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Bootstrappers Breakfast® Invites Milpitas Entrepreneurs to “Eat Problems for Breakfast”
Posted on 03/10/2010 - 02:01 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Given Milpitas’ strong commitment to entrepreneurship and new business development, the Bootstrappers Breakfast promise of serious early morning discussions among bootstrappers will have many local entrepreneurs feeling right at home. The focus of the monthly meeting is on technology businesses whose next stage of growth is based on internal cash flow and organic profits. Entrepreneurs who like to “eat problems for breakfast” bring business issues and challenges to discuss with peers. The Bootstrappers Breakfasts have been meeting on the second Friday of the month in Milpitas since 2008. Other Breakfasts are held in Minneapolis MN, Mountain View CA, Palo Alto CA, San Diego CA, San Francisco CA, and Sunnyvale CA. Date: Friday, March 12, 2010  7:30 a.m. (2nd Friday of the month) Location: Omega Restaurant, 90 South Park Victoria Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035  (Off Freeway 680 at corner East Calaveras Blvd. and South Park Victoria Drive) Cost: $5 Advance Registration, $10 at the door Info: see www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com. At last month’s meeting the roundtable topics included: forming a new business and getting it off the ground. It also included discussions about tips on building a customer base.  Members are saying great things about us: “A great group of entrepreneurs in start up mode and restart mode. The greatest value of these meetings is that they refocus my thinking of what is possible.” “I attended my first Breakfast on Feb 13th in Milpitas. It’s a great group, I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I learned a great deal more about Patents, Trademarks, and Intellectual Property matters from the guest speaker. I met a dozen people and learned about the needs of others involved in small business endeavors. However, I felt a genuine camaraderie with these folks and will actively adjust my schedule in order to attend future meetings.” About Bootstrappers Breakfast® Bootstrappers Breakfast® is for the founders of early stage technology startups. It is a chance to compare notes on operational, development, and business issues with peers. These breakfasts were designed for entrepreneurs to share ideas and leverage thoughts with other folks who are serious about growing their business. ...
skmurphy
Early Proposals: Avoiding Consulting for Free
Posted on 03/09/2010 - 18:30 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
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 up on a number of points. Two key challenges Free Consulting: strangers may want to learn more about the technology area you are addressing and request one or more sales calls while they listen attentively. The net effect is that you are offering free consulting to someone who has no intention of buying. Tipoffs: always encouraging, “tell me more.” They talk very little about their own challenges but are very interested in your offering or the technology arena that you are focused on. Column Fodder: potential buyers at large companies may need to solicit a minimum number of bids in addition to the team that they want to do business with. This means that they will put you through the exercise of generating a bid just so that they have three, even though they have no intention of working with you. Here are four steps to take to immunize yourself against the default assumptions you made when selling to friends. Balance time invested against size of deal, probability of a win, and competing alternatives. Establish a marketing budget in hours in advance (e.g. default might be 15 minutes for an inquiry, 60 minutes for a phone call) and adjust it as your understanding of deal size, probability of a decision, and probability of a win evolve. Always put an expiration on any quote or proposal, if nothing else it gives you a reason for one last E-mail/call. The first payment is always the most difficult, if appropriate ask for a token payment after you have expended some marketing effort to assess interest level. If you are not certain of interest in getting started, float a later date (e.g. six weeks instead of two) for the follow up and see if they pull it in. If you are not having conversations every week or two then the deal is in percolate or nurture mode and is not active. ...
Open for Business Stage, skmurphy
Quotes for Entrepreneurs – February 2010
Posted on 02/28/2010 - 19:01 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
“When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”  William Wrigley Jr. “Your brand is the promise that you keep.” Kristin Zhivago “Plans are made, unmade, revised, and recast through action and interaction with others on a daily basis.” Saras Sarasvathy See also “Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs” “Ask for input only if you plan to do something with it or about it.” Richard Moran “Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts” “Simple ain’t easy.” Thelonious Monk “One competitor to customer development is a co-founder’s belief that product development, in and of itself, creates value.” Sean Murphy See also “Customer Development Proceeds in Parallel with Product Development“ “Sometimes I am blocked by things I can see, other times by things I cannot. Too often, it’s just my fear of the unknown.”  Sean Murphy quoted in “Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape“ “At a distance big companies look like aircraft carriers, but close up you see they are really a thousand canoes.” Rick Munden “From a distance you look like an aircraft carrier, but as you get closer it becomes clear you are really a thousand canoes. ” Rick Munden recounting a vendor’s description of TI “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison “The surest way to be cheated is to think oneself cleverer than other people.” La Rochefoucauld ...
