Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling

My Thoughts

This book is filled with actionable, direct suggestions on how to ship a product that will generate revenue. It helps you avoid non-income-bearing ideas that waste time by forcing you to think about earnings as early as possible. While I haven’t successfully applied these ideas yet, it feels as though following this advice strictly would inevitably lead to earning money.

Summary

Start Small, Stay Small is a practical, execution-first playbook for developers who want to launch and grow profitable software businesses without external funding. Rob Walling argues that marketing beats code in determining success: start with a clearly defined, underserved niche, validate demand before building, and focus on building an audience and a sales system that converts. The book emphasizes a market-first approach, lightweight testing via keyword tools and AdWords, and building a minimum viable product while rigorously managing time, scope, and priorities.

Walling lays out a complete operating system for a micro SaaS: set written goals (e.g., first $500/month profit), value your time, outsource early, document processes, and channel energy into Top Shelf marketing (email list, content, SEO). He details how to craft a high-converting sales website (capture emails first, clear hook, single CTA, simple pricing tiers, guarantees), nurture leads with autoresponders, earn focused traffic, and build compounding assets. Finally, he shows how to iterate, measure, and decide whether to double down or start over.

Learnings

• Adopt the entrepreneur mindset: write goals, make public commitments, create accountability; aim for the first $500/month profit milestone.
• Market first, product second: failure most often comes from building something no one wants.
• Choose a tight niche (preferably “warm”) to reduce competition, increase relevance, and simplify marketing and feature scope.
• Validate demand before coding: use keyword tools, competition scores, and short AdWords tests to measure real search volume and interest.
• Product Success Triangle: product, market, execution—early effort should prioritize market and execution.
• Ship a 200–400 hour MVP; trim features aggressively to reach launch faster and learn sooner.
• Value your time; outsource/VA repetitive and low-value tasks; delay automation until the process proves its worth.
• Document repeatable processes to enable delegation, reduce mistakes, and increase the startup’s eventual sellability.
• Focus beats busyness: avoid “fake work” (excess reading/research); take action notes; single-task; either work or truly rest.
• Build compounding marketing assets: an email list, a blog/podcast/video presence, and organic search visibility.
• Use PPC as a learning tool (keyword discovery and validation), not a permanent growth crutch.
• Optimize for quality traffic: small, highly targeted placements convert better than broad “big press” spikes.
• Sales website rule: don’t try to sell on first visit; primary goal is email capture via trust, relevance, and a clear reward (lead magnet, contest, course).
• Core site principles: one primary CTA per page; everything within two clicks; strong hook; buttons that look clickable; visual over text where possible.
• Include core pages: Home, Tour, Testimonials, Pricing/Purchase, Contact; keep the home page simple with a single next step.
• Pricing: anchor to value and market norms; prefer three tiers; lean higher; end prices in 7/8/9; consider support/maintenance fees for one-time licenses.
• Offer a free trial or a strong money-back guarantee to reduce friction and increase conversions.
• Email strategy: build an autoresponder series; maintain relevance; optimize send timing and subject lines; mix education with periodic offers.
• SEO and links: prioritize high-quality, relevant links; vary anchor text; build consistently over time; leverage directories, niche sites, competitor backlinks, alerts, articles, testimonials, and ethical link opportunities.
• Iterate and test relentlessly (copy, pricing, funnels); accept uncertainty, fail fast, measure, and improve.
• Decide to grow or reset based on data; track key metrics from day one to improve operations and preserve optionality for a sale.

‘How to Read a Book’ Analysis

Key Sentences

1. “If you want to self-fund a startup you have to choose a niche.”

• Why it’s crucial: This is a core premise of the book: bootstrapped software succeeds by focusing tightly on underserved, specific markets rather than broad horizontals. It sets the strategic constraint that shapes product, marketing, and execution choices.
• Proposition: Bootstrapped founders should target a narrow, well-defined niche to gain traction and avoid head-to-head competition with larger players.

2. “It’s whether there’s a group of people willing to pay for it.”

• Why it’s crucial: This sentence names the single most important determinant of success—validated demand—over founders, features, or even marketing. It anchors the market-first approach and everything else (pricing, positioning, channels) follows from it.
• Proposition: The decisive factor in product success is the existence of a paying market.

3. “Unless you’re marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.”

• Why it’s crucial: It provides a priority hierarchy that overturns developer instincts, clarifying where to allocate scarce time and resources. It connects major ideas: market selection first, then customer acquisition, then design, and only then deep functionality.
• Proposition: Prioritize market selection and marketing ahead of design and features to maximize odds of success.

4. “Your number one goal, even beyond selling your product, is turning browsers into prospects.”

• Why it’s crucial: This reframes how to build sales websites: optimize for email capture and relationship-building instead of immediate purchase. It underpins the book’s emphasis on mailing lists, funnels, and nurturing as sustainable growth engines.
• Proposition: Design your site and funnel to capture contact information and nurture prospects rather than relying on first-visit sales.

5. “You should aim to master all three in the long-term but at the start, place emphasis on the latter two to determine if the idea will fly.”

• Why it’s crucial: Referring to the Product Success Triangle (product, market, execution), it directs early emphasis to market and execution (marketing/sales/support) over product polish. This connects strategy with practical validation and reduces waste.
• Proposition: Early on, validate market demand and your go-to-market execution before investing heavily in product development.

Unity of the Book

Start Small, Stay Small argues that the reliable path for a self‑funded developer to build a successful software business is to start in a tightly defined niche, validate demand, lead with marketing and audience-building (not code), and execute with disciplined, testable processes—outsourcing, systematizing, pricing, and conversion-focused sales—to steadily turn targeted traffic into sustainable profit.

Author’s Problems

Main Problem

How can a developer reliably build, launch, and grow a profitable, self-funded software startup by prioritizing market-first validation and marketing execution under resource constraints?

Supporting Problems

1. How to adopt the entrepreneur’s mindset and goals (marketing-first thinking, written goals/accountability, valuing time, focus, and comfort with uncertainty).
2. How to choose and validate a reachable, paying niche (vertical focus, “warm” niches, demand/competition assessment, and reachability via channels).
3. What to build for that niche and how to scope 1.0 (MVP definition, effort estimation, platform/revenue model, pricing strategy, and build-vs-outsource decisions).
4. How to craft positioning and a high-converting sales funnel/site (hook, core pages, single CTA per page, trials/guarantees, tiered pricing, and conversion testing).
5. How to build and nurture an audience, especially via email (list building, trust/relevance/reward for signups, autoresponders, content cadence and topics).
6. How to acquire and test traffic cost‑effectively (SEO on-page and link building, PPC for validation, social/media/forums/guest posts/affiliates/PR, and channel ROI math).
7. How to systematize and scale operations to maximize founder leverage (documented processes, what to automate vs do manually early, hiring/managing VAs, and time economics).
8. How to iterate post‑launch and decide to grow or start over (measure and test, improve funnel/channels/product, expand within/adjacent niches, track metrics, prepare for exit).

Problem Hierarchy

Mindset and goals (1) come first; without focus, time valuation, and marketing-first thinking, later steps stall. Market selection and validation (2) must precede product decisions. With a validated niche, define and scope the product and pricing (3), then build the sales funnel/site to convert (4). Audience building via email (5) underpins sustainable marketing and should be integrated into the funnel before scaling traffic. Traffic acquisition and testing (6) feed the funnel once conversion paths exist. Systematization and outsourcing (7) support ongoing execution as workload grows. Finally, with data flowing, iterate and make grow-or-restart decisions (8), which depend on metrics generated by all prior steps.

