Bootstrapping Archives - Page 7 of 8

The web is Punk.

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

What is Punk – what is Punk rock?

Here’s a definition I shamelessly lifted from wikipedia:

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.

When I read the above definition – I loved it so much I decided to highlight the key words and talk about them in our new world of the web and why the punk ethic is what we are embracing.

Garage Rock – Many of us start in our garage, or spare room – we start our projects simply because we have a vision of doing it our way, or because it’s just worth doing. We are doing it for us. We start without any support. We pull together the minimum requirements to get started.

Eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream – Large corporations have been taking advantage of us consumers, no – ‘people’ for far too long. Mainstream business has been churning out average stuff for average people and making large profits doing so. The excess has sickened us to the point where we have shown we can get our startups off the ground on a shoe string, with the software and tools we built for ourselves. We provide something better – and our fans prove it. Importantly success has not driven us to become corpulent pigs simultaneously. We beleive in egalitarianism and we are utilitarian.

Fast, hard-edged – We focus on speed. Before the large corporations have even turned around – we have a following a passionate fan group, and they wonder what happened.

Stripped-down instrumentation – We don’t need every tool in the business to make stuff happen. There is no research department, there is no prototype or an excess of departments involved – just us. We just make great stuff with a minimum of inputs. It’s made with passion so it just works.

Political, anti establishment –Yes, we want to do it different, we want to bust down the old paradigm, and have some fun doing it. The establishment does annoy us, and we want to show them we can do it better. We treat our customers like people, and engage on a personal level. We engage in conversation, and listen. We hate the arrogance of large corporations, so quite simply we don’t behave like them. We embrace the crowd and let things evolve.

Embraces a DIY –We don’t ask for permission. We don’t need to work within the existing infrastructure. We don’t need authoritative figures lining our pockets to get started. They usually do that after they discover the cool stuff we’ve already made.

Distributing them through informal channels – The channels didn’t even exist when we got started. So we made our own. The web is our channel, independent, large and evolving. No one owns it or controls it, it’s organic and we love it.

Web people and startups – thanks for starting Punk 2.0

theclash-paul-simon

Mistakes are awesome

Posted on April 29, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve made so many mistakes since I started rentoid, but everyone of them has lead me to a new insight, idea of method. And I’m not alone, so of the greatest inventions, business and ideas are the results of mistakes or unexpected evolutions. The terrific photosharing website Flickr.com started it’s life as an on line game before evolving. The point is it’s worth letting things develop before trying to patch everything. See what path it takes us on. Especially for websites, where unintended uses often lead us to great enlightenment.

While watching this old school break dancing lesson on Youtube – one of the great forefathers of BBoy-ing Crazy Legs said something in the first minute of the video below regarding mistakes. Advice worth remembering in startup land.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bF3tTzW2Ik]

Magnation – great battle story

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Last night Sahil Merchant the founder and CEO of Magnation (uber terrific magazine retailer) gave an inspiring talk at the Hive.

It was great to hear a great battle story, and not some story by an egoistical rich guy. A real battle story. His honesty was brilliant, and everyone loved it. Rather than re-tell it – I’ve used the power of twitter and and captured all the tweets with #hivemelb from last night which occurred while he was speaking in real time. It’s very interesting to see what caught peoples attention.

Read bottom up to see the tweets in order of occurance.

Steve Sammartino

The strategy is fine

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Today I had a discussion with a fellow entrepreneur who was wondering whether to reduce his pricing on a new business. His point was related to the fact that his very new business hadn’t achieved a great deal of sales volume just yet.

Then I asked him if he had implemented any of the sales generating activities we had discussed last week – to which the answer was no. My response was straight and simple:

If you haven’t been out knocking on doors selling your product to the potential target market, then how is it possible to know if the marketing mix is wrong?

It was at that time he knew he had some boot strapping work to do and get out there and sell.

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The point for entrepreneurs is that it is easy to get tempted to constantly revisit the strategy. To go back to the plans when things are not automatically falling into place. Instead of doing the really hard stuff – we look for a simple revision of ideas, the plan and all that shiny stuff. The thing we often avoid is the hard effort of selling and facing rejection. But until we go out into the market and try to generate revenue, it’s impossible to have real market feedback of what needs revised.

