by Tim Robinson on December 20, 2010
Streaming Podcast
In this interview you’ll learn how Mike Boyd helps entrepreneurs accelerate the growth of their businesses and his latest venture into making the morning coffee a more quicker and more enjoyable affair.
A Few Lessons From This Interview
Help Others and Make Friends - Stop trying to ‘network’ (stop the self promotion) with others in order to sell your services or become partners, and instead just help them, make friends and listen to what they have to say.
Build a Tribe - Creating some sort of free meetup or event in your local area (see http://www.meetup.com) is a great way to meet other likeminded people, build your own ‘tribe’ (as Seth Godin puts it) and build something that can really benefit your community and the world, all for only a small amount of time and effort.
Be first, be daring and be different – If you don’t stand out no one will ever notice you and if you do what everyone else does you’ll get what everyone else gets. If you don’t want to even try to stand out you may as well go back to working a 9 -5 job because your chances of success are slim to none.
Just do it – you have to have a go, you have to take action.
Action Precedes Clarity – Often you’ll have no idea how you’re going to pull something off, but once you start and step off that cliff you’ll achieve clarity. If you know what you want but don’t know how to get there just get started on anything you can do and figure out the rest later.
by Tim Robinson on December 18, 2010
So you want to run your startup full time and commit yourself 100% to it? but you don’t have savings, a loan or investment capital to fall back on? Here’s how you can make your startup immediately profitable:
- Start a service business related to what you’re building
OR
- Find one or more large companies willing to pay you a retainer or large fee to use your software and develop the specific features they need.
For Example:
- If you are developing a website design tool, start building websites for businesses using the tool.
- If you are creating a check in service start working with other companies to increase their exposure with other mobile apps (and once your product is complete you can easily get them on yours).
- If you are building a customer feedback tool, approach enterprises that could use the tool and see if they’ll pay you extra or some sort of retainer for implementing the exact features they need. (It’s kind of like them hiring you but then you get to sell the product later to others).
For some products this seems impossible, but I bet if you think hard enough you’ll find something that you can sell to other companies (even if it is business consulting).
I know, I know, the whole point of having a software business is it sells all by itself and runs on autopilot. But the early days when you’re still building your product are hard and money is tight and if you already know a bit about your target market, and have some business skills (you know you do) then why not leverage them to get some easy initial funding? It’s a hell of a lot better than working a job.
Did you know 37 signals started off as a web design firm? Or that Uservoice got their early funds by doing paid pilots for businesses (where the companies paid them a large amount of money to develop the specific features they needed in the software)? Even the mighty Microsoft started out building their initial product (MS-DOS) for IBM then went on to resell it themselves later on.
If you look deep enough you’ll see that most big companies started out either by developing a piece of software for another business and selling it themselves, or by selling services of some sort to other companies and using those funds to grow their current product.
It’s really really hard to live off just the profits of your software in the early days. But if you start selling related services you can charge a large premium, live off very little traffic and customers, and have a much higher chance of longterm success.
