Recently, I have gotten a lot of offers from freelancers and consultants to do some work for me for free. In an ideal world, we’d offer our services to a prospect, and they’d gladly pay for them. But the reality is quite different: many freelancers have a hard time finding clients, and some have come … Continue reading Should Freelancers Offer Free Trials?
Category: Bootstrapping
Managing Expectations: Making Good (on) Promises.
https://youtu.be/91ZGnnR-O4U Expectation management. What is that? It sure sounds like mind control. I don’t think my expectations are anything that someone else can manage. Nobody can dive into my mind and magically alter what I believe will happen. The only thing you can do to impact what I expect is to make promises. There is … Continue reading Managing Expectations: Making Good (on) Promises.
Why Founders End Up Unemployable
In most entrepreneurs’ lives, there comes a point where they jokingly claim to be “unemployable.” It usually happens in the middle of a conversation about the benefits and drawbacks of having a boss. After setting out on their first self-directed business journey, many founders have a hard time imagining themselves back on the clock as … Continue reading Why Founders End Up Unemployable
Seven Kinds of Entrepreneurial Debt
When I need to relax, I paint little miniatures. It’s a hobby I have had since I was a teenager, and once a nerd, always a nerd. But as an adult nerd with disposable income and dedicated “hobby time,” I am part of a community, and I ran into a YouTube video of a fellow … Continue reading Seven Kinds of Entrepreneurial Debt
Entrepreneurial Anti-Patterns — What to Avoid When You’re Starting a Business
They say all roads lead to Rome. Well, reality proves them wrong. And who are "they" anyway? When we look at successful businesses, we see many different approaches that got them to where they are today. But we can also notice the absence of several strategies that don't seem to create reliable pathways to success. … Continue reading Entrepreneurial Anti-Patterns — What to Avoid When You’re Starting a Business
What Founders Can Learn from Professional WoW Gamers
If you want to see tenacity at work, watch professional gamers racing to be the first to kill the latest dungeon boss in World of Warcraft. Every time Activision Blizzard releases new dungeon content, the world's best guilds join the "Race to World First." They grind through days, sometimes weeks, of trying to overcome the … Continue reading What Founders Can Learn from Professional WoW Gamers
The SaaS Market Maturity Paradox
SaaS businesses are most impactful in entirely new markets and the markets they have been serving for a long time. Anywhere in between, starting a new SaaS business has the potential to create a product with reduced effectiveness. There is a "small improvement trap" in every industry that many SaaS business endeavors fall into. While … Continue reading The SaaS Market Maturity Paradox
The Performative Nature of Building in Public: A View From the Inside
When you build in public, you're performing. You can call it what you want: sharing your authentic journey, teaching from the driver's seat — when you type your updates into that Twitter prompt, you are thinking about how you can "most authentically show something" to your audience. And that is a performance. A performance that … Continue reading The Performative Nature of Building in Public: A View From the Inside
Fear-Setting
While I was working on answering questions for my upcoming Twitter audience-building course, I ran into this one: "What if it doesn't work?" While my immediate thoughts went to the random nature of eventual success and how only consistency will pave the way there, I soon arrived at a problem that lies much deeper than … Continue reading Fear-Setting
Twitter: The Gathering. How and Where to Find the Right Followers
When you're trying to build an audience, you need to understand who out there could be interested in you and your work. Before you can attract the right people, you must know where they are already gathering. Here is an approach that I have found incredibly fast and effective: you "draw a map" of the … Continue reading Twitter: The Gathering. How and Where to Find the Right Followers
