Excerpts: What Steve describes in "The Four Steps to the Epiphany," is a method of doing that in four stages but when Brant and I sat to talk to Steve about this, Steve himself said, "if I can convince people just to get out of the building, they have done 90% of what needs to be done." And, getting out of the building means getting out and talking to humans about the problem, the solution and the product. It’s not feature mongering, it’s not market research, - it’s trying to really find the pain points and depending on who you are, this can be pretty difficult or very easy.
* One of the key benefits of being bootstrapped is that you would spend, whatever you have pretty carefully and would most likely make right financial decisions.
* when your startup name is easy to say and type, it becomes a lot easier for Word of Mouth Referral.
* Culture really comes from the entrepreneur articulating and promoting their core purpose and core values and then hiring, training, and firing around them.
* Never launch a freemium pricing model until a company is profitable and it can become a paid advertising channel.
Excerpts: As an entrepreneur, I think the single most important lesson or the quality I would suggest to someone is persistence. For the first two years, I would work every day on MakeUseOf without seeing anything back in return.
Excerpts: What are the most common mistakes that startups are making today?
... As much you say, get out of the building and call people. I challenge a startup that says, they are a Lean startup to tell me who is the last customer or person you called and did a customer and problem interview with. They don’t do it; they sit behind their computers and look at the codes and metrics. They sit their and survey people; they prompt people on their website for feedback. But, they don’t call; they don’t get on the phone; they don’t do it...
