The Death of Moon River Consulting
There are generally two reasons why a business ceases to exist. Either it went out of business or it was acquired by another business. In most cases, the founder would rather it be acquired rather than shuttered because at least that way you can say that you had a “successful exit”. I’m in the former…
Read MoreAnnouncing The Single Founder Handbook
This past August, I took a trip to my cottage in Edwards, NY. The trip was primarily intended for me to be on-site to show the place off to potential buyers and was successful in that regard. However, I also took it as an excuse to do a 3 day personal retreat. As part of…
Read MoreLosers Have Goals, Winners Have Systems
I blatantly stole this line from Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. So if you can get past my thievery, I think we’ll be ok for the rest of the day. My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems. – Scott Adams One of the most common mistakes I see entrepreneurs make time…
Read MoreThe Biggest Threat to Your Bootstrapped Business
When you’re building a new business, there are a lot of things that can go wrong at any given point in time. Only a small subset of these problems have the potential to completely destroy your business, bringing it to a total halt. Most of these are obvious. Problems with cofounders Running out of cash…
Read MoreMy Preemptive Strike at Google
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve had to consider whether or not I wanted to host my own solution or use a cloud provider of some kind. When I was first getting started as an entrepreneur, there simply weren’t choices to be had. You hosted your own solution, or you didn’t…
Read MoreMicroConf – Prague
For the last three years, my business partner Rob Walling and I have put on a conference for self-funded startups in Las Vegas called MicroConf. Something we resisted for the longest time was doing a second conference, but it seems we have no choice any longer. Early this year, we announced MicroConf 2013 in Vegas…
Read MoreFinding Your Entrepreneurial Calling
When building a business or a product for a business, you have to pay attention to a lot of different things. A short, but hardly comprehensive list of questions comes to mind: Are you solving a problem? Will people pay for that solution? Is it easy to reach the market? Are there no competitors or…
Read MorePost MicroConf 2013 thoughts
When Rob Walling and I put together the first MicroConf in 2011, we knew what we wanted to do, but weren’t quite sure if we could pull it off. Start to finish, we put it together in about 10 weeks. The following year, we gave ourselves six months and it still seemed like everything came…
Read MoreFree ticket to MicroConf from Microsoft
One of the single, best experiences I have each year comes out of MicroConf, the conference for self-funded and bootstrapped startups that I put together with Rob Walling. If you’re extremely serious about building your software business, this is the place to be. In just two years, MicroConf went from being a completely unknown conference,…
Read MoreHow my product could have prevented Adobe from being hacked
One of my podcast listeners forwarded me an interesting article from Adobe Software about how they had been hacked. It turns out that Adobe had a build server in their environment which had been compromised. This build server had apparently not followed their corporate standards for security, so when this server was deployed it was…
Read More