A note: I’m not in software, I’m in startups—a topic for another day—, but these two are ideals that I strive for in any business. They were taken from a recent interview with Joe Spolsky of Fog Creek Software, on the Venture Voice podcast, a recurring classic in entrepreneurship podcasting.

1. you can launch low-cost, i.e. bootstrap your way to the top: Joe differentiates between those companies that need to get to critical mass fast (the Amazon’s and eBay’s of the world) and pretty much everyone else.
2. instead of making (often) senseless financial projections, you can throw it out into the world and use the infrastructure of the internet to monitor actual sales, and make forecasts based on actual data. Again, if you need external funding for things like launching a comprehensive marketing campaign, you’ll probably need to make some (senseless) projections.

I know, it’s a pretty basic set of principles, and there’s lot’s of other good stuff in the podcast as well, such as SaaS vs. licensed software, but these two are the ones for the books. It reminds me a lot of this recent blog post on the Lessons Learned blog, about “Validated learning about customers.”

Vincent

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You may have noticed that I sign my name below my posts on tech it easy. The reason is that when we first started guest writing on this, Jeremy Fain’s blog, he asked us to write a small introduction before each post, a habit which we later abandoned. I miss the practice, but what I think was most valuable about it, was that it positioned each of us as a separate voice on the collection of thoughts that is tech it easy.

As I am, for now, a lonely contributor to tech it easy, this practice is perhaps completely unnecessary, but I still maintain it, perhaps for egotistical reasons. I like standing for what I write. At the same time, it may also cast a kind of shadow across other people’s [unsigned] post, which is definitely not my intention.

I’d like to know your opinion on it, whether you are a blogger (in which case, imagine yourself blogging on a site that once had 15 active writers) or a reader, and how you feel about the signing of names.

What do you think?
Vince

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