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

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, sometimes referred to as organic search. This is where we look to increase the amount of traffic we get to our web site, and specifically look to get the type of traffic we want. There are a lot of sites out there – and even more people looking at sites. Having a site that gets people who want to buy our product is a huge part of the success many a startup sees at the top of their marketing funnel. In this article, we’ll look at getting higher natural search results but not jump into paying for ads or other forms of display…

Written for the Bootstrappers Blog: Platform. There are books like Platform Revolution and The Business Of Platforms that tell us that we want to make our products “platforms” or we want to build a business model where in our products we can facilitate the exchange of data with other products. In doing so we gain access to more customers, make customers stickier, and ultimately, we do more of what the promise of computing in general is meant to do: we make the people that choose to use our products more efficient (which in turn makes our products more valuable). To read the rest of the article check out: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/creating-a-platform-overly-simplistic-api-strategies