Book’s Structure

1. Major parts/sections and their main points

• Part I: Mindset and Identity Shift (Chapter 1)
  • Reframe developer to entrepreneur: market-first, marketing > product, cross-role skills (developer/webmaster/marketer)
  • Niche focus; set goals, accountability; value time; avoid faux productivity; process-thinking; fail–measure–iterate
• Part II: Market Selection and Validation (Chapter 2)
  • Niches as the core strategy; verticals > horizontals; warm niches; small, reachable markets
  • Micropreneur Methodology: keyword demand, difficulty, AdWords testing; quality traffic over quantity
• Part III: Product Strategy, Scope, and Pricing (Chapter 3)
  • Product Success Triangle (Product/Market/Execution) with emphasis on Market and Execution
  • Scope to fast 1.0 (200–400 hours); hiring/outsourcing tradeoffs; pricing tiers aligned to value and segment
• Part IV: Conversion Infrastructure: Sales Website and Email (Chapter 4)
  • Sales funnel design; goal = capture email (trust/relevance/reward)
  • Customer insight; single CTA per page; core pages; hook; pricing page; guarantees; lead magnets; autoresponders
• Part V: Traffic and Growth Marketing (Chapter 5)
  • “Top Shelf” channels: mailing list, content (blog/podcast/video), SEO
  • “Second Shelf” channels: PPC, social, PR, forums, affiliates, ads; link-building strategy and tactics
• Part VI: Capacity, Process, and Leverage (VAs & Outsourcing) (Chapter 6)
  • Defer automation; use humans early; two leverage points (pre- and post-launch)
  • How to find, onboard, manage VAs; task selection and workflow
• Part VII: Post-Launch Path, Metrics, and Ecosystem (Chapter 7)
  • Decide: grow or start over; track data as if selling; engage in communities, conferences, and resources

2. How the parts relate and build upon each other

• Part I → Part II: Mindset (marketing-first, niche focus, goals) sets criteria and discipline for niche discovery and validation.
• Part II → Part III: Validated demand and positioning inform scope, features, and pricing; market size/competition dictate MVP boundaries.
• Part III → Part IV: Product/price decisions shape the website’s messaging, hooks, tier presentation, guarantees, and conversion goals.
• Part IV → Part V: The sales site and list are the conversion endpoints that all traffic channels must feed; email becomes the core asset amplified by SEO and content.
• Part V → Part VI: Marketing execution creates repetitive, delegable tasks; processes and VAs increase throughput, reduce founder bottlenecks, and protect effective hourly rate.
• Part VI → Part VII: With leverage and process, founders can evaluate traction data to choose between scaling the current product or restarting; community/resources sustain learning and opportunities.
• Feedback loops:
  • Metrics from Parts IV–V inform ongoing niche refinement (Part II) and scope/pricing adjustments (Part III).
  • Process documentation (Part VI) strengthens future launches and potential exits (Part VII).

3. Hierarchical outline (visual structure)

• Start Small, Stay Small (Central Aim: launch and grow a self-funded, niche software business through market-first, testable, lean execution)
  • I. Mindset and Identity Shift (Ch. 1)
    • Entrepreneur = developer + webmaster + marketer
    • Market-first; niche focus
    • Goals, accountability, time valuation
    • Process orientation; fail–measure–iterate
  • II. Market Selection and Validation (Ch. 2)
    • Why niches win; vertical advantages
    • Warm niches; reachability economics
    • Demand estimation: keywords, difficulty, AdWords
    • Traffic quality over quantity
  • III. Product Strategy, Scope, Pricing (Ch. 3)
    • Product Success Triangle (emphasis on Market + Execution)
    • MVP scope (200–400 hours); build vs. outsource
    • Pricing logic; tiers; value-based framing
  • IV. Conversion Infrastructure: Sales Website & Email (Ch. 4)
    • Sales funnel; primary goal = email capture
    • Customer insight; single CTA/page; core pages
    • Hooks; pricing page patterns; guarantees
    • Lead magnets; autoresponders; email cadence
  • V. Traffic and Growth Marketing (Ch. 5)
    • Top Shelf: mailing list, content, SEO
    • Second Shelf: PPC, social, PR, forums, affiliates, ads
    • Link-building principles and tactics
  • VI. Capacity, Process, and Leverage (Ch. 6)
    • Defer automation; use VAs to test/operate
    • Hire, onboard, manage; task structuring
  • VII. Post-Launch Path, Metrics, Ecosystem (Ch. 7)
    • Grow vs. start over; track KPIs for optionality
    • Conferences, blogs, communities, tools
• Flow (dependency chain):
  • I → II → III → IV → V → VI → VII
  • With iterative loops: (IV/V metrics) ↔ (II/III adjustments); (VI processes) → (faster future cycles)

4. How the structure serves the book’s main purpose

• Sequenced from mindset to market to execution: Reduces risk for self-funded founders by front-loading validation before build.
• Tight coupling of market, product, conversion, and traffic: Ensures every later activity (site, channels, outsourcing) concretely supports earlier strategic choices (niche, pricing, positioning).
• Emphasis on reusable assets (email list, processes, documented workflows): Compounds leverage for small teams and aligns with “stay small” sustainability.
• Built-in feedback loops and test-first practices: Institutionalize learning and capital efficiency, enabling repeated, lower-risk launches or disciplined growth without outside funding.

Prompt / Agent Ideas

1. Niche Miner from Warm Networks:
   I will paste a list of people I know and their professions/hobbies. Use it to propose 10 vertical niches I could serve with software. For each niche, provide:
   - Who they are (1–2 lines) and 3 urgent pains (especially ones tied to time or money).
   - “Magazine test” viability: list 3–5 trade publications/sites/forums/events where they congregate.
   - Initial keyword set (10–20 phrases) to test demand intent (buy, software, tool, automate, SaaS).
   - Competition snapshot: likely incumbents and why a narrow wedge could win.
   - A quick “warmth” score (1–5) based on my proximity to the niche.
   Ask any clarifying questions first if needed. Then output a table.

2. $100 AdWords Demand Validation Plan:
   Act as my growth analyst. For the product idea “[PRODUCT]” targeting “[NICHE],” design a 7-day exact-match AdWords test to validate real search volume and intent with a $100 cap. Deliver:
   - Keyword list (15–30 exact-match terms) split by intent tiers (buy, compare, problem).
   - 3 ad variants (25-character headlines, benefits-led copy, niche-specific) and 2 landing page angles.
   - Daily budget, bids, geo, and schedule recommendations.
   - Success/fail criteria (min impressions/clicks, CTR, CPC, conversion proxy like email signups).
   - Post-test decisions: pivot, persevere, or kill, and next experiments.
   Output as a step-by-step checklist with metrics targets.

