity is composed of three elements: visibility, recognizability and influence. The people in school who have those three qualities are often that way because they conform to a standard. Meanwhile, the kids who won’t or can’t conform
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Book Club: Seth Godin’s “Texting While Working” Wed-Sep-27
We are trying an experiment tomorrow, instead of a book we will be talking about a short (200 words) but insightful blog post by Seth Godin “Texting While Working” that addresses several challenges many bootstrappers wrestle judging by the breakfast conversations I take part in. Our panel: Organizer: Francis Adanza, Dir. Professional Services, LeadFormix Carl
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Refine and Curate Your Thoughts as FAQs, Articles, and Talks
Refine and curate your thoughts by reworking the first draft of your answers in an email or in response to a question from a customer or an audience member at a talk.
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Charles Minnich of Hyland Software on “Great Demo!” Workshop
Here is a brief testimonial from Charles Minnich of Hyland Software after he attended our Great Demo workshop in September of 2010.
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The Risk of General Purpose Toolkits as a First Product
I will sometimes encounter an entrepreneur or team who is developing “a general purpose toolkit for X.” This may be at a Bootstrapper Breakfast or other networking event. They have often developed a core of a promising technology and see applications for it everywhere. Here is what I normally suggest: Write up a few examples
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Highly Effective Software Development Teams
The highly effective teams I have been a member of used a rapid prototyping approach to help bound uncertainties/risks in the project and delayed making decisions when more information would improve the situation, unless any further delay was effectively a decision. I think that a lot of individual productivity comes from problems avoided by a
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Remembering What Happened
At first we didn’t know what to call it, so we called it what happened. “Do you believe what happened?” “They think he died in what happened.” It was weeks before we called it 9/11. Sometimes tragedy takes time to find a name. Peggy Noonan in “We’ll Never Get Over It, Nor Should We“ I
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Outstanding Panel for Wed-Sep-14 Book Club on “Great Demo”
We have an outstanding panel lined up for next Wednesday’s Business Impact Book Club: Matt Cameron, CEO, WhoTo.com Jon Cline, Principal, Cirrus Path Brian K. Seitz, Managing Director, Intellectual Arbitrage Group We will discuss lessons learned applying Peter Cohan‘s methodology from his “Great Demo” book. If you are interested in improving your sales presentation you
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Startup Fantasy Camp
“Startup Fantasy Camp: throw a group of strangers together for 48-72 hours and have them pretend to be a startup.” Sean Murphy Good ideas can be fleshed out and explored and an accelerated product prototyping experience can be had in a 48-72 hour camp. But I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that you can
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–August 2011
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–July 2011
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I Heard You Went to Stanford
I don’t often mention I went to Stanford when I meet people. I list it on all of my standard biographical summaries since it’s part of the formula, but I don’t lead with it. It’s rare to meet someone who attended Harvard or MIT not mention that in the first few minutes of the conversation.
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Len Sklar: Be Clear About Payment Terms And Consequences
Len Sklar, author “The Check is NOT in the Mail” has spoken several times at Bootstrapper Breakfasts. Here is a recent talk he gave where he stresses the importance of putting payment terms and the consequences on non-payment in writing, communicating them in advance, and ensuring that they are understood. It all seems so obvious
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The Search for Validation is Baggage, and You Need to Travel Light
Jon Carroll wrote a wonderful column on July 5, 2000 titled “As You Get Older.” The whole thing is worth reading but there is a section that begins “This is your challenge…” that reads like poetry. So I have re-formatted it as blank verse, it contains a number of observations on advice and influence that
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Erecting Barriers to Competition That Are Difficult to Duplicate
Competition is inevitable, that is why it’s wise to prepare for it and immunize yourself with difficult to copy differentiation where possible. A pure focus on implementing new features as fast as possible in an effort to outrun the competition is unlikely by itself to be enough. Here are some barriers you can erect that
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Tangible Costs, Time, and Pricing to Value
Amazon’s S3 and AWS platforms, and similar on demand storage and computing services, are becoming increasing popular as core infrastructure for software startups. There is a tendency, because the costs are well defined, to base your price on adding a margin to these services. There are three problems with that.
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Six From “A Few Rules That I Try To Live By” by Buster Benson
Buster Benson lists “A few rules that I try to live by” on his “Cultivate the Core” blog post. Here are my top six picks from his list of 17 (the bold wording is Buster’s) with some commentary
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Rehearsal
Rehearsal is key to making a successful presentation. If you can do at least two rehearsals of an important presentation it will pay huge dividends.