Archive for September, 2010
September 29th, 2010
Location:
Cafe 300
300 N LaSalle St
Chicago, IL 60654
(312) 670-0030
How to get there by public transit:
Take the Red Line to Grand. Walk 3 blocks west to LaSalle. Walk 3 blocks south to 300 N. LaSalle.
Take the Green / Orange / Pink lines to Clark & Lake. Walk 1 block west to LaSalle. Walk 2 blocks north, over the river, to 300 N. LaSalle.
Take the Purple / Brown lines to Merchandise Mart. Walk 1 block east to LaSalle. Walk 1 block south to 300 N. LaSalle.
Once you’re at 300 N. LaSalle, either enter the building and take the escalator down or take the outdoor stairs down to Cafe 300.
September 22nd, 2010
Sarah Allen gave a great talk about her entrepreneurial journey at our September first Bootstrapper Breakfast in San Francisco. Sarah Allen is a serial entrepreneur who is leveraging her software development consulting business, Blazing Cloud, to bootstrap her mobile-focused startup, Mightyverse. We also had a lively discussion about marketing and technology adoption issues, hiring people and discussing solutions with prospects.
Marketing techniques
- Very helpful to have your personal blog: Doesn’t generate customers but gives credibility.
- Twitter: Before you have a following, it tells you what you need to know. Before going to a conference, find people and follow them on twitter.
- Writing a book is a good marketing technique.
- Write articles but make sure you have a link on how to contact you.
Hiring People
- Software Development: If the people developing the software do not reflect the software, we won’t have the right software.
- If you can, you should pay people what they are worth. Working with experienced people can save time and management overhead.
Problem: While developing a product, do I focus on a vertical or do I focus on everything? Which vertical do I focus on?
- Pick randomly but not too randomly. Do your market research and if you find a dozen people who are willing to use your product who belong to a particular vertical, start off with that. Build verticals in snapshots.
- When asking people on their vertical of interest, instead of asking them directly, ask them about their problems. People are always happy to talk about problems.
- Don’t wait for your software to be perfect and satisfy all attributes before putting it out there. As long as a basic functional version is ready, put it out there to be tested by potential customers and users.
- Can you find 14 users who will help you develop your product? In Sarah’s case, even though everyone they talked to thought it was a good idea, it took several niche ideas to find 14 people that would help them develop the product.
- Other things to ask your 14 users: how much would you pay, make sure you really understand the problem & the impact of your solution.
- Find problems that are not going away. Then search for how you can solve it and in such a way that people pay for your solution.
Problem: How to get people to use the product. Encounter a lot of inertia to get people to use the product and hit a brick wall of people not wanting to change.
- Can target people who aren’t using any product and aren’t familiar with the technology.
- Go to the people who will actually use the product and then, the people higher up in the organization, who will pay the money.
Other Technology Adoption Techniques
One member suggested doing a project along side their current project, in parallel to their current development. So the customer could see the advantage but not be exposed to the risk as they had the current project to fall back on.
September 21st, 2010
At the Bootstrapper’s Breakfast last Friday in San Francisco, we had a good discussion on managing contract workers. Below is a summary.
Advantages of hiring contract workers
- Allows you to remain flexible in an uncertain economy
- Can hire contractors with specific skillsets according to your current need.
How to manage contract workers
- Establish Expectations at the onset
- Have clear guidelines on contract duration, nature of the work and timeframe.
- Communicate if expectations are not met
- Be available to the contractor to answer work related queries.
- Train the contractors on your company’s philosophy and goals.
- To attain quality work
- Hire a relationship manager who is responsible for handling the graphic designers.
- Work with a firm who hires and manages contract designers for you. You may have to pay a little more, but a good firm can minimize your pain. At the same time, there are firms that can rip your pocket.
- Test out a small pilot project with freelance graphic designers before putting them onto larger projects.
- Make communication with them as specific and detailed as possible.
- Show contractors how their work is being used to motivate them.
Challenges to be aware of
- Contractor may work well in the beginning but may slack off during the middle or towards the end of a project limited by time. Make sure you have intermediate milestones to help mitigate.
- Your treatment of contractors should not affect your full-time employees’ morale.
September 19th, 2010
At AV-Comparatives.org you will find independent comparatives of Anti-Virus software. Here is how our members vote for anti-virus software.
