Wikis dissolve voice and authorship. Use them where there are rewards and incentives at a team level, where a team is being held accountable for a result. Blogs and forums preserve voice and authorship. Use them where knowing who said what is important. Start with frequently updated information that is also frequently accessed: Meeting agendas […]
Use Wikis for Team Projects Read More »
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,
I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale? Read More »
Bootstrappers are well served to focus on recurring revenue and charging early: sustaining is more important than starting.
Sustaining Is More Important Than Starting Read More »
Great post by Lindsay Robertson on “The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity, For Some Reason” where she lists nine rules of thumb for getting publicity. Here were my top three from here list (numbers are from the original: read the whole thing): 1. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE to any blogger with
Lindsay Robertson Do’s and Don’ts for On-Line Publicity Read More »
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.” We make some strong claims in the case study: Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more
SKMurphy Featured In Case Study For Central Desktop Read More »
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs – December 2009 Read More »
We use eReleases which distributes over PR newswire for about half the price ($400). See http://www.ereleases.com/submit.html for details, we have been working with them for more than two years and been very pleased. Press releases are not appropriate for every startup’s marketing communication: you need to make sure that you have the right message before
Tips For A Startup’s Early Press Releases Read More »
If you are updating your website, here a couple of things you want to make sure you do: Add Google Analytics to your new pages. Add permanent redirects (HTTP 301) for any pages you have moved/renamed to preserve search engine ranking. View your website on multiple browsers (at least the latest versions of Internet Explorer
Updating Your Website? Don’t Forget … Read More »
Ben Foden has been working with us part time; the following is a blog post he developed on creating genuine connections with social media.
Ben Foden on “Creating Genuine Connections with Social Media” Read More »
There has been a lot written about various aspects of social media: what tools to use, how disruptive it is, how to develop and/or demonstrate expertise. Here are four rules of thumb we follow. To establish a reputation you have to be visible or reasonably well known, but it’s more important to be known for
Social Media for Startups: “Less is More” Read More »
I use LinkedIn very differently than many of the folks I meet when I am out and about in Silicon Valley. I normally only link to people I have had shared success with. I do not link with folks who I have just casually met. I believe it’s important to keep track of folks I
Six Simple Suggestions for Using LinkedIn Read More »
A blog post from October 2006 “Administrivia in Startups” made the following points I had lunch with Sylvia Nessan, a veteran of Synopsys, CoWare, and several high tech startups and she made an observation that I thought was worth writing down: the founding team, and CEO in particular, don’t pay enough attention to how much
Administrivia Revisited Read More »
Many entrepreneurs planning their first software startup get stuck on funding and ownership issues. Here are some simple rules of thumb that may help you reframe an issue: Revenue, especially break even revenue, is never dilutive of your ownership. The right co-founders, while dilutive, substantially increase your chances of success: they give you a smaller
8 Tips for Evaluating Funding Alternatives Read More »
If you want to find any typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, or sentences with missing words we have found the quickest way is to take a final look at the copy after the hard copy is back from the printers. Errors that eluded your notice (and those of the client, independent proof reader, and the rest
Tip For Finding Typos Read More »
I very much enjoyed the opportunity to present our startup stages model and the “Software Startup Maturity Checklist” at Silicon Valley Code Camp today. I have posted the slides here.
“Startup Maturity Checklist” Slides From Today’s SVCC Session Read More »
Younger entrepreneurs bring several advantages to startups: a willingness to innovate, tolerance for failure, and a native facility with new technologies. “Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Three Advantages of Younger Entrepreneurs in B2B Startups Read More »
Lost in an all too frequent age discrimination promoted by many investors are some key advantages older entrepreneurs can offer a B2B startup: connections and social capital that can find early customers, domain knowledge, and patience.
Three Advantages of Older Entrepreneurs in B2B Startups Read More »
I blogged about mass E-Mails in “Please Take Me Off Of Your E-Mail Distribution List” in Sep-2007 but I got the following E-Mail recently which gave me some pause (names change to protect the repentant). Hi Sean, How is your summer going? Things are going great here at [XYZ Co]–in the past couple of quarters
Send Personal E-Mail Read More »
High availability is often expressed as “nines”, or the percentage of availability in a year. Six nines is 99.9999% uptime or no more than 31.5 seconds of downtime in a year.
Achieving “Six Nines” When You Launch Read More »
Both engineering and entrepreneurship alternate exploration and verification cycles to develop a solution that satisfies a customer’s need. Both of these rely on the scientific method of “observation, hypothesis formation, prediction, and experimentation” to develop and validate testable theories, engineering solutions, and profitable products. Both require that a new configuration or an opportunity be recognized
The Limits of “I Will Know It When I See It” Read More »