Quotes, skmurphy
Use Wikis for Team Projects
Posted on 02/23/2010 - 08:20 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Wikis dissolve voice and authorship. Use them where there are rewards and incentives at a team level, where a team is being held accountable for a result. Blogs and forums preserve voice and authorship. Use them where knowing who said what is important. Start with frequently updated information that is also frequently accessed: Meeting agendas and minutes (avoiding the bottleneck of the designated note taker and/or overlapping amendments in different e-mails that then have to be reconciled), Early and still evolving specifications Project status in a dynamic environment Projects end, products are shipped and end of life, problems get solved. At some point in the business world many wikis must be congealed into a document or document set and either archived, frozen as a static HTML tree, or transferred to a content management system where more formal revision and change control methods are more appropriate. Unlike Internet wikis, older project or product wikis are often better preserved as read only archives. Wikipedia anchors a lot of expectations in a use case that is rarely appropriate to a team that is not building an encyclopedia. Hope that useful content will be curated in a general purpose wiki is unlikely to be satisfied. Use many small team level wikis, each for a distinct project or purpose, where the team membership is clear and there are shared incentives for cooperation and success. ...
Blogging, Rules of Thumb, skmurphy
Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape
Posted on 02/18/2010 - 00:01 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
I can always tell when I am feeling stressed because I dream about being back in school taking an exam I haven’t studied for. Although to be candid some of those dreams are closer to suppressed memories than unrealized anxieties bubbling up from my unconscious. But a year or two ago I had a dream a while ago about a tiger that I keep turning over in my mind. A tiger is pacing in a cage, but it’s not a square cage, it’s more of a maze. It’s not in a zoo, more like a warehouse or strangely configured storage unit. The floors are smooth cold concrete. The tiger is trapped in a maze of walls of iron bars and plexiglass. The tiger starts out in a section that’s primarily iron bars with a few walls of plexiglass. It leaps against the bars and can’t break out. Then it sees what appears to be an opening and runs into a plexiglass wall, which it can’t break through either. But running into the the plexiglass a few times makes it more cautious. So it paces, alternately sniffing and growling, confused and angry, trying to find a way out. Finally it comes to an opening that just has strip of masking tape on the floor. And there it sits, convinced that this is some new barrier that’s also uncrossable. Any resemblance to recent  legs of your entrepreneurial journey (or mine) is entirely coincidental. ...
Early Customer Stage, skmurphy
Better, Impossible, and Unthinkable Products
Posted on 02/16/2010 - 08:31 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
I think that there are better products, impossible products, and unthinkable products. Better products follow an established trajectory in an industry. They are “15 minutes ahead” and the easiest to sell…for a while. Examples include: Faster computers with larger memory Cars with better gas mileage Impossible products find a way to relax one or two constraints that designers of better products have taken as fixed. They are harder to sell, not so much because they are hard to understand but difficult to believe, prospects will ask you “What’s the catch?” Examples include: ATM Machines replacing human tellers to dispense cash Ethernet over twisted pair Unthinkable products are typically developed by someone from outside the target industry or are the result of repurposing a product from another industry. Their developers were not handicapped by the mental roadblocks that come from following established practices and patterns in an industry. They can be extremely difficult to get prospects to understand–much less believe in–as they are almost always incompatible with current practices and infrastructure. But they can create an entirely new category of product. Examples include: IDDQ testing in semiconductors The Reebok Pump shoe Henry Ford realizing that a meat packing plant’s “disassembly line” could be run backward to assemble a car. What are you working on? See also Customer Development Helps Entrepreneurs Assess the Value of an Invention ...
Finding your Niche Stage, Idea Stage, skmurphy
George Grellas Answers Questions at Feb-16 Bootstrapper Breakfast in Sunnyvale
Posted on 02/15/2010 - 12:23 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, February 16, in Sunnyvale where George Grellas will present a short legal guide for entrepreneurs. George is a veteran Silicon Valley startup business lawyer who heads a boutique firm that specializes in early-stage technology startups. Since 1984, as a founders’ lawyer, George has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs in helping them with their strategic planning, entity formation, IP protection, funding, acquisitions–the range of their startup legal needs for both deals and disputes. George’s style is practical, direct, and down-to-earth, emphasizing a strong working knowledge of technical issues (including tax) explained in a manner that is made understandable and helpful for those new to startups as well as for seasoned entrepreneurs. He is the author of the Startup Law 101 series of tutorials for founders and entrepreneurs. Bring your questions for George and the other entrepreneurs around the table. As always, there will also be time for your general questions and concerns. ...
