A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Tweet. --> It’s a big decision to make your first hire, because what you’re really deciding is whether you want to keep a lifestyle business or attempt to “cross the chasm” and maybe even get rich. There’s already a lot of great advice about hiring at little startups. (Powered by LaunchBit ).

Hiring 282
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How to convince a startup to hire you

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Ambitious Sailor writes: How can a former navy officer with twelve solid years of overseas defense contracting experience convince a tech startup to hire him as their business guy? Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. And, once you find it, you’ll get the job.

Hiring 230
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The Code is your Enemy

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

But this also produces a natural weakness , and when I look at what made me a successful entrepreneur — not just a great coder — it’s that I acknowledged and overcame that weakness. The weakness is your love of creation. You love to write clean, tested, scalable, extensible, beautiful code.

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WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s the heroin-hit that hooks the entrepreneur. (The And now, with Silver Lake’s investment and support, we can accelerate our growth investing even more into our strategic roadmap, and placing some new bets on ideas we’ve had but haven’t been able to find the space to explore. The next sale isn’t quite as sweet.).

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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

More than that, knowing your "padding" as I used to call it is helpful in making decisions like "Can I afford to try this Risky Expensive Thing," such as making your first hire or trying a $20,000 media blitz. I know, you can't afford anyone right now, no one can do as good a job as you, and you don't even know that you'll ever hire someone.

Startup 315
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Startup identity & the sadness of a successful exit

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

A long-winded but high-quality study from Columbia Business School ( Life after Exit ) interviewed 22 entrepreneurs and every one of them experienced this effect. I didn’t want to manage managers or figure out what changes, strategies, hirings, products, marketing, and sales were needed to make $100m/year.

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Rise and fall: Three Lessons for Entrepreneurs

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Thanks to Walker Corporate Law Group , a boutique law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs, for supporting A Smart Bear this month. I am sharing this personal story to help entrepreneurs. Indeed, this is why many CEO's and other business leaders prefer hiring hungry, working-class guys over the wealthy Ivy-leaguers.