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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. Even bootstrapped businesses can make this work (e.g. Marketing and sales spend is nil, so there has to be a reason it spreads by word of mouth, ideally virally as a natural result of using the product itself. $10/mo Think: GoDaddy).

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Bootstrapping vs. Raising Money

Spencer Fry

Days before the conference started, I was asked (and felt honored) to lead two workshops on bootstrapping vs. raising money. Having started and sold 3 successful bootstrapped businesses, and am now running 1 venture capital backed business ( Coach ), this is a topic I know a thing or two about. The quality bar has never been higher.

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What every entrepreneur should know about financing right now

Version One Ventures

We have all heard about the Series A crunch in the Valley (there might actually be up to 2000 companies in the Series A pipeline right now), and perhaps there’s a Series B crunch now too. Additionally, we need to watch out for two developments on the horizon. That’s okay: many great companies have been built by bootstrapping.

Finance 167
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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: SignNow.com

crowdSPRING Blog

than it is to explain how the 1999 UETA and 2000 ESIGN Acts and our https framework help keep us secure. Coming from the financial world to the software world taught us a lot about bootstrapping and finding valuable outsourcing tools. One example is outsourcing our original software development and it eventually had to be redone.

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Fermi estimation for startup business models

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Suppose the goal of this particular company is to achieve $1m in annual revenue for a two-person bootstrapped startup, with a goal to be so efficient as to never have to hire employees, and therefore produce a terrific little business that nets each of them a few million dollars over the next ten years. Bigger markets make things easier.

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The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

invested, IPO’ed in 2000 for $32/share — stock price now $2. But all that investment in growth and sales force didn’t have a long-term payback, and the actual value of the product to small businesses wasn’t as high as claimed, even though the simplest of customer development reveals this fact (ask any restauranteur).

IPO 240
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The Rise Of Hyper-Startups From Millennial Entrepreneurs

Mike Michalowicz

Believe it or not, there was a time when an aspiring entrepreneur would come up with a concept, develop a detailed business plan, prototype and refine the concept, seek a credit line from a bank, and then give it a go by bringing the concept to market. Oh how times have changed. That’s the right way to ride the wave of opportunity.