George Grellas left a great short essay on leadership in a comment on Hacker News. Writing in response to “Wash the Dishes When Nobody Else Will” This is reposted with his permission (re-formatted from a single block of text).
George Grellas on Leadership Read More »
Here are a couple of rules of thumb you may find helpful in thinking about price, value, and your prospect’s perception of risk.
Price, Value, and Your Prospect’s Perception of Risk Read More »
Startups see fluid opportunities in dynamic environments, but no certainties before opportunities pass or the “situation changes.”
Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities Read More »
Tristan Kromer suggests that there are many viable models for a business, all have advantages and drawbacks. Services are easy to start but hard to scale. Despite surface appearance, a software business still inventory of people, key assets in the form of ideas, and a manufacturing process in the form of software release.
Tristan Kromer on Businesses Models Read More »
I will often hear folks say “I think I can get a lot of users, I know that there is a market for this.” I worry because a market requires customers not just users: you can tell who your customer is because they pay for your product or service. When you say to yourself that
Users, Businesses, and Hobbies Read More »
Customer understand when they have unmet needs, persistent problems, and goals and risk. They are normally very good at describing their problems and constraints on a solution but less accurate in fully specifying a solution.
Interview Prospects To Find Unmet Needs, Persistent Problems, and Goals at Risk Read More »
Webinar: Practical Insights From “Back of The Napkin” May 11 Whether it’s in a conversation with your team, with prospects, partners, or customers, the ability to sketch and to encourage them to collaborate on a sketch of the issue that you are discussion can be very helpful. It can be on a white board in
Webinar: Practical Insights From “Back of The Napkin” May 11 Read More »
Tips for using a wiki to organize customer interviews for customer discovery and to assess perspectives on their offering after purchase.
We Use a Wiki to Organize Customer Interviews Read More »
Tom Van Vleck has a great collection of software engineering stories on his site. One particularly good article is “Three Questions For Each Bug That You Find” which offers the following key observation: The key idea behind these questions is that every bug is a symptom of an underlying process. You have to treat the
Tom Van Vleck’s “3 Questions” Complement Root Cause Analysis Read More »
You can follow @skmurphy to get them hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs–April 2011 Read More »
To many of the current incubators seem focused on “on hit wonder” startups designed to be acquired quickly. Apps are the new pop songs and the incubators are the music labels, stoking the star maker machinery.
Stoking the Star Maker Machinery Behind The Popular App Read More »
After every Bootstrapper Breakfast® we E-mail all of the participants and ask them for “one thing you learned at the breakfast.” Georgi Dagnall left a nice comment after Steve Blank visited on Friday (I have added some links for context) Sean suggested that I read the book, Four Steps to the Epiphany written by Steve
Georgi Dagnall on Steve Blank’s Visit to April Bootstrapper Breakfast Read More »
[Note this post was written in 2011]. The recent troubles at Cisco have prompted a lot of commentary on the Cisco alumni e-mail list. One of the more thoughtful analyses was posted by Larry Lang (@llang629), who spent more than a decade at Cisco in a variety of positions. His last was as VP and
Larry Lang on Managing Incentives Read More »
I recently took part in a small reunion of folks who worked on the “router software release” team at Cisco in the early years and I took it as an opportunity to jot down some rules of thumb I learned, mostly the hard way, about managing software releases. There is always a strong reason to
Making the Trains Run on Time: Software Release Read More »
We had a great Bootstrapper Breakfast® in February in Milpitas with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, speaking very candidly about the challenges of Bootstrapping Central Desktop and some lessons learned. Bob Gerughty mentioned after the meeting that he had run into someone who remembered him from a comment he made at a breakfast almost
Conversations Entrepreneurs Remember Read More »
Second place in a market can still allow a company to be profitable and growing. Second place in a lawsuit can impact not only profits and growth but viability.
2nd Place in a Market vs. 2nd Place in a Lawsuit Read More »
Failure To Thrive: “We need another two weeks to add this one last feature.” This mindset of hesitation kills more products than any competitor.
You can follow @skmurphy to get them hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
Quotes For Entrepreneurs–March 2011 Read More »
I had lunch two weeks with two old friends and when I mentioned that we were working with a new company, TTM, helping them to exhibit and present at Semi-Therm last week and one of them told me an interesting story. He writes microcode and debugs complex system design issues for a storage area network
Address A Problem An Industry Promotes In Satisfying A Major Need Read More »
In his introduction to his interview with Fred Brooks, John Cook has another great passage. The shelf life of software development books is typically two or three years, maybe five or ten years for a “classic.” Frederick Brooks, however, wrote a book on software development in 1975 that remains a best-seller: The Mythical Man-Month. His
Human Nature As Applied to Software Development Read More »
