Archive for January, 2010
January 20th, 2010
Joe Delaney is an exceptional resource to the Bootstrappers Breakfast community by providing insight and guidance to wealth management www.vistawm.com, funding matters and overall financial management. To get an idea of Vista’s approach are a couple of resources from the site:
Joe has been advising closely held corporations and high net worth individuals for 20 plus years and is a recommended resource for expert guidance in these areas. Joe has an entrepreneur’s mindset and has been a great advisor for me. Please feel free to reach out to Joe for assistance at (415) 842-3112 or jdelaney@vistawm.com
Endorsed by Brendon Farrell.
January 18th, 2010
Brendon Farrell works with innovative companies to help them reduce operating cost and increase revenues. Brendon is an entrepreneur, starting a company in high school and has served in management roles in commercial real estate, a tech company, Classified Ventures and TriNet. Currently at TriNet, Brendon serves approximately 300 clients providing human capital consulting, funding trail metrics, banking relationships, and international build out/operations. Brendon comes from a family of innovators and drinks innovation and new ideas with every meal of the day. Feel free to reach out to Brendon for guidance or to share a “drink of innovation”.
January 18th, 2010
Sean Murphy, founder of Bootstrappers Breakfast, has taken an entrepreneurial approach to life since he could drive. He has served as an advisor to dozens of startups, helping them explore new options and bring their businesses to new levels. His firm, SKMurphy, focuses on early customers and early revenue for software startups, helping engineers to understand business development. His clients have offerings in electronic design automation, artificial intelligence, web-enabled collaboration, proteomics, text analytics, legal services automation, and medical services workflow.
January 18th, 2010
Francis Adanza offers an energetic perspective in his role at eMOBUS. Since joining the company in 2008, he has helped develop and implement the marketing strategy, customer development programs, and alliances with service partners and independent technology vendors. With five years of marketing experience as a software entrepreneur, Francis brings experience from other innovative SaaS technology companies that have enabled him to learn proven approaches to driving rapid growth for technology-enabled services. Previously, Francis was a Project Manager at SKMurphy, a boutique consulting firm that helps software startups find early customers and early revenue. He assisted with sales, marketing, research and development for the firm’s clients. Before joining SKMurphy, he was an AR/AP Accountant for ebrary, Inc. a leader in eContent platforms. Francis has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from Menlo College.
January 9th, 2010
We had someone come to the Milpitas breakfast yesterday who was interested in bootstrapping a consumer products startup. They had an electrical engineering background and several ideas for different innovative products, here are a few of the suggestions they got that may be of use to other entrepreneurs
- The Inventor’s Alliance has meetings in Menlo Park and Sacramento, you can also attend over the Internet. They invite speakers that focus on various aspects of the invention process, including protecting your invention and getting it manufactured. The typical speakers at their events are successful inventors, prototype experts, manufacturing experts, and patent attorneys. You can get an idea from the the website of past meeting topics and speakers, as well as a list of local inventor groups. I personally attended an event in February 2006 where Doug Hall spoke and it was outstanding and very well attended.
- TechShop in Menlo Park: “TechShop is a 15,000 square-foot membership-based workshop that provides members with access to tools and equipment, instruction, and a creative and supportive community of like-minded people so you can build the things you have always wanted to make.” Memberships are $125/month or $1200 a year. In addition to their Menlo Park location they have facilities in Durham, North Carolina) and Beaverton, Oregon
- Considering finding a mechanical engineer or product design engineer as a partner as hiring a consultant to do this will be a significant part of your prototype development expense.
- A good group to network with electrical engineers in Silicon Valley is the IEEE Consulting Network of Silicon Valley.
January 8th, 2010
We had a visitor from out of state drop in to today’s breakfast in Milipitas who had “ten ideas for my next startup” and asked for advice on how to sort the list or pick the best one. Here are some of the criteria that were suggested for someone to evaluate how likely they would be able to bootstrap a new business:
- Understand who the customer will be for the product, the customer is the one who will pay you. If you can’t define a customer, or the person/firm paying is different from who benefits, look at the problem from different angles to try and align who is paying and who benefits.
- Look for customers who are in a lot of pain. Preferably who face a deadline or an impending event. It’s dangerous to develop a “nice to have” product that doesn’t need to be used by a customer.
- Don’t judge a product by the size of the market, consider the size of the niche market that you can access directly to get started. If you are selling a product to an airplane manufacturer you should know someone at Boeing or Airbus (to cite an extreme example).
- Pick a business model where your skills and background are intrinsic to managing or differentiating the product. If you have an idea for solving a problem in an industry that you have never worked in, you should look for a co-founder who has some good knowledge (and connections) with folks in that industry.
- Be careful of businesses that require a lot of customers to be viable. If your business needs a million unique visitors to your website before advertisers will be interested, consider targeting a smaller population that advertisers will pay more for (e.g. “everybody” vs. “college students” or “network engineers” or “technical writers”). Consider a subscription model where you create enough value to charge $10-100 per year per customer. This should lower break even operation to hundreds to a few thousand customers (admittedly this may make it harder to get a customer, but it’s also very hard to get 100K unique visitors a month, much less a million).