September 19th, 2010
Bootstrappers Breakfast Chicago is moderated by Griffin Caprio, a technologist and entrepreneur who has been helping companies of all shapes and sizes with their technology needs for more than a decade. Since 2008, he has been running two companies here in Chicago. With clients ranging in size from startups to Fortune 500, 1530 Technologies has been leading development teams, providing lean consulting and developing mobile and enterprise applications. Alternatively, he’s pioneering the concept of A Part Time CTO for startups and small companies in the area, specializing in consumer facing and mobile technology teams. He also runs the Chicago Lean Startup Circle and Chicago Semantic Web Meetup and still has never turned down a game of foosball.
September 19th, 2010
GeoGroups is in the business of building monetizable geosocial networks. http://geogroups.com/ I am looking for a co-founder to help me in taking GeoGroups to the next level, and to complement my technical background. This person must have solid marketing, communication, and business development skills.
- Must have extensive contacts in the mobile industry in the bay area.
- Must have professional experience working with mobile related products.
- Must have deal-making skills for partnering with content-providers.
Contact us if you know someone or think you are the right person.
September 18th, 2010
Join us at the Minneapolis Bootstrappers Breakfast this Thursday, September 28 at 7:30AM when Jeff Pesek will give us some insights on his experiences as a technical space entrepreneur. He will compare the practices of bootstrapping
lean startups versus startups that have needed–or taken–venture capital money for their success.
Jeff Pesek is a co-founder of TECHdotMN, a Minnesota High Tech site that focuses on startup culture. He will be chatting with Bootstrappers Breakfast attendees about the Minnesota startup community. Jeff has been an early supporter of the Minneapolis breakfasts and we are delighted that he has agreed to speak. More on TECHdotMN from their about page:
TECHdotMN is a passionate group of technology enthusiasts on a mission to serve Minnesota’s high tech ecosystem and the early stage ventures within it. Through a mix of unique audio/video features and written word, we create original Minnesota high tech news and curate relevant local news from outside sources. When combined with Minnesota’s most comprehensive calendar of high tech/entrepreneur events and the deepest directory of Minnesota high tech companies (including 150 +/- startups) the result is an exhaustive resources for those who care about what’s happening in Minnesota’s high tech market.
September 12th, 2010
Liz Ainsworth of Life By Design gave a great presentation that triggered fantastic conversation at the September Bootstrappers Breakfast in Milpitas.
Here are a few things that I gleaned from her presentation on social media.
- A small daily effort has a strong positive effect. Consistent execution of a small task 3-5 times a week yields large benefits over time.
- She grew her Facebook connection list from 300 to 4300 over about 6 months by sending a few personal invites five times a week, spending about 15 minutes a day.
- She posts about an activity she is taking part in related to health and wellness about five times a week. She prefers Facebook to twitter because the Facebook message format is longer than 140 characters and allows you to send short personalize note without having to resource to contractions and jargon.
- She also has a Facebook fan page for her business, where she will post more commercial messages, but she is very strict about keeping her personal communications strictly related to a health or wellness related activity she is taking part in.
- She writes in the first person on both her personal and fan pages and always has a point of view. She showed some examples of folks that she was following who were clearly writing in “press release speak” where they were talking about themselves in the third person. It was off putting compared to a short personal note.
- She budgets:
- 15 minutes twice a day for Facebook
- 15 minutes twice a day for E-Mail
- one hour a week for twitter, using SocialOomph to schedule her tweets for the week.
- one hour a week on her blog
- one hour a week on her newsletter
- Clearly her self-discipline and time management are a key part of her success.
- Her writing and other efforts seem to flow naturally from who she is as a person. Her commitment to self-improvement also came through very clearly in her talk and in her examples.
September 9th, 2010
Liz Ainsworth of Life By Design is a frequent attendee at our Milpitas breakfast. When she told us last month that she had lined up more than a dozen speaking assignments this year we asked what as the secret of her success. She answered “Facebook and other social media” so we asked her to share lessons learned this month.
Liz will share tips and tricks to:
- Build your optimum fan base quickly and effectively
- Promote your business
- Keep your Facebook presence current.
- Advertise your events to target audiences
- Be strategic with minimum use of time.
Liz has been teaching, training and coaching for twenty-six years and is passionate about inspiring others to make good choices.
Postscript Friday morning: It was a very inspiring talk. Liz has been attending the breakfasts in Milpitas for a couple of year’s now and it’s been very interesting to watch her grow her business. Her willingness to take risks and her commitment to authentic self-improvement are inspiring. I really value her perspective and gumption.
September 8th, 2010
Below are some of bootstrappers favorite tools for building, managing and maintaining our websites.
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