Bootstrapping a Business
Working in Public Is Hard
The ability to work in public is probably in the Top 5 challenges I’ve had to face in the last several years. I’m not talking about going to Starbucks with a laptop and working for several hours while people watch you work. I’m referring to building something new and working on it in such a…
Read More6 Steps for Implementing Marketing Monday
Are you a technical entrepreneur or a developer who likes the idea of building your own software company? If so, chances are good that you enjoy writing software but hate the idea of marketing. It’s not your fault. Like sales, marketing carries connotations of being a sleaze-infested cesspool of rotten people and you probably don’t want…
Read MoreThe Biggest Threat to Your Bootstrapped Business
When you’re building a new business, there are a lot of things that can go wrong at any given point in time. Only a small subset of these problems have the potential to completely destroy your business, bringing it to a total halt. Most of these are obvious. Problems with cofounders Running out of cash…
Read MoreMicroConf 2012 Review
I can’t begin to describe the feelings I have now that MicroConf is over. But I’m going to try anyway. MicroConf 2012 was somehow better than last year. I spoke with several others and we couldn’t quite pinpoint why, but it was better. We upgraded the venue, we seriously upgraded the Monday night party (Thank…
Read MoreMicroConf: How it all went down
About three months ago, Rob Walling and I announced that MicroConf was coming to the Riviera in Las Vegas. Two weeks ago, it happened. And more than 100 people descended on the hotel for a conference we put together from beginning to end in a mere three months. If I saw you there, then I…
Read MoreOutsourcing for Entrepreneurs
If you’re an entrepreneur, you should try to outsource as much as you can possibly get away with.
In the tech industry, ‘outsourcing’ is a dirty word. Outsourcing. The very word invokes thoughts of high technology jobs being sent overseas from the US to be fulfilled by people in India or China. This is seen to be unfortunate for tech workers in the US. It’s a widely accepted misconception that if you don’t speak English well, then you’re somehow less intelligent. If you don’t speak English at all, you’re somehow better off than if you spoke it poorly. No English means you never learned and it’s not your fault. Poor English translates to idiocy. This is obviously wrong, but I digress.
What many people don’t realize is that outsourcing is an entrepreneur’s best friend. Now, before you track me down and smash my car headlights with a baseball bat, let me explain what I mean.
Read MoreHiring for a Single Founder Company
Hiring your first employee is hard. In a single founder company, the job is even harder because there are many complex issues that you need to juggle simultaneously, some of which aren’t remotely related to evaluation of the person you’re trying to hire. In this article, we’re going to completely ignore how to evaluate a…
Read MoreThe Single Founder Myth
My previous article, Startup Myths Debunked, seemed to attract quite a bit of attention in the developer community. In particular, people who left comments seemed to agree with “Myth#3: I need a partner”. Paul Graham who is one of the more influential voices in the startup community recently wrote an article titled “The 18 Mistakes…
Read MoreHow to bootstrap a consulting business
In my previous article, I received a question in response to “Myth #1: I need to get VC funding to make my company successful.” I was asked to explain what it really takes to get a consulting company off the ground. How much money does it take to start a consulting company? How much constitutes a…
Read MoreStartups for the rest of us
Like thousands of other software developers, I have read the majority of Paul Graham’s blog both past and present. He’s a fantastic writer. He has great insights into software startups and building a startup software company. I even went to one of the Startup School presentations that he helped organize at Harvard last October, and…
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