- Pick a business that’s an Act 2 or a Phase 2 for you: if you can build on your existing skills or know how it’s less likely you will fail. Also, if it’s phase 2 you can still define a phase 5 that is hugely successful if somewhat distant in time, but if it’s “act 1″ or a new beginning it may be difficult to convince co-founders to join you or customers to pay you.
January 6th, 2010
Come join San Diego entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast. We collaborate and discuss innovative ways to operate more efficiently, gain revenue and reach company goals.
The facilitators of San Diego’s Bootstrappers Breakfast are Steven Moody and Francis Adanza.
- Steven has a background including being a successful entrepreneur, a manager and a senior consultant to companies with an innovative focus.
- Francis is VP of Marketing at a software enabled services firm focus on cellular spend management and an active entrepreneur since college.
They have a unique ability to understand the business issues and translate them into actionable cost savings and profit generating programs.
January 4th, 2010
Ogden Lily and Kevin Epes from Boitano, Sargent, and Lily will be joining us January 19th in Sunnyvale to answer questions on accounting and tax issues for startups. BSL has been serving Silicon Valley businesses for six decades: Ogden and Kevin are CPA’s with the firm. Some of the issues that they are prepared to address:
- Moving your accounting into the cloud with Quickbooks on-line
- Understanding the accounting implications of different corporate forms: LLC vs. C vs. Sub-S; CA vs. DE
- Deductibility of business expenses
- 401K options for bootstrappers
- When to incorporate
Bring your questions and remember if this if your first year to file business taxes the deadline is March 15 not April 15. Please note that Bootstrapper Breakfasts in Silicon Valley have a $5 membership charge per meeting in addition to the price of your meal, tax and tip.
January 3rd, 2010
One of the neat things about attending Bootstrapper Breakfasts is that you get to watch companies go from concept to launch to growth. Assistyx is one of our successes for 2009, what follows is a brief write-up by Dan Smucker, another regular Breakfast attendee who has been helping the Assistyx team with their marketing.
A brief history of Assistyx LLC and
TapToTalkIn the late summer of 2008, Phil Bookman came upon an interesting product while serving on the board of a special needs school. It was software designed for non-verbal children with autism or other delays. The software ran on a hobbyist handheld game system and had the capabilities of products that cost thousands of dollars. This product cost around $250. However, the “owner” had moved on to another project and no longer had interest. Phil saw the potential of this product and tried to get the owner to get back in the business to help the special needs school and other children. Having no desire to stay in the business, the owner agreed to sell the IP to Phil.
Phil was no novice at this having founded successful software start-ups in new markets in the past. He immediately called Lenny Greenberg, a fellow experienced entrepreneur and co-founder of Phil’s last successful venture. The two experienced and like-minded software entrepreneurs quickly decided to bootstrap another company, Assistyx LLC. Assistyx’s mission would be to develop affordable assistive technology products to a market dominated by very expensive custom hardware. Phil and Lenny both thought that this product could be sold directly to parents and professionals through the Internet as a subscription service. Parents and schools would no longer need to wait months (and sometimes years) for insurance companies or state agencies to approve the purchase. A child could be served immediately.
In his role as CTO, Lenny led the effort to convert the original software to the Nintendo DS, the most popular game platform in the world. The Windows app used to individualize the Nintendo software was substantially enhanced and converted to the Web. As CEO and CMO, Phil developed the Web site and ecommerce strategy for selling direct to consumers, speech professionals and schools. Phil and Lenny worked toward their vision with focus on the first product, TapToTalk, and their target market, non-verbal special needs kids. Within 5 months after launching, they had a prototype. After 7 months, they had a special education school as a initial beta site actively using the product. In 12 months they launched the product to the world.
In its first 3 months since launch, TapToTalk has customers in 28 states of the US and has opened its virtual doors to Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland. Phil and Lenny are working on moving beyond the Nintendo in 2010. TapToTalk is truly a viral marketing success in its niche.
Lenny frequently attends Bootstrappers Breakfast and has spoken there on the importance of focus and having a long term product vision. He enjoys the back and forth with fellow bootstrappers who have provided good ideas and lessons learned. He spoke in October 2009 on strategic planning, for the slides see “Great Talk on Strategic Planning by Lenny Greenberg.“
January 2nd, 2010
Events are sorted by day of the month they occur on. Mountain View location is 4 blocks from Caltrain.
| Palo Alto (1st Friday at 7:30am) |
Hobee’s Restaurant Map
4224 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, 94306
(650) 856-6124
| Sunnyvale (2nd Tuesday at 7:30am) |
Coco’s Restaurant Map
1206 Oakmead Parkway
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
(408) 736-289
| Milpitas (2nd Friday at 7:30am) |
Omega Restaurant Map
90 South Park Victoria Dr
Milpitas, CA 95035
| Dublin/Pleasanton (4th Thursday at 7:30am) |
Athens Burger Restaurant Map
6999 Dublin Boulevard
Dublin, CA
| Mountain View (4th Friday at 9:00am) |
Red Rock Coffee Map
201 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
Public Transit Tips