The Bootstrappers´Bible

Following on my last post, I would like to give you some more hints on bootstrapping from The Bootstrappers´Bible written by Seth Godin.

If you try to steal the giant´s lunch, the giant is likely to eat you for lunch.

Without a business model, a company can get publicity, hire employees, and spend money – but it won´t make a profit.

Understanding the value chain of your business is a great first step in getting to the core of how you´re going to succeed.

The time to develop a multiple income source startegy is not when you run out of money. Then it will be too late.

Courting your big suppliers is a big part of being a successful bootstrapper. It gives you leverage.

Be up-front with your customers and learn how to deal with them in a professional way.

At the beginning … you might be tempted to be very choosy about which projects and which customers you take. Don´t do that!

You need a formal business reinvention process. Put it in your calendar.

You´ll discover that the time you spend managing people can have a huge impact on the way you run your business.

This book starts with a nice manifesto for all the bootstrappers and continues with real examples and a bunch of rules for all the areas of a business. What a great reading for upcoming Christmas! :P

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Bootstrapping in practise

One of the few things I am taking from ESADE is the concept of bootstrapping. As I was working on two entrepreneurial ideas, I swept into this magic world of no external funding and low costs. A start up, that is bootstrapping, is basically sustaining itself on the basis of positive cash flow. To have a better idea of how this can work in the online world, you can have a look on video from David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals, Ruby on Rails, book Rework – recomendable). In his speech, everything seems really simple as he puts it that way. And I think his way makes a lot of sense.

Recently I´ve been shown the difference between a novice and an experienced entrepreneur. Between those two approaches, try to find five diferences:

Novice entrepreneurs primarily look for:

• how novel the idea is
• extent to which the idea is based on new technology
• potential to change the industry
• superiority of the offering
• intuition and gut feel

Experienced entrepreneurs are in the search of:

• solving customer´s problems
• speed of revenue generation
• ability to generate positive cash-flow
• manageable risk
• others in the network whom to develop the venture with

You´ve got them? And now guess what … surprise, surprise … David is just trying to show all the other entrepreneurs that starting a business doesn´t mean you need to be a genius! His simple three step start up is:

1. Having a nice application/solving customers´ problem a little bit better then all the other guys / treating clients nicely
2. Asking money for that
3. Being profitable / becoming a million dolar company

There´s basically no need for taking the big waves, developing the next Facebook. It is all about simple ideas! Solving problems! And a positive cash flow …

Lazy Sunday morning

Everybody knows it (might be converted into lazy Monday/Tuesday/… morning). You get up, have loads of work ahead, but don´t really feel like starting. So you spend some time reading emails or you might check your favourite web pages or search for some interesting news. But …

• I don´t receive so many emails to cover with them all my unproductive mornings anymore.
• I am not into surfing through internet, because I like topics for whose reading I would need to switch on my brain.

So, usually I end up on Facebook. Photos + some personal news are quite a good deal for waking up. People like pictures. When children get a book, they first browse through all the pictures. So actually Photos + world news could be also an acceptable choice for Sunday mornings. And here emerges the solution –The Big Picture. Hot issues combined with quality photos. Just a perfect fit! You want to spend some high quality unproductive time? :-)

Leverage Facebook for your web or blog

Jon Bond:

Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.

Last week I have attended an online conference on the topic of “How to drive more traffic to your web or blog” mady by Jose Maria Gil. He hit the issue of many fragmented platforms which offer marketing of your company for free. No matter if you are a newcomer bootstrapping your costs or a well established company – if you want to connect with your customers, you need to get to those platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs are going to be the essentials. The big paradox is having to spend less, but work more.

To share with you at least few insights from the conference, I would like to summarize some of the existing marketing opportunities that Facebook offers.

1. Starting from the landing page, this is the first touch point, that a company should take advantage of. Personalize it (Facebook allows you to use HTML), use the applications available, get inspired by others (check my article “Stop and shop in a one-stop-shop“, where I have been commenting on Facebook and included links for Starbucks and Coca Cola).
2. Coming to the wall page, get it properly linked to others social sites like Twitter or Facebook and iclude links to your web page to get better rating for your SEO and Google Adwords.
3. Moving to general information, don´t forget to mention all the links again.
4. Finishing with the events page, as for all the others, mention important links and use your key words while naming your events created.

One-stop vol. 2 – Multiprotocol Instant Messaging

Do you know what is a freeware proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application?

Put in a simple way, it is a one-stop instant messaging integrating the best known IM accounts such as Google talk, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, providing news feeds from Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and supporting notifications from your e-mail account.

I find it highly useful in a sense that you don´t need to check all your accounts to find out if the person you want to talk to is connected somewhere, you don´t need to change your status in all IM accounts separately, you don´t need to enter your email to see if you have new messages and you don´t need to enter to Facebook to see what the news are.