3. Hook and Homepage Conversion Kit:
   Given [PRODUCT], [NICHE], [CORE BENEFIT], and [PRIMARY CTA], craft:
   - 20 hook headlines (5–7 words), in 3 styles: who-for, benefit-promise, remarkable-feature.
   - A hero section: headline, 1-sentence subhead, 3 bullet benefits, 1 primary button label.
   - Above-the-fold layout wireframe notes with a single focus and 2-click path to [CTA].
   - 5 A/B test ideas (headline, button copy, social proof, image/video, guarantee).
   - Trust elements: 6 testimonial prompts, guarantee copy, and risk-reversal line.
   Return all copy and test plan. End with the top 3 hooks you recommend and why.

4. Value-Based Three-Tier Pricing Designer:
   Help me set pricing/packaging for [PRODUCT] serving [CUSTOMER TYPE]. Inputs:
   - Hours saved/month: [HOURS]
   - Monetized hourly rate: [$/HR]
   - Competitive anchors: [LIST OR NONE]
   Produce:
   - A value ceiling and recommended price band.
   - 3 tiers ending in 7/8/9 (Low/Mid/High), with doubling logic and >2x value per jump.
   - Feature/usage limits per tier tied to what this niche values.
   - One highlighted plan (“most popular”) and justification.
   - Add-ons and 20% annual support or monthly equivalent recommendation.
   - 5 pricing page best practices and microcopy (FAQ, guarantee, trial).

5. Autoresponder Engine: 5-Day Course + 6-Month Nurture:
   For [NICHE] and [PROBLEM], create:
   - A lead magnet title and 5-day email course outline (Day 1–5), with subject lines (<7 words), plain-text friendly body copy, and 1 clear CTA per email.
   - A 6-month evergreen autoresponder (biweekly): 12 emails mixing current events commentary, Q&A, interviews, and tips. Include subject lines, preview text, and CTA cadence (every 4th/5th email salesy).
   - Deliverability checklist (timing, from-name, spam triggers, attachments policy).
   - Metrics targets (open, click, unsubscribe) and A/B test plan.
   Output ready-to-paste email content.

6. Sales Site Blueprint (5 Core Pages, One Goal Each):
   Build a mini IA and copy for [PRODUCT] targeting [NICHE], ensuring every page has one primary call to action [CTA]. Deliver:
   - Sitemap: Home, Tour, Testimonials, Pricing & Purchase, Contact.
   - For each page: goal, key sections, bullet-level copy, and the button label.
   - “Two-click rule” checks to reach Demo/Buy/Email from any page.
   - Testimonials framework: 8 question prompts to elicit outcome-focused quotes.
   - Accessibility for scanners vs readers (headlines, bullets, short paragraphs).
   Provide concise copy blocks and a QA checklist to enforce single-focus pages.

7. SEO + Link Building Playbook for a Vertical:
   For [NICHE] and [PRODUCT], produce a 90-day plan to rank for [PRIMARY KEYWORDS]. Include:
   - On-page targets: 1 page per keyword cluster (title/H1/meta/internal links).
   - Link acquisition mix by month: directories (DMOZ, JoeAnt, Gimpsy), niche/local directories (list 20), competitor backlink outreach (template), testimonials (template), academic/nonprofit free license (outreach template), Google Alerts engagement plan.
   - Anchor text rotation strategy (50% primary, 50% long-tail/synonyms/brand).
   - Pace: link goals per week to avoid spikes.
   - Tracking sheet columns and success thresholds.
   Provide outreach email templates and a weekly cadence.

8. VA/SOP Starter Pack: From Goal to Delegable Tasks:
   Turn this goal into VA-executable tasks: “[GOAL, e.g., Find 50 niche blogs with >[METRIC] and contacts].”
   Deliver:
   - Job post text (skills, hours, budget, trial task).
   - SOP: step-by-step with screenshots placeholders, acceptance criteria, and examples.
   - Data schema for a Google Sheet (columns and validations).
   - QA checklist, time estimate, and escalation rules.
   - Communication cadence and daily check-in template.
   - A small paid trial plan to evaluate 2–3 candidates fairly.
   Output in copy-paste friendly sections.

9. Accountability & Goal Cadence Generator:
   I want to hit $500/month profit with [PRODUCT] in [TIMELINE]. Create:
   - Written SMART goals, public commitment script, and weekly accountability email template to a friend.
   - A 12-week plan split into Market, Execution, Product tasks (70/30 non-code/code).
   - Weekly time-blocks enforcing “work hard/play hard” and a consumption fast.
   - A Friday review and metrics dashboard (visits, CTR, signups, conv%, MRR, churn).
   - A “dip survival” playbook: triggers, actions, and motivational reminders.
   Return a printable plan and email templates.

10. Human-in-the-Loop MVP Planner (De-scope to 200–400 Hours):
    For [PRODUCT IDEA], list all workflows and suggest which to code now vs replace with a human/VA until traction. Deliver:
    - Screen list, rough sketch count, and hour estimate using the 4–12 hours/page rule (+DB and integrations).
    - Eliminate/sequence features to hit a 200–400 hour v1.0.
    - Tasks to replace with VA/manual ops (billing, reminders, onboarding, reporting), with SOP notes.
    - Launch checklist and rollback criteria.
    - Post-launch iteration loop and what to instrument.
    Output a prioritized backlog and a simple burn chart plan.

Highlights

The focus of this book is building and launching a successful software, web or mobile startup with no external funding.

This process includes:

• Developing the proper mindset for a self-funded startup

• Understanding the Market-First Approach

• Finding and testing a niche market

• Choosing the optimal platform, price and revenue model

• Building a killer sales website

• Understanding the primary purpose of your sales website

• Building the right kind of interest, and thus driving the right kind of traffic, to your website

• Learning how to outsource

• Working with virtual assistants

• Determining what to do after launch: do you grow the business or start over?

Chapter 1 - The Chasm Between Developer and Entrepreneur

There are many definitions of entrepreneur, but since we’ll be discussing self-funded tech startups we are going to focus our definition on a few key points:

Point 1: An entrepreneur is a technical visionary who creates software for a niche market.

Niche markets are critical. If you want to self-fund a startup you have to choose a niche.

Building an online invoicing software as a service (SaaS) application? Good luck.

Building an online invoicing application targeted at landscape architects? Now you’re talking.

The genius of niches is they are too small for large competitors, allowing a nimble entrepreneur the breathing room to focus on an underserved audience. Once you’ve succeeded in that niche, you can leverage your success to establish credibility for your business to move into larger markets.

Point 2: An entrepreneur merges existing technical knowledge with online marketing knowledge.

The key factor in an entrepreneur’s success is their ability to market their product. I can almost hear you groaning…but keep an open mind. Millions of people in this world can build software. A fractional subset of those can build software and convince people to buy it.

A developer who knows how to market a product is a rare (and powerful) combination.

Note: It settled. It’s not about coding up a product, it’s about marketing it. All in on merketing!!!

Especially in the age of ai.

Point 3: An entrepreneur is a cross between a developer, a webmaster, and a marketer.

Developer

Software entrepreneurship would be nearly impossible without the technical skills we learn as developers. The ability to fix a production site that’s crashing or put together a hot fix for a key customer will be critical to your success.

Webmaster

These days it’s imperative that your startup knows how to sell online. This means creating a website that converts visitors into customers. We’ll be exploring a number of ways to build high-converting sales websites, and doing these will require basic HTML knowledge.

Once your website is up, you will be making constant updates, adding new content to achieve better search engine rankings, tweaking conversions (newsletter sign-ups, trials, purchases, etc…) and most of these tasks will be better executed if you can make small changes yourself. Basic knowledge of HTML or a CMS is essential.

