Ian MacKaye (via mwfrost)
I have been taking cold showers in the morning for a few weeks now. This is what I do: I get up, take a hot shower for a few minutes and then turn of the heat and stand under the cold water for a minute. Yes, it is cold. Yes, I’m cursing a lot and yes, it feels awesome! There are several reason why taking a cold shower is good for you. Something about your blood circulation, skin health and even testosterone levels. And although those are nice side effects I do it for another reason. The reason I take a cold shower is to remind myself that my goal in life as an entrepreneur is not to get comfortable. My goal is to succeed in whatever I want to succeed in. If that means getting uncomfortable so be it.
When I was in law school I was standing in a bar one day and the most beautiful girl I had seen around campus walked up to me and said: “I am just wondering why you have never come up to me and tried to talk to me. Every other guy I see around at parties does this.” Five years later we were married. She was right, I might have never walked up to her and introduced myself had she not taken this action herself. Imagine for a moment if she had not walked up to me. The course of both of our lives would have been radically different. The idea that our lives can literally be transformed by these small actions is something that amazes me because it happens all the time and everywhere. Who we become, what we do and what happens with our lives is often controlled by small actions of stepping up and meeting various individuals that we normally might not choose to meet.
It’s hard to argue against going through the Customer Development Process (CDP) when building your startup. It just makes sense and experienced entrepreneurs are really excited about it. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with Steve Blank’s Four Steps to Epiphany and Eric Reis’s Lessons Learned blog.
Fearless by Pink Floyd - Inspirational lyrics for the entrepreneur this morning:
You say the hill’s to steep to climb, climb it. You say you’d like to see me try, climb it.
…and as I rise above the tree-line and the clouds. I look down, hearing the sounds of the things you’ve said today.
By the way, the chanting in the background is the Liverpool FC club anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic”, delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910 -download PDF
Customer acquisition and development is critical task for a Startup. With limited budget-time-resource, it is almost impossible to let go even 1 single customer. As a Startup you have hardly any room to say no to a customer such as when they ask for new features, additional services, reduced pricing and many such things. As customer is God and Startup is your life’s precious ambition, so you think your Startup shouldn’t say ‘No’ to a customer, isn’t ? Go ahead, you should say ‘No’, not for the sake of saying but certainly ‘say no’ if you think your customer will move on if you don’t fulfill their suggestion.
In my last post I outlined some of the questions that you should ask to establish a business case for your new product or service. Once that’s done, it’s time to define who you are building the product for and the problems they face, what your proposed solution looks like, why you think it is better than anything else out there, and how your solution will work to solve these customer problems.
I’ve been working with students quite a bit at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center this semester. One class of questions that keeps coming up surrounds how you actually take an idea and make something out of it. In particular, lots of technical people know how to do the bleeding edge research and get something up and running for the first time, then they get stumped at the point where they have to take an idea (represented in, say, 3 powerpoint slides) and a proof-of-concept technology demo, and take it all the way to V1 release.
So,
It was 1998 and the dot-com boom was in full effect. I was making websites as a 22 year old freelance programmer in NYC. I charged my first client $1,400. My second client paid $5,400. The next paid $24,000. I remember the exact amounts — they were the largest checks I’d seen up til that…