Morale

Seth Godin has as good and short a description I’ve seen of the curves of product sales. The four curves of want and get

Basically curve A is what everyone wants but rarely gets, Curve B shows a spurt of early adopters then hardly anyone else. Curve C shows the most realistic success curve which we should generally speaking plan our finances around and finally curve D which is essentially the failure curve.

These things are very important for us bootstrappers as we we need to be able to plan our funding/finance accordingly. I think it is best to plan for C. Obviously if you plan for D, why start at all. This is why it is so bad to fund with your credit card, because unless you hit curve A, the credit card will kill you before success hits in curve C.

Curve B is interesting. Seth talks about this as what happens if you a fan group who all buy your stuff immediately. Then no one else does.

During the Reboot 7 conference one of the most interesting sessions was Jason Fried from 37Signals titled “Doing big things with small teams”.

It is the story how they have managed to roll out:

• Basecamp
• Tada-list
• Backpack

Using very few resources and quickly. It was basically a tale of bootstrapping successfull commercial web services.

Much of what he said runs along the same thread that I have been pushing here. In fact there was really very little I would be in disagreement with.

The main things that where enlightening for me was their tech support strategy. Jason does most of the techsupport for all of their sites himself. If someone has a suggestion he replies back to them thanking them for the idea and immediately deletes the mail. If enough people suggest a feature it will be memorable enough that it will make it on the todo list.

He also stressed the importance of leaving applications as simple as possible, allowing people to structure things their own way and not imposing structures upon them.

Several people asked him if they didn’t want to grow bigger. He replied that currently that would not be a priority for them as that would take the enjoyment out of it. I am absolutely in violent agreement with this.

The reboot participang notes from Jason’s session

Joseph writes this peice Look for competition last where he postulates that worrying about competitors at an early stage is a bad idea.

I find a lot of people that have great ideas and concepts, but they throw them out because they do some research, and find a plethora of competition. That’s a big mistake.

If there weren’t competition in an industry, there wouldn’t be a market. So, when you’re thinking about ideas, DO NOT plan your business by looking at your competition. Plan your business by using your mind and your own resources. Think about what you and other people would want as customers of your new business and build from there.

This is all excellent advice and fits right into my rants about The evils of business plans and bootstrap a business versus playing a business .

Seth Godin hits it again. Small is the new big he claims. This is what I’ve been claiming for years now:

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog. Seth Godin

In Bootstrapping a business versus playing a business I write about the importance of sticking to the core business and not going through the trappings of acting like a “big business”.

I think that is one of the big lessons we all should have learnt from the dot com boom/burn. I see almost all the successfull startups follow the small route, but unfortunately there are also many who keep going down the traditional eternal loop of writing business plans and seeking funding, while they really should be focused on their business.

What we really need now is a CEO, CFO, HR person etc. No!!! Focus on your business is the only thing you need.

I am now live with StakeItOut/Beta. Note the site is only ssl.

In the next couple of days I will explain what it actually is about.

In the first week I will only trickle in new users to make sure that the server holds up and that there aren’t any major bugs I’ve overseen.

As always send me an email at [email protected] and I will add you to the beta list.