Marketer

Marketing is more important than your product.

Let me say it another way:

Product Last. Marketing First.

Your product has to be good. If it’s not, you’ll be out of business.

But before you build a good product you have to find your market. With an enormous amount of anecdotes to back me up I strongly believe that building something no one wants is the most common source of failure for entrepreneurs.

Most developers want to build software products for the wrong reasons.

Reason #1: Having a Product Idea

If you have an idea for a product, odds are high that you have project/product confusion.

A project is a software application that you build as a fun side project. The code is fun to write because you’re not concerned about quality and performance, and the end result is a neat little application that likely isn’t of use to many people.

A product is a project that people will pay money for. In other words, it’s a project that has a market (a group of people who want to buy it). Without a market, a software application is just a project.

Most developers who come up with an idea know exactly how they will build it, but no idea how they will reach potential customers. They think a link from TechCrunch will drive hundreds, if not thousands, of sales.

On rare occasions the product-first approach works, but for the most part it’s a recipe for failure.

Reason #2: To Get Rich

Getting rich shouldn’t be your goal when launching a product. Thousands of people with significantly more coding and marketing skills have built and launched products, yet still work for a living. If you are doing it for the money you will not stick around during those long months of hard work when no money is coming in.

If you want to make a million dollars, buy a lottery ticket or start a venture-backed startup; the odds of succeeding at either are very much not in your favor, but the potential payout is big.

As I said earlier, I’m pretty sure you’re here to do something with less risk and less reward, but a much higher chance for success. A million dollar payday is most likely not in your future, but owning a successful startup can be.

Reason #3: Because It Sounds Like Fun

We’ve all read the stories of a successful startup and dreamed that we would one day be that person in the Fast Company article. Whether it’s someone who hits it big with a fluke Facebook application or works for years to build a successful software company that you’ve followed through their blog, the story is always romanticized. In other words, the few glimpses you have into the life of a startup are not a true indication of what goes on behind the scenes to make it work.

If you want to become a Micropreneur because it sounds like fun, you’re going to have a rude awakening on the 10th day when the initial excitement has worn off and you’re slogging through exception handling code at one in the morning.

To throw more fuel on the fire, what you know about software development is a small piece of the puzzle. Writing code, where most of us are well-versed, is only about 30% of the work needed to launch a successful product.

The other 70% is debugging, optimizing, creating an installer, writing documentation, building a sales website, opening a merchant account, advertising, promoting, processing sales, providing support, and a hundred other things we’ll dive into in later modules. Some of it is great fun…other parts, not so much.

Suffice to say that being an entrepreneur can be fun, but the fun parts come only with hundreds of hours of hard work.

What are the Right Reasons?

The “right” reason to start a startup depends on your goals. As I mentioned before, Micropreneurs lean towards lifestyle choices (freedom, income independence, location independence), while bootstrappers might embrace the challenge and excitement of owning their own business, to build equity in something they own, and to have control over the projects they work on.

It’s hard to re-train your mind out of the dollars-for-hours mentality. For me it took well over a year.

A study at Dominican University3 revealed that the following 3 factors substantially increased someone’s chance of following through on their goals:

1. Written Goals – “Those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.”

2. Public Commitment – “…those who sent their commitments to a friend accomplished significantly more than those who wrote action commitments or did not write their goals.”

3. Accountability – “…those who sent weekly progress reports to their friend accomplished significantly more than those who had unwritten goals…”

It may feel like you’re an exception; that you don’t need goals or accountability…but trust the science and give it a shot. Spend 20 minutes making a list of the things you are hoping to accomplish by starting up. If you believe what was said above, it will make a big difference. Worst case, you waste 20 minutes of your time.

Remember that there is no single best path to success as a startup founder. Since you are deciding on a specific lifestyle and are making sacrifices to get there, it can look like almost anything. Just be sure it’s what you want.

Here’s one question you should think about right now: what is a good short-term goal for your startup?

I have a suggestion to help get you started:

Strive to build a startup that generates $500 per month in profit.

This may sound like an easy goal, but will require more work than you can fathom at this point.

Once you’ve done that you will have so much experience under your belt you won’t believe how much you know (and how little you knew when you started).

Note: At this point it no longer sounds simple. It’s giving hard.

The reason you need goals and accountability is to stay motivated during the hard times. Without goals you are much more likely to throw in the towel when things get difficult. This might be when you launch and no one buys, or you are bombarded with so many support requests you don’t have enough time to build new features.

The key factor in getting you through the dip is your goals. These are the goals you wrote down six months prior due to the advice given to you in a random book about startups.

Once you make it to the other side, you’ve learned what it takes to launch and maintain a product. The next time you launch a product, you will have a monumentally better chance of success because you are now a more savvy software entrepreneur.

Note: You just have to do it once, then it will be much easier.

While there’s no way to avoid the fear of starting your company, the following can help put the fear in perspective:

The up-front fear is a big indicator that you’re going to grow as a person if you proceed through it. And, frankly, the terror wears off pretty quickly.

Overcoming the terror of firsts is hard, but it’s what makes the goal beyond it worth achieving. The terror that stands between you and the goal is something 99.9% of people will never overcome.

Having no clear, written goals for your startup means you won’t know whether to pursue the white label deal someone offers you two weeks after launch, or to start selling in overseas markets because someone asks you to.

Without goals for both yourself and your startup you are flying blind without guidance in situations where there is no right or wrong answer. Answers need to stem from your long-term desires for your startup and yourself.

Your goals must serve as your roadmap that takes you to your definition of a successful startup.

Spending an evening finding 50 blogs to market to is a great way to feel productive, but do you really need 50, or could you get by with 10? Shouldn’t you have outsourced this task for a pittance to any respectable virtual assistant (VA)? In reality, the 4 hours you spent researching should have been 10 minutes spent writing up this task.

Note: Idea for marketing agents?

Tags: project idea

Another common distraction masquerading as productivity is reading business books. It sure seems like Why We Buy6, Made to Stick7 and Outliers8 are going to help you launch a successful product. But reading books gets you no closer to launching than watching Lost.

If reading business books is a hobby, fantastic. But it won’t get you one hour closer to launch.

You can’t consume and produce at the same time – when you’re in high-producing mode you have to temporarily step away from your magazines, blogs, and other forms of distraction for a while. Being in the pattern of checking your RSS reader every time you sit down at your computer kills hours of productivity each week. Those are hours that could be spent building your product.

Anytime you’re on your computer ask yourself “Is this activity getting me closer to my launch date?”

Take a risk this month: outsource your first task and see where it takes you. When was the last time a single tool or work habit offered the opportunity to save 20-60 hours?

Putting a value on your time is a foundational step in becoming an entrepreneur, and it’s one many entrepreneurs never take. Skipping this step can result in late nights performing menial tasks you should be outsourcing, and an effective hourly rate slightly above minimum wage.

It never seems like a good idea to pay someone out of your own pocket for something you can do yourself…until you realize the economics of doing so.

Realizing your time is worth $50/hour is the first step; the next step is actually generating $50 for every hour you work, and the third step is figuring out how to make your time worth $75 or $100/hour. If you continue to think your time is worth $50/hour it will stay at $50/hour.

