Is Silicon Valley Worth the Cost for Tech Startups and Bootstrappers?
There’s always some article or other in the blogosphere rambling on about why XYZ will be the next Silicon Valley–they’re quite popular. I just read an interesting piece that has some clues about the true costs of living here (yes, I live at least near SV and have worked most of my career in SV). [...]
Can We Ignore Churn Early On at a SaaS Company?
Jason Lemkin has my juices flowing again. He’s published a blog post with the suggestion that you should ignore churn and length of sales cycle as key management metrics when a SaaS company is young. I’m with him on the Sales Cycle–it’ll be all over the map in the early days. But on churn? Nope, [...]
No office, no boss, no boundaries: The Life of a Bootstrapper
I loved this CNN article that I found courtesy of Hacker News, except for the sketchy spin on loneliness. It captures some of the lifestyle I’d like to have, though I’m not there yet. I have been able to quit my day job, but I’m still low enough in six figures and busy enough with [...]
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 [...]
Reading News on an iPad is Astonishly Bad UX
Hi, my name is Bob Warfield, and I am a news junkey. I subscribe to about 200 blogs in my feed reader. I alternate between my Gmail, Google Reader, and Google News when I have a spare moment of leisure, looking for something new and exciting to discover. I do this almost entirely on my [...]
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 [...]
Most Hiring and Investment Decisions are Terrible Due to Pattern Matching
One often hears venture capitalists refer to their decision making process as “pattern matching“. This reference to machine learning (and a fuzzy match really ought to be pattern recognition, but hey, the techies aren’t using this language so much) is intended to sound smart. One envisions coupling years of hard-earned experienced with the biggest neural [...]
Saw the Microsoft Surface Tablet and Liked It
I was at Houston’s Galleria mall during the Thanksgiving weekend and got a chance to spend some time in both the Microsoft and Apple stores there. I had read a few articles praising the device, such as Jeff Atwood’s piece (which fairly gushes), but was skeptical. I’m not at all an Apple Fan Boy nor [...]
