Jack of All Trades
It’s easier to become very good at two or three things than the best at one specific thing: this “Jack of all Trades” strategy applies both for career and entrepreneurial endeavors.
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Startup Stages
Common Mistakes in New Product Introduction Demos
A baker’s dozen of common mistakes that I have seen founders make preparing and delivering new product introduction demos and presentations.
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Killer Instinct Can Blind You to the Value of Partners
A “killer instinct” that allows you to focus and prioritize is helpful, but if it blinds you to win-win outcomes you will not succeed as an entrepreneur. Killer Instinct In “Killer Instinct” Rafael Corrales writes: “There are no plus-minus stats to measure a player’s ruthlessness, his desire to beat his opponent so badly he’ll need
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The Business is Everyone’s Business (Part 2)
To grow the business founders must assess the task relevant maturity of each employee’s experience with a particular task to manage them effectively.
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The Business is Everyone’s Business
Startups face time pressure and resource scarcity, they need to cultivate effective collaboration among everyone on the team to compensate. They need to act as if the business is everyone’s business. Jack Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” offers some useful models for fostering a shared understanding of the current challenges to enable effective joint
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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to know one another realized that we both
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Early Proposals: Avoiding Consulting for Free
A lot of bootstrappers start out by selling their product or services to friends or people they know and/or have worked with in the past. One of the early thresholds a team crosses is making the transition to “selling to strangers” (see the “Startup Maturity Checklist” for some relevant questions) and they can get tripped
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Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape
An actual dream I had of a tiger prowling a maze where some walls are iron bars, others are plexiglass, and strips of masking tape seem to bar some paths. I later realized it was a metaphor for three kinds of barriers that entrepreneurs need to navigate as they get a new business established.
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Better, Impossible, and Unthinkable Products
I think that there are better, impossible, and unthinkable products. Better products are “15 minutes ahead.” Impossible products relax one or two design key constraints. Unthinkable products restructure the design pattern or paradigm to achieve an unprecedented result.
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I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
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,
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Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs
Update Feb-24-2011: Since I first wrote this in 2010 the Effectuation.Org site has been considerably upgraded and contains a lot more information on research on entrepreneurship by Saras Sarasvathy. Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneurs
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Sustaining Is More Important Than Starting
Bootstrappers are well served to focus on recurring revenue and charging early: sustaining is more important than starting.
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Customer Development Proceeds in Parallel with Product Development
Steve Blank had a great post today “Building a Company with Customer Data, Why Metrics Are Not Enough” that highlights the need–even for Web Startups–to get out of the BatCave and talk to strangers who may be potential prospects. Engineers in particular can feel that this is not as productive a use of their time
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Early Bird for Jan-2010 “Idea to Revenue” Ends Next Week
Just a quick reminder, the early bird rate ends next week for our Jan 12, 2010 Idea to Revenue workshop in Redwood Shores, CA. If you are in formation or the early days of your startup this is a good opportunity to spend four hours on your business with your team members. We help you
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George Grellas on Insightful vs. “Window Dressing” Advisory Boards
George Grellas offered some great advice on the difference between insightful and “window dressing” advisory boards on Hacker News I have reprinted here with his permission
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4 Steps to Prepare for a Startup While You are Still Employed
Someone with the label selfemploy posted the following question (note the fact that he is in Bangalore appears later in the thread, I have included it in the body of the question) on Hacker News earlier this month. As the recession continues to affect not only in Silicon Valley but many engineers around the world
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8 Tips for Evaluating Funding Alternatives
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
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Time is the Limiting Resource for Bootstrappers, Not Money
I think a bootstrapper’s true scarce resource is time. Determining how to be most effective with how you spend your time is more important than spending too many cycles on trying to save nickels. As a side effect of cutting out ineffective activities you will tend to cut unnecessary expenses. “Lost wealth may be replaced
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Eleven Work Weeks–Or Less–Left in 2009
I blogged about end of year issues last November in “6 Work Weeks or Less in 2008” and I thought I would issue the “Warning Dates in Calendar are Closer Than They Appear” a little earlier this year because a lot of new businesses need to take action in the next few weeks to get
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Nanette Collins: Startup Culture is Critical
I am happy to be able to offer another guest blog by Nanette Collins, her first was on “Volunteering, Lessons Learned from the Trenches.” Nanette is an entrepreneur in her own right, she is the principal at Nanette V. Collins Marketing and PR with offices in Boston and San Francisco and one the web at
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