$100/hour is a good long-term goal to shoot for. If you’ve done your research on one-person software companies (which are similar in economics to small software startups), the reality for most tends to be closer to $25/hour12.

If you are making $25/hour as an entrepreneur you are doing something wrong. Improve your marketing, grow your sales, find a new niche, outsource and automate. $25/hour is not an acceptable dollarized rate for a startup.

Outsourcing aspects of your business is the single most powerful approach I’ve seen to increasing your true hourly rate as an entrepreneur. If I didn’t outsource my administrative tasks, my effective hourly rate would plummet.

Wasting time is bad. Boring movies, bad TV, and pointless web surfing are expensive propositions. If you aren’t enjoying something, stop doing it.

I need to re-iterate here: I’m not saying you should never relax, have fun, watch movies, play with your kids, watch TV, or surf the web. I’m saying that you should be deliberate about your work and your free time to get the maximum benefit from both. In other words:

Work hard and play hard, but never do both at once.

Numerous times throughout the day ask yourself:

At this very moment am I making progress towards crossing off a to-do, -or- am I relaxing and re-energizing?

If I’m doing neither, evaluate the situation and change it.

If you aren’t enjoying a movie, walk out.

If you’re playing with your kids and working on your iPhone you’re not really working or playing – you’re doing both poorly. Put the iPhone away and focus on your kids; it will shock you how much more fun you have and how, after making this choice, you’ll feel energized and ready to dive back into work

The same goes for multi-tasking work in front of the TV. Your productivity level is around 50% when trying to do both. Most evenings you’ll feel as if you worked the whole night but didn’t get anything done.

If your time is worth, say $75/hour, standing in line at the bank is painful. Sitting in traffic is another money waster – every non-productive, non-leisure minute you spend is another $1.25 down the drain.

Since it’s not practical to assume you will never wait in line again, the best counter-attack is to have a notebook and pen handy at all times. Use this time for high-level thinking, something you may have a hard time doing in front of a computer.

It’s amazing that we think we can remember our important thoughts. Due to the amount of information and chaos you consume each day, a thought stays in your head for a few seconds before it disappears. Perhaps you will think of it again, perhaps not. Writing down important ideas is critical to building a list of ways to improve your business.

As someone who likely enjoys consuming in large quantities, at some point you will realize that you are wasting an enormous amount of time. I highly recommend putting the following into place:

When reading blogs or books or listening to podcasts or audio books, take action notes.

Action notes are short- or long-term to-do items that apply directly to my businesses.

For example, I listen to several SEO podcasts. If they mention an interesting website, I make a note to check it out the next time I’m able.

In The E-Myth Revisited13, author Michael Gerber talks about the archetypes of running a business. They are: entrepreneur, manager and technician.

• The entrepreneur is the dreamer, the visionary, and the creative mind.

• The manager is the person who thinks about return on investment (ROI), near-term success, and productivity.

• The technician gets the work done. She follows the manager’s guidance and is concerned about today’s success.

95% of us are comfortable, and probably excel at, being technicians. This means you’re good at writing code, producing something tangible, and cranking away on each task, moving one step closer to launch date.

But it takes more than a technician to run a successful business. It’s critical to look ahead into the near-term and determine which features or marketing efforts will provide the best ROI (manager), and to think out a year or more to determine the long-term direction of your business (entrepreneur).

The first step is to determine your goals and objectives as we’ve been discussing in this chapter.

Without planning, organizing, systematizing, outsourcing, and marketing, all things you will shy away from as a technician, you will never make it past the $25/hour pit that many startups fall into.

The product with a sizeable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality. Think QuickBooks in the early days, or any niche product you’ve ever seen that looked like it was written by a six year old but sold thousands of copies.

In the same market, the product with better marketing wins. Every time.

In the same market with equal marketing, the product with the better design aesthetic wins. Sure, a few people will dig deep enough to find that the “ugly” product has better or more functionality, but the product that wins is the one that has the best looking website and user interface.

Functionality, code quality, and documentation are all a distant fourth. I know that this sounds sacrilegious to a software developer, but unless you’re marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.

Writing code is cut and dry. There are different ways to accomplish the same thing, but in general you know how you want your application to behave and you just need to get it there. Your constraints are constant – the compiler behaves the same way it did the last time you compiled.

By comparison entrepreneurship, especially the marketing side, is never this clear. As we’ll discuss in chapter 2, marketing is about math and human behavior. The math part is straight-forward. It’s the human behavior that’s going to throw you for a loop.

Even the foremost marketing experts in the world are not sure whether people will buy a new product. People with 20, 30 and 40 years of experience still have to take their best guess at what will succeed. They have to try things out and adjust as they go. They often do small roll-outs to test audiences and adjust the product or the message before unleashing it on the world.

You will have to do the same and it will involve a lot of guesswork at the start. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re used to making decisions based on fact. Instead, you have to take your best guess; then measure and tweak.

And then do it 20 more times until you succeed.

The faster you fail and learn from your mistakes, the faster you will improve. Pretty soon your ads won’t lose money, you’ll get better at estimating level of effort, and you’ll be sure to thoroughly test the complex parts of your code.

But you have to wade through that sea of failures before you can reach the other side. And this can be a hard thing to do.

A product, marketing effort, and a reputation take time to build. But once they build they snowball such that the effort to launch a new version of your product is miniscule by comparison, and your chances of success are much higher.

Once you have 5 releases under your belt, 1500 targeted visitors every month, a 500 prospect mailing list, and hundreds of incoming links…surprise! Things are easier. Much easier.

Documenting repeatable processes for anything you will do more than once is essential to your sanity.

Without process it’s impossible to delegate, difficult to bring on a business partner, and easy to make mistakes. With processes in place it’s much easier to sell your product if/when you want to make an exit.

You have to invest time every month into marketing, development, support, SEO, AdWords, and every other aspect of your business. The dream of building an app that never breaks, never needs new features and possesses auto-pilot marketing are possible, but they will not come by accident.

Chapter 2 - Why Niches Are the Name of the Game

I’m going to take it even further: the single most important factor to a product’s success is not the founders, not the marketing effort, and certainly not the product.

It’s whether there’s a group of people willing to pay for it.

The product with a sizable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality. Think QuickBooks, Palm, or IE 5.5.

But the way the vast majority (dare I say 99.5%) of all businesses in this world that succeed in the long-term – be they large or small, high-growth startup or lifestyle business – is to find a market that is willing to pay them money for something.

That something can be dry cleaning services, invoicing software, or hosted salesforce automation. What matters is finding a group of people who need your something more than they need the money you’re charging for it.

Building a general purpose, small-business, online accounting application is a really bad idea for a self-funded startup. For one, you won’t have the development or marketing resources to compete with the likes of Freshbooks, Blinksale, and BillMyClients. In addition, you won’t be able to keep up with support or feature implementation for that many general purpose business clients.

If you choose a niche market and focus so tightly that your product becomes the best in class, members of that niche will have no choice but to use your product.

Tags: niche

The lesson here is that the narrower you can make your product while still maintaining a large enough market, the more profit you will generate. It’s that simple – if you can find a small group of people and make them amazingly happy, you will make money.

The most common mistake made by inexperienced marketers is attacking a market that’s too large. Common sense tells you that the larger your market is, the better off you are. For bootstrapped startups, the opposite is true.

Marketing to large markets is not cost-effective. The larger a market, the more money you’ll need to spend in order to locate people willing to buy your product.

