Web + seminar = webinar. A webinar is just a presentation streamed over the internet. Webinars are usually hosted by an organization looking to sell something. We use webinars to educate potential buyers about how to do things in our industry or with our products. Notice I stopped that sentence there. I could have said “in order to capture information about potential buyers or move them down in our sales funnel.” But I didn’t. We’re not going out to conferences or running in-person seminars these days. So if they weren’t always, webinars are now a key aspect of the modern business to business sales funnel when done right. To read…

The digitization of the world is an amazing, crazy, sometimes boring, and often surprising process of often seemingly disconnected technologies, philosophies and scientific advances that came together to form a whole far greater than those parts. Digitization has changed humanity in ways we could never have expected and somehow continues to be stifled in ways that go back hundreds of years. From raw scientific discoveries and rational thinking to very specific engineering challenges, the process of automating our lives and getting more and more visibility into the world around us continues – just as progress does. To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/100-podcast-episodes-on-the-history-of-computing

I have a lot of conversations about how to price products in startups. It took a long time to realize that before any meaningful conversation about pricing can be had, we first need to understand currency.  Currency is a term generally used to describe a system of money for a given country. Companies, like governments, end up establishing a currency – usually based on the industry we are working in. The bottom line is revenue, but it’s easier to talk downstream about the units we bill in that aggregate into that revenue.  To read about the various types of currency, click here: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/what-s-your-currency

Chip posted his reading list awhile back. Mine is more a compilation of works I’ve used in researching my next book. But if there are any founders out there looking for inspiration then hopefully someone finds it useful! Rather than post a big long list of books though, I’ll just go ahead and in true nerd fashion make it into a GitHub repo at https://github.com/krypted/TheHistoryOfComputingPodcast/blob/master/Books.md. Since it’s somewhat long (currently around 230 books), I’ll just list the top 5 here: To read the rest of the article, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/charles-reading-list

We often to refer to huge new customers as whales. In sales this usually means a customer that is 10 times the average sale. Working with big customers isn’t just about the money though; we usually think of the value of having that logo on our list of customers and as a means to legitimize our products and efforts. Sometimes we start with a big name. Other times we grow into it. Larger customers are a natural point of growth for small and medium-sized businesses and it’s thrilling to get a chance to work with them. Suddenly, it seems like we’ve really gotten there. Like our other customers will feel…

Transparency doesn’t come naturally in a startup. We start a company thinking we need to shield employees from all the things that steal their attention from their job. Most countries consider it taboo to talk about finances (like salaries) amongst employees. We think the people we worked hard to recruit will be flight risks if they know how things are going. We don’t think to post certain aspects about how the company is doing because we have so much going on. Transparency takes work. But having an organization where people understand the inner workings of the business is worth it. How? To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/the-value-of-transparency

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is a piece of software organizations use to store information about customers and sales prospects. Once upon a time, we had a piece of software to track trouble tickets in support, another to track inbound sales leads, another to track email list subscribers, another to track outbound sales leads, another to store vendor information, and the list goes on. But these days, we often use a single piece of software for all of that. And that software is increasingly Salesforce. We also used to buy big complex software tools that took days to set up. Now we can get started in minutes with…

We often start building a company and the technology that a company delivers and it just kind of evolves over time. There’s a general idea of where it’s going, but we build features, options, integrations, and focus on aspects that allow us to acquire new customers. And that’s important. But we should ask ourselves a number of questions routinely. I’ve long felt a good annual planning meeting (even in a company of two) helps us make sure that we aren’t just building out tons and tons of new features without spending some of our time working on the foundations of our products. If we do that, we will eventually slow…

As our name might imply, we love bootstrappers. Services is a great way to bootstrap any company – especially a software company. Providing outsourced development helps us fund the development of our own products while honing our skills as developers, making great contacts, and learning valuable business skills. And long term, providing services that wrap around the product we provide is a great way to bring in revenue, diversify revenue sources, and help us brand ourselves as experts in the field. But as we grow we need more focus on products and that can make service delivery a difficult proposition. To read more of the article, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/professional-services-as-a-service