Next week [21st March 2012], I’ll be giving a talk at the Kingston Round Table of Inventors, a thoroughly lovely local inventor group that meets once a month or so at Kingston University, chaired by the well-respected Bob Lindsey. Feel free to come along, everyone’s welcome & there’s normally lively discussion in the Grove Tavern afterwards (a [...]
For a while I’ve been putting together my “Startup Handbook”, a realistic and practical guide to funding startups in the UK. In it, I introduce the idea of Minimum Buyable Product: whereas a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ has come to mean a stripped-down late prototype you hope you can get away with selling, a Minimum Buyable Product [...]
As recommended yesterday by Ben Markland on the London OpenCoffee meetup forum, here’s a video from July 2011 you might enjoy: a 50-minute lecture + Q&A session by Fred Destin at Miniseedcamp Ljubljana. Fred’s a smart guy, and manages to squeeze in the whole lifecycle of startups: founders (the magic number is two), funding, launch, build, the [...]
As I blogged here a while back, there’s broad agreement amongst the startup chatterati that traditional business plans are dead. MBA thinking is (allegedly) useless for entrepreneurs, bootstrapping (and low-end funded) companies are stuck at the front end of the [necessity-----strategy] spectrum, everyone is talking about Eric Ries’ “Lean Startups” (even if nobody yet knows [...]
Ohhhhhh dear: Monday evening saw a group from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) come to TechHub in Old Town Street with a £1m grant giveaway, fully expecting to have rose petals strewn in their path by hordes of grateful self-funded digital entrepreneurs (à la #StartupBritain launch). Unfortunately, they were not so much “egged on” as [...]
I thought, given the bold implicit claim on this blog’s mast-head, I ought to at least mention in passing how far towards its mythical future $1bn valuation Nanodome has progressed over the last few months. The honest (i.e. startup theatre-free) answer is: it’s hard to tell – as always, there’s good news and bad news… [...]
It has become über-fashionable to talk about ‘bootstrapped business’: but… what is this, exactly? The inspiration for the term “bootstrapping” seems to have been a 19th century tall tale in which somebody supposedly defied the laws of physics “to pull themselves up by the bootstraps” (the leather loops on the back of your boots) right up [...]