Niches Have Less Competition

Niches Have Higher Profit Margins

Niche markets are typically pursued by small players; players who don’t have the marketing expertise (or the manpower) of large companies. As a result, competing in niche markets is a lot easier than running head-to-head against someone like Monster.com (whose well-produced commercials run each year during the Super Bowl).

A “warm” niche is a niche where you have some kind of association. Perhaps you worked for a credit card company for a few years, your wife is a lawyer, you collect comic books, or your brother is a plumber.

Each of these would be considered a warm niche, and introducing a product into this niche will be much easier than choosing a completely unknown market. Remember, you stand a better chance when you know who you’re selling to.

Make two columns on a piece of paper. In the header of the left column write “Person” and in the right one write “Hobby or Work Experience.”

Now for each row write the name of someone you know, including yourself, friends, relatives or colleagues, and write their work experience or hobby in the right column.

Coming up with your initial list of niches amounts to pulling ideas out of thin air. Here are a few suggestions on how to do that.

Approach #1: Look at All Areas of Your Life

Examine your hobbies, interests and work experience. Are you into sports, the news, comic books, arts and crafts, health or shopping? Are you fascinated by modern art? Do you have experience building software for dentists?

Approach #2: Look at Occupations

Scan through the following lists of occupations to determine if you have any experience with them, or if you know someone who does:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occupations

• http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm

Approach #3: Cheat

One way to avoid the multi-step process of brainstorming niches, evaluating demand and selecting a product is to jump right to a product idea. And why not start with some inspiration to stretch and mold into a niche you’re familiar with?

• http://www.entrepreneur.com/businessideas/ – Business idea search engine. I found the best ideas searching on Category->Online Businesses.

• http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html – A list of 999 product ideas. Only a portion are software/website ideas, but even the physical product ideas get your mind thinking about specific niches.

• http://www.ahbbo.com/ideas.html – Over 400 home business ideas. More of a generator of niche ideas than product ideas.

• http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html – Startup ideas YCombinator would like to fund.

For ongoing inspiration, I subscribe to every one of the following blogs. Even when I’m not prepared to build a product I scribble a note about an idea that I keep for review when I’m ready to build my next application.

• http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/ (also on Twitter at http://ww.twitter.com/astartupaday) – by far my favorite web app idea blog. I’ve come very close to pursuing several of his ideas exactly as he’s written them.

• http://ideas.4brad.com/ – crazy ideas from Brad Templeton

• http://www.ideaisqueen.com/wordpress/ – I’ve seen quite a few ideas that would work for a Micropreneur on this blog.

• http://www.ideatagging.com/ – Another solid idea blog.

• http://springwise.com/ – Covers innovations in products and business models. Think about applying the innovations they mention to a niche from your list.

• http://www.trendwatching.com/ – A high-level look at emerging consumer trends.

• http://www.coolbusinessideas.com/ – Another list of business ideas that are already being implemented by someone.

Best Niches are Reserved for People Who Do Something

My blog gets over 60 visitors per month who arrive based on a variation of the term “make your own magazine cover” based on a 36 word post I published four years ago.

I would never have guessed this is such a popular topic. And my blog has only hit on this single keyword phrase for it – imagine if you launched a strategic attack on every keyword combination you could think of surrounding the creation of magazine covers?

Everyone is using the same keyword tools so good niches are found and taken pretty quickly. The best niches are under the radar, and you have to get out and do something before you will find them.

This approach, while not only expensive, has lost much of its effectiveness in recent years as consumers have become more and more immune to interruption marketing (that is, marketing that tries to interrupt someone during their daily life rather than speak to them at the exact moment when they are searching for a solution to a problem).

This is because creating demand is very, very expensive while filling existing demand is, by comparison, cheap.

When searching for a niche, there’s a loose rule of thumb that says to stick to markets where you can take out a full-page ad in a magazine targeted at your market for less than $5,000.

Beyond searching for a magazine that caters to your market, you should also look at census and labor statistics to get an estimate of your market size. It’s important to remember during this process that a large market is not helpful if you can’t reach them economically through a specific website or magazine.

Your “market size” research should involve the following:

• A web search for related magazines and websites

• Tracking down their advertising rate cards, which tell you how much it will cost to advertise in their magazine or on their website

• Reviewing their circulation (for magazines), visitor statistics (for websites), and rates

• Entering websites without rate cards into Compete.com22 to check traffic levels

• Checking in with your friendly neighborhood bureau of labor statistics for a sanity check on your findings

For example, if you were targeting marriage and family therapists in the U.S. you would spend a few hours on Google searching for “family therapist magazine” and “marriage therapist magazine.” You would visit their websites and compile their rate cards. Rate cards are almost always available from a magazine’s website. Look in the footer for a link to “rate card,” “advertising” or “ad rates.” The rate card typically comes as a PDF and contains a lot of demographic information about the magazine’s subscriber base.

When you receive 50,000 visitors from one of the major media sites you will be lucky to convert five sales. Five measly sales. That has to win for the worst conversion rate ever.

Note: It’s about quality not quantity

When looking at your marketing plan you should actually be thinking:

“If I could get only on the front page of [small-but-very-focused-niche-website].com.”

There are hundreds of ways to market software, but for Micropreneurs and bootstrappers there are a handful of what I call Top Shelf approaches, that we’ll look at closely in this book. These approaches are the best way to provide sustainable, long-term prospects to your business.

The Top Shelf approaches focus on two key areas: building an audience and search engine optimization.

The good news about these approaches is that while they will bring in sustainable traffic, there are also shortcuts that will allow you to easily test a startup idea for a small investment (typically around $100).

From a startup perspective, vertical market niches are superior to horizontal markets for a number of reasons we’ll look at below.

Reason #1: Members of a Vertical Have Similar Behavior

Since pool cleaners tend to come from similar backgrounds or follow a similar career path, they will tend to exhibit similar behavior when faced with a purchase decision. This also means that a single marketing message will more easily catch their attention than if you are trying to market software to both pool cleaners and web designers.

This is not to imply that all pool cleaners react and behave identically, but when compared to web designers they have many more similarities in how they view the world, how much web and technical expertise they possess, and how they decide on purchase decisions.

This ultimately means your marketing and sales approach can be simpler than if you are trying to cut across verticals.

Reason #2: Members of a Vertical Talk to One Another

Small industries tend to have a handful of thought leaders. Even industries like pool cleaners or countertop installers have business owners who are pushing the industry forward, finding and adopting new techniques, and communicating those techniques to the rest of the industry through conferences, trade shows, trade publications, online forums, social networks or mailing lists.

This is important for a business selling into this industry for two reasons:

1. If your product is good, word of mouth marketing will spread quickly

2. If you can find the thought leaders and convince them to adopt your product, you will receive massive exposure in a short period of time

Reason #3: Members of a Vertical “Hang out” Together

Pool cleaners hang out together; whether at local trade meetings, national conferences, or online. Having a handful of places where they congregate makes marketing much easier since you can simply attend (or sponsor) trade meetings or conferences.

Alternatively, you can also hang-out (or buy ads) in any online venues where a concentration of your target market aggregates.

This is an entrepreneur’s dream.

