Secrets of When and How to Talk to Customers at a Startup
Jason Lemkin says forget building wireframe UI’s and start out interviewing 20 customers, because you just won’t understand your customers until you do. Here’s the gist of why you need 20 interviews before you do anything else: And you have to do 20. I know it’s hard to get to 20. But it’s the right […]
23 Great Websites for Entrepreneurs: Plus Some Radical Advice from an Entrepreneur-Bootstrapper
I recently came across two giant lists of websites for entrepreneurs, courtesy of Jason Lemkin (whose blog is listed in both): Inc.com 50 Forbes 100 Now for some radical advice: the vast majority of the sites listed in those publications won’t help the vast majority of entrepreneurs at all. In fact, many of them will […]
Evil VC Seeks Minions for World Domination
If we substitute “Venture Capitalist” for “Evil Genius”, the placard on the right describes the Silicon Valley Startup Culture perfectly. Yes, you young hopefuls, your friendly neighborhood (that’d be the Sand Hill neighborhood) VC really does expect you to sacrifice your lives in a play for world domination. They don’t care about building a nice […]
Too Many Would-Be Entrepreneurs Are Thinking About Their Ideas, Companies, and Investors All Wrong
As so often happens, the serendipitous intersection of one too many notes from the same chord in a short time have prompted me to post. In this case, I am seeing a lot of evidence that would-be entrepreneurs just don’t think about their ideas, their companies, or investors as they should. Case in point: I […]
Charging for Your Product is About 2000 Times More Effective than Relying on Ad Revenue
I was reading Gabriel Weinberg’s piece on the depressing math behind consumer-facing apps. He’s talking about conversion rates for folks to actually use such apps and I got to thinking about the additional conversion rate of an ad-based revenue model since he refers to the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. Just for grins, I […]
A Solo Bootstrapping Odyssey: 2012 Was The Year I Quit My Day Job
For those who like Bootstrapping Case Studies, here is mine. 2012 was the year I moved on from a Day Job and started doing my Bootstrapped Company CNCCookbook full-time. I’m not the first to do so, and certainly not the last, but I thought I’d provide a historical background and then some data on CNCCookbook in 2012 […]
Converting Content-Audience Fit to Product Traction
Jason Lemkin has a new post out about gaining traction after your product ships. He says it’s hard, much harder than building the 1.0 product which was already hard, and he makes some concrete suggestions on how to go about gaining traction: – Finish hiring your core team. Presumably you’ve left the sales and marketing […]
The Very First Thing a Founding Team Needs to Do: Achieve Content-Audience Fit
A lot of entrepreneurs, when faced with the question, “What’s the most important thing to do first?”, would answer, “Build a product.” Big mistake. The most important thing to do first is to find an audience. It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to […]
The Series A Crunch: One More Reason to Bootstrap and Skip Venture Capital
I’ve talked a lot about bootstrapping on this blog–I am a total convert, and I’m enjoying every minute of bootstrapping my own company. There are many reasons for my enthusiasm. Investors these days are going to make you take most of the bootstrap journey before giving you a dime being one of the biggest. You’ve […]
Entrepreneurship and Leadership is About Eliminating “They”
Something to think about for Bosses, Boards, and Workers: “They” don’t think we ought to be in that market. “They” won’t give us the budget for that program. “They” insist we focus the next release on mobile and have it out by Christmas. “They” believe we have to focus on attacking the competition. “They” are […]
