Are you a boss or a leader?
Are you a boss or a leader? Here is a short list outlining the difference.
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Quotes for Entrepreneurs January 2016
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
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Recap Customer Development & Pricing For B2B Startups Jan-19-2016
I led a very interactive session on customer development and pricing for startups on Jan-19-2016 with the Montreal Lean Startup Circle. I have included the slides and their text but they comprise only about 1/6 of the session, the bulk of which was having different entrepreneurs in the audience present their challenges with customer development
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The Illusion of Progress
An entrepreneur who succumbs to the illusion of progress does a startup more self-inflicted damage than almost anything else. Working on the wrong things squanders effort and irreplaceable time without gaining the learning needed for the actual efforts required.
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Rock Paper Scissors
Technology markets look like a game of rock paper scissors. Startups have to find an effective counter to a competitor’s offering not just a slightly better version. Their pebble cannot beat the incumbent’s rock, they have to use paper (and scissors is a really bad idea).
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Alastair Hood: Lessons Learned Bootstrapping Verdafero
Dr. Alastair Hood, PhD, CEO of Verdafero, was our featured attendee at this morning’s Bootstrapper Breakfast® in Palo Alto. He offered a candid assessment of lessons learned bootstrapping Verdafero since 2009. The Verdafero platform is used by businesses to capture, analyze, visualize their waste, water, and energy utility bills. It allows them to compare locations
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How To Test Your Leap To A Solution
In your early customer discovery conversations to assess demand for a new offering a wide range of customer needs and symptoms can trigger a leap to a solution, which just happens to be yours. Guard against this by probing to understand the root problem–have at least three questions that allow you to dig out the
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New Year’s Eve 2015
New Year’s Eve is always a time for optimism. I hope to learn from my experiences in 2015 and to make new mistakes in 2016 instead of repeating the old ones. I hope to build on the skills I nurtured and the insights I gained this year.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs December 2015
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
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Newsletter: Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action Reviews
Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action: end of year is a good time to assess what you have accomplished and what you have learned.
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Ten Rules of Thumb from “101 Things I Learned in Engineering School”
Ten rules of thumb from”101 Things I Learned in Engineering School” by John Kuprenas and Matthew Frederick that I think entrepreneurs will find particularly useful. It’s a great book full of very clear illustrations and examples for most of its 101 two-page chapters. I purchased it as a Christmas gift for my sons and could not
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Courtesy Keeps The Spirit Of Christmas Alive
Christmas afternoon finds me reading “Courtesy.” It’s an essay by Ian MacLaren (pen name for Scottish author and theologian John Watson) that offers a recipe for keeping the spirit of Christmas alive in daily life. Here are some excerpts I found useful, the last finds me still clearly in the “before picture.”
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No Man is a Failure Who Has Friends
No man is a failure who has friends. Clarence’s parting observation to George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is good advice for all of us on Christmas Eve. Watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” has become a Christmas tradition in our family in recent years: it’s one of the few black and white movies my boys will watch.
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Moore’s Law Enables New Uses For Old Algorithms
Moore’s Law and the rise of cloud computing models that enable collaboration in networks of up to hundreds of thousands of individual CPUs on a single algorithm mean that old algorithms can find new applications and address much larger problems. I believe that this will have as profound an impact on knowledge work over the
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Clients in the News: Asentinel Acquires eMOBUS
We are as excited by eMOBUS’ recent acquisition by Asentinel, a leading provider of lifecycle Technology and Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solutions. It is wonderful to see all their hard work payoff. Congratulations team!
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Time Capsule: SKMurphy Profile at UnderTheOak
Another time capsule post: this one is an archive of a profile I had on the UnderTheOak wiki in the early 2000s that was maintained by Matt Simpson (wiki now offline).
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Scott Robertson Offers Five Tips on Content Marketing
Scott Robertson had a great post up last month on how to make content marketing work: be relevant, be different, be real, be useful, and be consistent. Here are some excerpts along with additional thoughts and commentary.
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Beston Jack Abrams on Curiosity, Experimentation and Action
Curiosity, experimentation and action are essential to moving your business forward. I have selected a few aphorisms by Beston Jack Abrams from his self-published third volume of “Abramisms” on these and related topics that I think are of use to entrepreneurs.
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Only Ask Customers For Referrals
Only ask your customers for referrals, don’t jump the gun and ask prospects to recommend you, especially if they have not even had a chance to use your product.
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Risk Mitigation: If You Predict Rain Build an Ark
Two critical aspects of any plan are risk identification and assessment, but if a team stops there and does not modify the plan to mitigate as much of the risk as possible then it’s pointless. Risk mitigation is what allows you to build a sustainable and enduring business.
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