Focusing on a large long term abstract revenue goal makes you loose focus and morale. Instead focus on building the first $50K of revenue. Just saw this by Wil Schroter, The First 50 Plan via Ken.

The problem with trying to think in terms of “how do we get to $10 billion in revenue in 2050” is that you lose sight of the fact that your resources are very limited today. Staying focused on earning the first $50K of revenue allows you to concentrate your resources on a very well-defined short-term goal.

This is a brilliant little trick Wil came up with. Following the same logic I was also thinking that a better or maybe earlier goal of $2k pm in regular revenues might be better for a small bootstrapped web startup. For a frugal bootstrapper this may be sufficient to break even. Once you have proven to your self and others that you can make regular monthly cashflow and not just a burst of big sales. This could be an easy metric to yourself. Lets say your $2k revenue comes from 100 sales at $20. That is something you can understand and focus on. Our goal is to reach 100 monthly sales.

Updated, Thanks to Peter for noticing a slight math error.

Just read this cool article Pioneer of the Flat Tax about Mart Laar the first prime minister of an independent Estonia.

It reads almost like the story of a typical hard headed young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet know all the reasons why something can’t be done.

Imagine a place with no tax accountants, where the annual return takes a businessman an hour to complete. Think how you could lead a country and design an economy just as you liked. Consider the joy of creating a tax system with no loopholes and exemptions, where everyone is treated the same.

When he became the prime minister of Estonia at the tender age of 32, Mart Laar saw this opportunity as a beautiful thing. The Soviet regime that once ruled his country had been overthrown, and he was starting with a clean slate – and the confidence that came from reading only one book on economics.

This table shows how it compares to UK Tax.

“Most experts advised against it and said it was a very stupid idea,” he said. “My finance minister said don’t do it, the IMF said don’t do it. But it’s not very easy to convince a young person that he is wrong and I was that type of young person. So I did it.”

This is how Bezos started Amazon. Max and Peter PayPal. Classic hard headed entrepreneurial spirit.

Thanks to Scott at Baltic Blog
for bringing this article to my attention. He says:

As an American with a screwy tax system that confounds me, even that as an ex-pat, doesn’t owe any money but can’t figure out the proper filings forms because of the Byzantine nature of the U.S. tax system, Estonian tax filing is simplicity in itself. It is all Web-based, and generally take 10 minutes to file.

As all of us entrepreneurs know, tax is a pain in the *ss. While obviously paying a huge percentage like we do here in Denmark is bad enough, I think for many smaller entrepreneurs the reporting overhead is actually worse.

Also in places like Denmark you tend to worry more about your deductions than your income. Imagine a 0% tax on your business. What kind of clarity in your daily life would this give you? Focus on your business effect and not the tax effect. I have been considering Estonia for a while as it certainly is an attractive place for a startup.

Today was the first time I had TextMate open for 2 weeks or so, what a relief. We just bought a place and have spent a long time painting and doing other annoying things that were necessary. I’m really exhausted by all of it. I only have a few rewiring things todo by next weekend and I should be finished.

TDC the Danish telecoms monopoly messed me about with the ADSL line. It was installed last Friday but didn’t work because of a dead phone line. It would take them 2 weeks to send a technician to get it working. So I quit my subscription and opened a Cable Modem account, also with TDC (Unfortunately). In Denmark you still have to have a analog phone subscription to have ADSL, so at least I’m saving the DKK 119 pm ($20) I’m paying for nothing. I have never made a call from that line anyway. The Cable Modem deal was cool. I picked the modem up in the local TDC shop and my account was setup the next day.

Now to battle TDC for the moving costs. They charged me DKK 450 ($75) for the move (which never worked). This includes DKK 49 for postage. I’m not quite sure what it was they posted. I fully expect an hours worth of battle with TDC about this. I’ve fought isp’s before and won, so I’m not going to lie down.

Annoyances aside. It is great to finally be back at work. I’m trying to finish the last bug fixes in the next StakeItOut release. No ETA at the moment except for real soon now.

I have to admit like many people I was dumbfounded when I heard about EBay’s purchase of Skype. Having read EBay’s Skype Presentation
I think it does make a lot of sense. There is definitely a lot of shared areas that might not be entirely obvious to some of us who are snow blind in they payment area.

In particularly they mention that Skype can help reduce friction points in the sales of high value and complex items.

I remember when I sold my Landrover Discovery II (boo hoo how I miss you) 5 years ago on EBay. There was certainly a lot of calling back and forth between the buyer and me.

The real thing that worries me is if they start going conservative on Skype the same way they were with Paypal.

Have a read through Who Killed PayPal? which describes how PayPal has instituted a bunch of strange super conservative rules, that basically piss users off but please regulators.

I knew Max and Peter from PayPal back in the early days and remember their techno-libertarian enthusiasm which I still share today.

Skype is in many ways the PayPal of telecoms. It has a very Libertarian/anarchic approach to everything. I’m not sure it was intended that way or if it just happened as an accident. I really hope EBay leaves Skype to do it this way.

If you have to start confirming who you are before signing up, it would certainly kill off the growth of Skype. Eg. See David’s commentary on Flickr Signup pre and post yahoo .

The good thing is that EBay definitely is a ecommerce company and a a successful one. They are not a conservative telecom company nor a media conglomerate. They don’t need or should feel scared into doing major changes.

Excellent advise today from David Cowan: The Best Startup Advice I Have which is about the Sales Learning Curve as defined by Mark Leslie the founder of Veritas.

In a nutshell as far as I understand it you need to expect a certain learning curve between you and your customers with regards to your product/service before it becomes sellable. In other words until you have let customers show you how they want to use your product and you have adapted to this reality, don’t bother traditional sales routes or funding.

In many ways this fits in with the whole agile approach of releasing early and changing even earlier.

Thus it is something to remember when bootstrapping. We bootstrappers are uniquely able to handle the Sales Learning Curve, but we need to be aware of it and not re-mortgage the house for 6 months living expenses to only find we haven’t got the sales we need at month 6 to keep in the game.