The Invisalign Story

June 21, 2013

As a kid I had braces to fix an overbite problem. The braces worked well for moving my jaw, but did little to close gaps on my top teeth or align my bottom teeth. Today my brother, a dentist in the Charlotte area, started a treatment to fix those problems with Invisalign. Invisalign uses a series […]

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NIH SBIR Review Process

June 20, 2013

For some startups, the SBIR funding mechanism is an excellent way to receive non-diluting funding to bootstrap research efforts towards developing a product. SBIR funding is reserved for commercializing high research-value projects which have a good chance at being commercially viable. Typically that means that PhD-level qualifications are required. From a startup perspective, there are […]

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German Strawberries and Product Bloat

June 18, 2013

This is a story about strawberries with an analogy to product bloat. I love strawberries. While I was at ISC 2013 today, I purchased a carton of strawberries at a local farmer’s market (see pic below). They were small, tasty, and perfect. The strawberries at home are much bigger and often suspiciously tasteless. In searching around, […]

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Laggards at Lunch

June 15, 2013

Today I had lunch with 2 laggards. It was a conference lunch as part of HP-Cast 20. To refresh your memory on the meaning of “laggard” as defined by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, I’ve included the image below. Laggard is as far away from adopting new things as you can get. They are the deepest […]

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Starting Up by Rebooting Something Old

June 14, 2013

Most idea-stage startups are recently incorporated entities starting from scratch. They are founded by entrepreneurs who are taking a gamble and putting money, time, and opportunity costs on the line. However, that’s not the only way to do a startup. Another approach is to reboot an older company that already has a presence in the target […]

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Webinar Hosting

June 11, 2013

We like to provide webinars for our customers and leads. It is a great opportunity for us to engage directly them and field their questions. I’m writing this post to solicit feedback from you about your favorite webinar hosting tool. We’ve been using Webex, but we don’t like it very much. It’s expensive (we averaged […]

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The Word “Customer”

June 9, 2013

One easy way to tell an entrepreneurial newbie from a veteran is to watch how careful they are with the word, “customer.” Veterans are careful to reserve the word “customer” to refer to paying customers. Veterans use other words to describe everything else: Prospective customers – blanket statement for anyone in your target market that […]

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Reapproaching Former Hiring Prospects

June 6, 2013

In 2009, we hired our first employees. We wanted to hire the best talent we could find, but we did not have much money. So we tried our best to catch good talent with a mix of low salaries balanced by heavy profits interest units in the company (i.e. shares). We caught some great employees […]

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Right-Sizing Market Focus

June 5, 2013

One of the most difficult things to do for a startup is to right-size your market focus. If you go too narrow, no matter how deep you go, you’ll never be interesting enough to substantiate your existence as a business nor grow beyond a few paying customers. If you go too broad, you’ll never grow […]

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Lead Gen and Sales Tools

June 4, 2013

I received two sales approach related questions from a reader of this blog today. Tonight’s post answers those questions. First Question * What is your best lead gen source? Do you run any paid media, or is it all through inbound marketing? There is no single strongest source of lead gen for our business. This […]

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