Startups are made out of people. When the people wear down, progress halts. Recently, I’ve been stressed. I was just shy of the breaking point, in that my output was still good but the internal process was a mess. I was burning increasing amounts of energy just to meet the next short-term deadline. Toyota has [...]
04 Feb
The point of following your passion when you start a company isn’t because it magically makes the work easy. It’s still hard and you’ll still hit the dip. The real benefit is this: By following an internal compass (what you care about) rather than an external one (market trends & “opportunities”), you’ll repeatedly return to [...]
10 Jan
Ask anyone how to start a local marketplace business and Zaarly will have successfully done the opposite. Bo did a great interview about how they approached it all. Although there’s plenty to learn from the interview, I want to focus on a comment from an agitated viewer. This comment represents a common mindset which, left unchecked, [...]
30 Dec
I’ve done nothing for the past 5 years but drive companies out of business. Through doing so, I’ve learned how to make failure sustainable. Career entrepreneurship isn’t viable if you’re forced to return to a full-time job after every slip-up. Upside versus downside A few years ago, I would have claimed that the definition of [...]
27 Dec
You want to start a company restoring ancient stained glass windows to their former glory. You live in a country rife with cathedrals and have spent a lifetime appreciating these translucent masterpieces, but you don’t have any deep technical knowledge of their restoration. How do you get started? Why is it that most people can [...]
07 Dec
A friendly reminder: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven Pressfield Some stuff is just hard. We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself. The quote above is from [...]
04 Dec
I recently spoke to Joseph Hill of Aeir Talk–a beautifully designed speech & language helper app for autistic kids–and wanted to share his story for a couple reasons. First, it shows an unbelievable amount of hustle — he built up enough market evidence & excitement for a development team to agree to get involved and [...]
01 Dec
The approach I follow is a combination of customer discovery and effectuation, constrained by lifestyle goals (and making heavy use of the business model canvas). Begin with constraints Which parts of the business model do you care about? This takes a little bit of soul searching. Start with a business model canvas and fill in [...]
28 Oct
After a brief, failed experiment paying me to do chores, my dad tried something really neat. It clearly took a bit of legwork, but maybe there are some transferrable lessons for parents who want to lay an entrepreneurial foundation. He gave me a vending machine. He rented the machine, found a location in a local [...]
28 Oct
Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research. I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me? I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this [...]
07 Feb