You Want a Tribe
According to Seth Godin, a tribe is a group of people that are connected to each other, an idea, and a leader. Tribes are supercharged communities. They are dense networks of people who bond over…
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Archive · 2020
When You Reach Your Limits: Growing a Company Beyond the Founder(s)
If you’re coming from a professional background in salaried positions, the chances are that you’ve never hired anyone before. And even if you have, hiring someone for your own business will be a…
Read the essay →The Power of Omission: Killing Features for Fun and Profit
If you add features to your product indiscriminately, you will end up with a gigantic bloated mess of software. One way to deal with this is to be very careful when deciding if new features should be…
Read the essay →Made to Stick: Shaping an Extensible Product
It won’t take long before customers start asking for one particular kind of feature: integrating into other tools that they use all the time. They have adopted your product into their routine and…
Read the essay →Standard Operating Procedures: Managing Your Future Self
Delegation is most effective if there is an Operations Manual for the company. Michael E. Gerber calls this the “Turnkey Revolution” in his book The E-Myth Revisited: the idea of documenting your…
Read the essay →Roadmaps and You: Building a Future Together
It’s great to know where you are going. It’s even better to know that your customers approve of that. Both goals can be reached by establishing roadmaps. Usually, that’s a document that lays out what…
Read the essay →Customer Retention: How to Keep Them Around
When it comes to customer relationships, momentum is on your side: it is much easier to retain a customer than it is to find a new one. Once the initial inertia is surpassed, the effort that needs to…
Read the essay →Customer Exploration: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
At this stage of your business, you have a mostly mature product that is used by many customers. You can expect that for most of their use cases, it is good enough. But instead of guessing, I…
Read the essay →Being Small Is a Benefit: How to Leverage Being a Bootstrapper
Many founders feel they need to act bigger than they are. They expect only to be taken seriously when they appear to be a mature company. It turns out that this is no longer the case in many…
Read the essay →Spreading the Word: How to Do Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
One beautiful thing about a niche is that there is a certain similarity between the people in it. They are likely to frequent the same social media, read the same blogs, visit the same websites. They…
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