So before we re-design our plans and process, we have to test the current one in market. We do this by trying to sell what we already have at every possible distribution point. Until we have done that, strategy revision is just an excuse for not putting in the effort required.

the instant reward society

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I was recently asked how a particular rentoid promotional activity went. Which was when we got rentoid on iwearyourshirt.com

Turns out it was pretty cool, he did a good job of promoting our stuff, but there wasn’t a huge upswing in members or rentals. Which is OK – it wasn’t a game winning activity. It got me thinking about our attitudes towards instant gratification. We live in a world where we want and expect instant gratification. In nearly all things. It’s not hard to understand why with Google results, instant video, mobile technology that we want our answer right now, or we’ll move on.

This has a dangerous implication for entrepreneurs – in that the business world doesn’t work this way. Sure we need to move quick, finish things fast, and innovate constantly – but this still wont (or very rarely) will deliver instant results. We need ignore all the stories we read about our heroes who ‘did’ have things work out rather quick. They are the 1 in 6 billion aberration – and believe me it is not us – we are not that lucky. And it is luck, not brilliance. Proof of this lies in the fact we all know a handful of equally brilliant people who haven’t had the luck of Zuckerberg or Sergy.

We need need instead is to stay the course, and have faith in our actions. We must celebrate effort rather than results. Because there is no telling when the results will actually appear. But if we do the right things they will come to fruition. Success which may not be the global type entrepreneurs like dreaming about – but success to a level of great satisfaction.

We again can look to nature to see this in action. If we took societies instant gratification ethos into growing our food we’d all starve to death. In nature things take many months at a minimum, many years as the usual, and oft times, many years before we will yield anything. Whether we are growing vegetables, crops or fruit, we have to believe that doing the right thing will result in in just rewards. But we will not see the rewards until a long time after the input of our efforts. Efforts which must be made consistently every day with nothing to show for it. We must have faith that that the results will eventually come. Without faith the motivation to continue the nurturing will be lost. We wont do what is needed and the crop will fail. There is no instant reward in nature.

picture-1

And there is rarely an instant reward in business. We need the same faith we have in nature when we know we have the right ingredients. We must continue to attend to the field regardless of physical evidence of success. We must celebrate effort and not results. Only then will we have the patience and tenacity required for a financial yield.

Set up costs

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

When starting out in business the first thing we often do is set up the relevant legal structures:

Partnership agreement
Logo design
Business name registration
Operating company
Holding company
Non disclosure agreement
Holding company trust
Member terms & conditions of product / web usage
Specific bank account
Small business book keeping software
insert other legalese business recommendation here

Startup blog advice is this: Don’t waste your time or money. Get revenue first, register later.

With the only possible exception being a .com registration – which if you’re in the on line world may be an actual requirement to simply operate. No doubt this is contrary to all you’ve read in business guides. Sure, keep accurate cash flow books, run things professionally and stick to project deadlines. The reason for the recommendation is pretty simple. Most startups never get to revenue. If you’re like me you have a hard drive full of business ideas, half written business plans, and a spare room full of product prototypes. Until we have revenue (which doesn’t mean a couple of orders, it means thousands of dollars) we have nothing to protect. It also adds a strong reporting and administration burden which startups could well do without.

sand-castle

So why waste time and money building a fence around nothing? Build the castle first, or at least get the foundations in place. If we follow the lawyers advice, they may be the only people who ever make money from the venture.

Why speed wins

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

In start up land the most important thing we can do is do things fast. It’s the opposite of the perfectionism we learn in graduate school and large corporations especially as it pertains to marketing.

Here’s why:

So the startup blog explanation of my above chart goes something like this:

No project, task or strategy is ever perfect. Even if we spend a large amount of time developing it. At best it will be around 90% of what we need or imagine. If we cut the available amount of time in half (which is this example is 6 weeks) we may be able to achieve 70% of the desired outcome. But what option 2 presents for us is the ability to learn and revise quickly. In fact we can launch another version (version 2.0) of said project for another 70% progression.

The net result is pretty simple – we’ll be a progression of 140 vs 90. Pretty simple. And in startup land the reality is we often don’t know how effective something will be until it is implemented, and from here the lessons will emerge. In addition it moves us up the learning curve and in all probability the next implementation will be far more effective than the first.

The other fact we have to consider is that speed is important for our customers. They like to see progression, even if it is less than perfect. They know things are improving and that we are making stuff better for them. It’s also far less confusing to deal with incremental consistent change than it is a total re-design. We also remove the risk of better ideas and methods putting a kibosh on doing anything at all and creating inertia.

And this is why in startup land, speed wins.