I have tried Digsby and Trillian and personally prefer Digsby because it is simpler, doesn´t show offline contacts and is more user-friendly while managing your email and checking Facebook. The advantages of Trillian are in my opinion better design, integration of Skype and possibility of video conferences.

Want to have a simpler social life?

Pick a fight!

As the authors of Rework advise:

If you think a competitor sucks, say so.

You will differentiate yourself. You will attract followers, people who will agree with you. And you will have a great story to tell the customers.

Truly digital

Digital life.

Who is nowadays not concerned about those two words? Well, I surely am. When enjoying my digital life, I came across a company called Digital Life. And as this company seems to me pretty fascinating, I would like to share my foundings.

First, Digital Life says that it is the largest study of the global digital consumers (might not be the largest, but who cares). The important thing is that they provide interesting data and collect insights really all over the world, including also BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and most of the Next Eleven markets (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria,   Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam). This is quite important as other simmilar studies (as of Comscore) do not provide information on for example China or India.

Second, I also appreciate their brief reports  – check for example The Drivers of Online Behaviour or The Digital Lifestyles. They provide an inspiration of what would be useful to know about the digital consumers and how can you organize the information found.

Third, Digital Life is for me truly digital. I enjoy the design of their web page and even more the sample of their study. That is what I call interactive. If you want to have fun actually searching for information or if you want to find more about what are the digital consumers doing, what is the most important to them, for how long are they online and how social are they, reserve yourself a couple of minutes.

Sit in the front row of your life

I have been lucky enough to sit in the 4th row (the first one filled with people) of the seminar “Leadership and finance” which turned to be just awesome. Two hours of leadership (without finance :-)) and as the cherry on the top a video from Ben Zander. Ben Zander is the conductor of Boston Philharmonic. And the way he learned to lead people in orchestras is pretty much apliable to one´s personal life or performance of businesses. By playing according to his notes you might be more successful both personally and professionally. I would like to highlight two of his insights catched in the following video.

1) Universe of possibility

It´s all about your point of view. The same thing can be a disaster or a glorious opportunity. It´s much better to see the world of opportunities then to fell into the world of disasters. Ben Zander gives on this topic a great expamle – different approaches of two business men in Africa. Their evaluation if there´s a potential market place for a manufacturer of shoes is following:

Situation hopeless, stop, they don´t wear shoes. / Glorious opportunity, they don´t have any shoes yet.

And it´s just up to you which attitude / world to live you choose.

2) Long term vision

It´s all about having a vision. A long-term vision changes your approach to the world of possibilities. It lets involve you others. It´s about working together to reach common goals. It´s about suceeding by  making others powerful.

To this I would add more remarks from his other videos.

3) Cosmic laughter

It´s all invented. The world around us invents rules and limitations and orders and statuses and … but it´s all just made up. When you realize this, you ´ll experience the cosmic laughter. You will find out that it doesn´t matter if you have 68 points out of 70 or a grade A. The hidden assumptions decide what we can observe. The invented theory limits us to see the possibilities surrounding us.

4) Giving an A grade

By expecting everybody to excell, you enhance the people´s potential. You make them feel powerful and raises their desire to contribute to others no matter how big or perfect their contribution can be.

Stop and shop in a one-stop-shop

Well, there´s nothing unexpected about this trend.

People want convenient lives.

Time is money.

In the same way as the popularity of huge commercial centers and hypermarkets grows, the popularity of online one-stop-shops grows. People don´t want to go from the bakery shop to the grocery one, then the dairy one and at the end to the butchery. People don´t want to book separately their flight, then the insurance, the hotel and at the end rent a car. People don´t want to talk with their friends on MSN, look at their photos on Facebook, share with them videos on Youtube and at the end invite them to an event via Doodle.

It is everywhere. Physical shopping, online shopping, social media.

The next big development in social media is clearly multi-media integration. The networks that can do it in the most convenient way will be the winners. And the winners will take it all. Internet users focus their digital life around single networks rather than around many specialized tools with social features. That also explains the popularity of Facebook. By looking on what activities social media users look for (statistics from March 2009) and elaborating what Facebook offers, it becomes pretty self-explanatory.

But as all the others, also Facebook still has a long way to go before becoming a real one-stop-shop. Some of their big steps are already noticeable. Lets´ have a look for example on integration of applications for different brands. Have you ever come across with such pages as of Starbucks or Coca Cola? And have you ever seen such social media management companies as Vitrue? Those are most probably showing the future way Facebook is going to take … Well, taking into account the potential future revenue streams of Facebook I have published on my previous post, I should correct the sentence. Those are DEFINITIVELY showing the future way Facebook is going to take.