The other benefit is that if you decide to use direct mail, cold calling or direct email marketing, there are lists available for specific industries. These lists will likely convert well if your product is targeted at the niche. Contrast this with owning a general small business invoicing solution – how do you buy a list for every small business in the U.S. without going broke?

It’s much easier to target a specific industry (such as pool cleaners); your marketing expenses will be a fraction of the cost and will convert at a much higher rate.

Reason #4: Members of a Vertical Have Similar Needs

Imagine building an invoicing application for every small business in the world. The number of features would be overwhelming. How can you possibly provide a solution that works for pool cleaners, web designers and dry cleaners at the same time?

By contrast, building an invoicing solution that satisfies every single pain point for pool cleaners is not that difficult. They have well-defined needs that are common to pretty much anyone who services pools for a living. Building an application that satisfies their needs exceptionally well is a feasible task for a one or two person development team.

With niche research the problem is not finding new ideas, but narrowing to the most effective strategies that you can implement in a reasonable amount of time. That’s what I’ve done with the technique below.

Given that we’re in the process of narrowing our choices by exploring multiple niches with minimal time investment and no cash outlay, we are looking for a quick, easy and free way to determine a rough order of magnitude traffic and revenue estimates.

This is what the Micropreneur Methodology provides.

You only need to master two skills to sell online: human behavior and math.

Understanding human behavior means you know how people think, what motivates them. You need to know how to speak to the voice inside of them that makes buying decisions, rather than their tough, rational exterior. We will cover this in chapter 4 when we look at building a sales website.

Math is the science behind every business in the world, whether they realize it or not. With internet marketing, the math involves views, clicks, click through rates, unique visitors, goals, conversion rates, gross profit and net profit.

Micropreneur Methodology for measuring demand with search engines uses the following free tools:

• Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool30

• SEO Logs Keyword Difficulty Tool31

Or the following tool which costs $97 (one-time fee):

• Micro Niche Finder32 – The marketing for this tool is bad, but the tool itself is extremely powerful.

Enter each keyword you pulled in steps 1 and 2 and enter them one at a time into this tool.

The score that comes back is a rough approximation (based on the number of search results returned in Google) of how hard it is to rank for this term. The lower the score, the better.

39 or below is good. 60 or above is bad. 40-59 is so-so.

“attorney billing software” (without the quotes) returns a 39. It should be easy to rank for.

“legal billing software” (without the quotes) returns a 45. This one is a bit harder.

They’re the best information we have, but they’re nothing more than estimates of search traffic based on extrapolated data. But there is an approach that can give us the exact number of Google searches performed for a given keyword in a given timeframe.

The approach is to place an exact match AdWords ad (using quotations around the keyword) and bid high enough to ensure your ad is on the first page. Every time the term is searched for, your ad will appear. At any given time, you can go into your AdWords console and see how many times the search has been performed.

Of course, this isn’t free – you’ll pay every time someone clicks your ad. But the cost involved, typically $.10-$1.00 per click, is low enough that it’s worth exploring this approach before investing time to build your product.

The Benefits of AdWords

Beyond being able to verify search counts, the benefits of AdWords for the testing approach we discuss below are numerous:

• There is no minimum investment, unlike most forms of advertising

• You can turn it on and off instantly, unlike SEO and other advertising

• It’s relatively inexpensive

As such, AdWords is an ideal tool for testing a product idea. Testing an idea is the next step after narrowing from say, the 20 niches you wrote down earlier in this chapter, to 1-4 product ideas you narrowed to in the last section using keyword tools.

Chapter 3 - Your Product

The success of your product will depend on three things: product, market and execution, which together make up what I call the Product Success Triangle.

• Product - Your product has to be good

• Market - You need a group of people willing to pay money for it

• Execution – You have to market, sell, and support it

In the paradigm above, your product is one-third of the equation. This is far from the hefty weight most developers place on the product. Speak with most new developer-entrepreneurs and you’ll get the impression that the product is 99% of the equation.

You should aim to master all three in the long-term but at the start, place emphasis on the latter two to determine if the idea will fly. Once you know you have a market and can execute, then you can improve your product. For this reason this book focuses on the latter two steps.

There are a million ways to estimate software projects. Here is a good way to get an order of magnitude estimate:

• Create a site map (for websites) or list of screens (for desktop apps).

• Sketch out how each page will look using pen and paper. This should take about 2 minutes per page. You don’t have to sketch out all the pages or even capture all the functionality; you’re simply trying to get an idea about the complexity of each page.

• Estimate 4-12 hours per page depending on complexity.

• Add 10-20 hours for DB design depending on complexity.

• Estimate back-end functionality such as credit card processing, PayPal integration, or scheduled tasks. Add 10-40 hours each, depending on your experience.

• Add it up.

As a rule of thumb, your path to 1.0 should fall between 200 and 400 hours.

If you’re under 200, it’s a good sign, but take a second look at whether you are offering enough functionality to differentiate yourself from the competition, or if you are really building a “tool” rather than a full-blown application. The difference is that you’ll have a tough time charging people to use a tool, while an application will provide real value and bring in revenue.

If you’re over 400 hours, take a serious look at eliminating functionality to shorten your time to launch. This is the most common mistake I’ve seen with 1.0 products – too many features and too many months between the start of development and launch.

Note: Ai allows this plan to be much much shorter.

Compared to hiring out, building your own application is more likely to lead to burnout and an early decision to quit. If you have a few thousand dollars set aside, you should consider hiring out development. If the only reason you’re not going down this path is because you want to be in control of the code, then you need to seriously re-think whether or not you can let that go. Letting it go and stepping away from the code will increase your chance of launching.

Note: I personally don’t other devs to build it out. They might do it in a way that won’t allow me to continue the work and I might depend on those same Devs in the future. Is this a false fear, probably. But I kind of feel comfortable with bypassing this advice from Rob even though I understand it probs hurts me in the long run.

The biggest hurdle when deciding whether to hire someone to build your software is that you think you can build software better than the next person.

You don’t have to admit this to anyone, but every good developer I know thinks his/her code is the best code out there, and that by hiring it out they will receive a poorly-written product. If you’re going to hire out your software construction:

You have to get over your desire to write the software yourself.

You do. You have to accept the fact that the code is not going to be in exactly your style, and it may not be as good as if you build it yourself.

However, once you find a good developer you won’t believe how good someone else’s code can be. And depending on if you’re open to offshoring development, you could have your entire application developed for under $3,000 (200 hours @ $15/hour for a Senior PHP Developer).

You can also hire out your sales site design and HTML development which will cost $500-1,500 and save you another 50 hours.

And think about it…a lot of people can build a good invoicing application.

But how many can work the necessary marketing angles, form partnerships, create a profitable pay per click campaign, and build a compelling sales site? Finding someone who can execute on these is much more difficult (and more expensive) than finding a developer who can build your application.

For consumer products dealing with hobbies (i.e., products that aren’t going to make or save someone money), you’re going to have a tough time charging more than $29 fixed-price or $14/month.

For consumer products that will make or save someone a tangible amount of money you’re going to top out around $49 or $19/month.

For small businesses you’re going to top out around $400 or $99/month unless you solve a serious pain.

For larger businesses your top end will be around $1,00037 or $199/month unless you solve a serious pain.

The steps for finding your first cut at a purchase price are:

1. Know your market. The first step is to get a sense of your market and of the price it will bear, using the General Guidelines for Pricing listed above. You also need to find out how software is typically purchased by your buyers, how they will pay for it, and how much they can purchase without approval.

