From the archive · Page 40 of 44
On June 29th, 2020, I self-published a book called Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business and released it on Twitter. Within twenty-four hours, I sold 350 copies. Within another twenty-four hours, the book was #1
Read the essay →You can position your product in different ways in many different markets. You may have started describing your product in a certain way, only to find that your customers understand it very differently. Many first-time founders make the mis
Read the essay →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 specific interests or goals. These interests
Read the essay →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 daunting task. It certainly was for me. I tho
Read the essay →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 added. Another rarely used approach is t
Read the essay →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 their workflow, only to notice that somethin
Read the essay →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 business like a franchise. Build your busine
Read the essay →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 you want to do in the future, ordered by
Read the essay →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 be put into keeping a customer is signif
Read the essay →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 recommend setting aside some time every few mont
Read the essay →