Events, skmurphy
Customer Development Helps Entrepreneurs Assess the Value of an Invention
Posted on 02/13/2010 - 15:03 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Colin Cherry in “The Telephone System: Creator of Mobility and Social Change” makes the point that the full impact of an invention is very difficult to predict (emphasis added). Inventions themselves are not revolutions; neither are they the cause of revolutions. Their powers for change lie in the hands of those who have the imagination and insight to see that the new invention has offered them new liberties of action, that old constraints have been removed, that their political will, or their sheer greed, are no longer frustrated, and that they can act in new ways. New social behavior patterns and new social institutions are created which in turn become the commonplace experience of future generations. Such realization does not come easily, quickly, or even “naturally,” for the new invention can first be seen by society only in terms of the liberties of action it currently possesses. We say society is “not ready,” meaning that it is bound by its present customs and habits to think only in terms of its existing institutions. Realization of new liberties, and creation of new institutions means social change, new thought, and new feelings. The invention alters the society, and eventually is used in ways that were at first quite unthinkable. I think that we are now at a transition point in our use of web applications: the larger challenge for software entrepreneurs is not inventing a new technology, but determining how to apply the last two decades (Tim Berners-Lee had the first webserver working in 1990, SLAC had one in 1991) of invention to business problems in new ways, many that would have been unthinkable earlier. This is what customer development helps entrepreneurs to understand: how to apply inventions to problems that customers will pay them to solve. ...
Customer Development, skmurphy
New Firms in Silicon Valley
Posted on 02/10/2010 - 18:20 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Companies names have sure changed in the last year or so. I was noticing today how many signs outside of office buildings seem to be branch offices for these firms: Move In Now First Month Free Your Name Here Available for Lease Space for Rent Here are two directories that list available office space for Silicon Valley: http://www.buildingsearch.com/silicon-valley-office-space/ http://www.rofo.com/ We use Pacific Business Centers and have been happy with them. ...
First Office, skmurphy
I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
Posted on 02/10/2010 - 01:20 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Three true stories: We were driving back from a sales call and the CTO said “I don’t understand. We won the argument. Why didn’t we win the sale?” He was very disappointed at their stupidity and stubbornness. Different startup, I had been recruited by a new CEO as a part of a turnaround. A team had gone off to meet with a new prospect and I asked the sales rep how the meeting had gone. He said “It was one of those meetings where the actual purpose of the meeting became figuring out who the smartest person in the room was: one of our guys or one of theirs. After a while it was time to leave.” About a decade ago while I was still at Cisco I got invited to a large meeting with an outside vendor. Cisco had two software vendors providing similar but incompatible tools that solved the same problem in different ways. Times were tight:  folks were being laid off and projects were getting canceled. Our inability to be able to share scripts and models between these two tools meant that management had decided we needed to standardize on one. This was a meeting for all of the supporters of tool A to compare notes and develop a common set of reasons why it should be the standard. The vendor sent a large contingent and there were perhaps two dozen engineers from different groups who were concerned. What a disaster. The vendor essentially started off by implying that the users had done a poor job of educating management as to the value of the tool and listed a number of improvements and techniques that they had “taught” us. After perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, someone spoke up and said, “Hey, wait a minute, that was an idea that we gave you! You incorporated into version 7, but we had that first.” The meeting degenerated into an angry shouting match and the default plan became engineers would refuse to switch to the other tool. Not a winning strategy in a downturn as it turned out. Diagnosis: in each case the startup didn’t view the customer as a partner, and somehow believed that they would succeed by convincing them that they were smarter. This is called the “bringing fire to the savages” sales and marketing model. Variants include viewing your product as a luxury good “not everyone can own our product” or an IQ test (”not everyone is smart enough to be able to use our product”). None of them are particularly effective in generating revenue or reference customers but they do preserve the world view of the founders that they are all a bunch of really smart people. Three specific antidotes: Focus on understanding the customer’s problem. Make sure you can describe their problem before you start to describe your solution. Test for other symptoms that they have not mentioned that you have heard from other customers. Do all of this before you mention any features or benefits of your offering. Understand specifically what steps they have already taken to address the problem and what constitutes their perception of the status quo. When you propose your solution, make it as compatible with their current work process and practices as you can, and incorporate any of their ideas into your product roadmap that you believe may benefit other customers or prospects. This minimizes their transition cost and their sense of loss. We help software firms explain their new product to the right prospects in ways that convince them to become reference customers.  If you have a new product and are having difficulty getting people to understand what it can do, please give us a call: we can help. Related posts: NuSym De-Cloaks Part 4 Early Customer Conversations: Use Appreciative Inquiry and Amplify Positive Deviance Negotiate the Level of Reference In Parallel With Price ...
Customer Development, Early Customer Stage, Rules of Thumb, skmurphy