2. Ask yourself. When 37Signals determines pricing for a new product38 they ask themselves the following two questions:

   a. What would we pay?

   b. What numbers feel right?

3. Look at your competition. If you have competition this step is easy. With little or no competition you’ll need to compare to similar markets. Writing inventory software for small businesses? Look at invoicing or accounting software for small businesses.

4. Determine your product’s value. If your software saves your prospect 5 hours per month and you can monetize their time at $25/hour you will save them $125 per month. You won’t be able to charge more than this figure, but you can use this as a top-end of your potential price.

5. Combine. Use the numbers from steps 2-4 to determine the optimal price range for your product. Ideally you want the high end of your range to be 4x your low end.

6. Lean towards higher pricing. Developers tend to undervalue their software, and think that lower prices will result in higher sales. This is typically not the case.

7. Use three tiers. There is no single best price for your product, so shoot for multiple price points. Use the low end of your range as your lowest tier price. Multiply by 2 for your middle tier, and multiply your middle tier by 2 for the top tier.

8. End in 7, 8 or 9. It’s stupid, but it works. Make each of your three prices (the dollar column) end in a 7, 8 or 9 and be sure they all end with the same number.

9. Determine the benefits of each tier. For each tier, based on your knowledge of your market, decide which metric(s) will increase as you step up the tiers (invoices sent, disk space, processing power?). Ensure that as your price doubles from tier to tier, you provide more than double the benefit.

10. Add Support. If you charge a one-time fee for your software, seriously consider charging 20% of that fee annually for support and product upgrades. Failing to charge a yearly software maintenance fee will cut into your profit margin every single time you speak with a customer.

11. Alternate method for calculating recurring payments. If you have a recurring monthly fee and for some reason it’s easier to determine a fixed-price for your type of software (perhaps there are no competitors with recurring fees), take the fixed-price and divide by 12 for your highest tier.

12. Test. Try the price testing techniques mentioned below. Don’t be confident in your numbers until you’ve tested them.

Chapter 4 - Building a Killer Sales Website

After you launch your website you will need to test different approaches, copy, buttons and bonuses for each of the steps shown in the sales funnel to improve and hone them for maximum benefit. For example:

1. You will spend time making sure more people see your URL (getting written up in blogs, testing and increasing advertising that works, monitoring forums and offering your product as a solution, etc…)

2. You need to spend time turning browsers into prospects, meaning you need to engage them with your content, and convince them that they stand to gain by providing you with their email address

3. You need to spend time nurturing an ongoing relationship with your prospects to turn more of them into buyers, as well as honing your website sales pitch to increase your sales conversion rate

The first rule of sales websites is that the most common approach is wrong. That is:

You shouldn’t plan to sell to a customer on their first visit

Your number one goal, even beyond selling your product, is turning browsers into prospects. A prospect is someone who has expressed at least a small amount of interest in your product. On the web, this is typically achieved by asking someone to provide their email addresses.

Convincing someone to give you their email address is much easier than convincing them to buy your product. Once you have an email address, you have the chance to begin building a relationship with the customer, as well as to gently remind them, through relevant emails, to return to your website.

In order for someone to provide you with their email address you must do three things:

1. Establish Trust – Your visitor must believe that you aren’t going to spam them, sell their email address, or send offers for V1@gra.

2. Establish Relevance – Your visitor must believe that your product is relevant to their need and that anything you send to them via email will be relevant.

3. Establish a Reward – We are predictable creatures. Offering something in exchange for an email address is guaranteed to work better than offering nothing. On DotNetInvoice.com I had an email sign-up form where people could receive email updates on our product. We received 3 sign-ups in 8 months. I switched to offering a chance to win a free copy of DotNetInvoice…30 sign-ups in a month. There’s still room for improvement, but it’s headed in the right direction. Now, when I send out the winner’s announcement I’m going to include a small snippet about the new features available in our latest version. The best rewards are: a contest, a relevant four- or five- day email course, a relevant white paper, or a webinar.

Before you begin architecting your sales website, you need to understand what goes on inside your typical customer’s head. From this stage, even before we’ve conceived any concrete details about your website, you need to think like a potential customer.

Your goal should be to understand what your ideal customer wants to find on your website, what they want to find in your product, and what triggers will make them buy.

To begin, imagine your ideal customer:

• Are they married?

• Do they have kids?

• How do they get to work?

• Do they work in an office? On a construction site? Driving a truck?

• How old are they?

• What kind of car do they drive?

• Do they watch TV? Surf the web? Listen to music?

Now imagine how your ideal customer feels when they arrive at your website:

• What do they want to find there?

• What will your product provide for them that they absolutely cannot live without?

• What is best way to convey this message to them?

• What will they respond to?

• What elements naturally draw them in? Audio? Video? Images?

• What is going to make them click a link?

• How should you introduce your product to your customer? What should your copy say on the first page they see?

• What is going to convince them to provide you with their email address?

• What is going to convince them to purchase your product?

To help understand what motivates your ideal customer, think about the following questions:

• What keeps your customers awake at night?

• What are they afraid of?

• What are they angry about?

• What are their top three daily frustrations?

• What do they desire most?

• Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (example: engineers are exceptionally analytical)

• Do they have their own jargon?

• Who else has tried to sell them something similar? How have they failed or succeeded?

In a successful sales website, every page has a single, primary call to action. That is, an action you want your user to take.

For example, your home page should not be the standard collection of links, text and announcements that make them want to click in every direction.

Seven Rules of Sales Site Design

Rule #1: The home page will not necessarily be the most visited page on your website. Search engines and deep linking50 have changed this.

Rule #2: As a result of rule #1, every page needs a call to action. A visitor may first interact with your website through your Tour, Testimonials, or Pricing page. All of them should urge the user to take an action that gets them closer to providing you with their email, trying your demo, or making a purchase. Look at the bottom of every sub-page at DotNetInvoice.com for an example.

Rule #3: Every page needs a single focus. Think ruthlessly about eliminating extraneous functionality and duplicate information from your website. Each page should serve a single purpose and contain nothing to distract the user from that purpose.

Rule #4: Everything should be within 2 clicks. From any page, a visitor should be able to demo your product, buy your product, or provide you with their email address with two clicks, including the click of the “submit” button. This makes for a small and tight website with a single focus. For larger companies or sites which offer multiple products, this might not hold 100% true in every case.

Rule #5: Accommodate different reading patterns. Use headlines and bulleted lists for skimmers. Keep paragraphs unnaturally short for those who read every word.

Rule #6: Make buttons look like buttons. Make your buttons so clickable that people can’t help but click them.

Rule #7: No One Reads. Text is a terrible selling tool; audio, video and images are always better.

While it’s impossible to provide a list of pages to include in your website for every potential startup idea, the vast majority of downloadable products and SaaS applications will perform well with five core pages.

The Core Pages

• Home

• Tour

• Testimonials

• Contact Us

• Pricing & Purchase

The #1 goal of your home page is to convince your visitors to click 1 link. That’s all you have to do to convince them not to leave is click a single link.

The key metric with home pages is abandonment rate (the number of people who leave without clicking a link). The book Web Design for ROI estimates that home pages have a 40-60% abandonment rate on average before they are optimized. This means that around half of all home page visitors leave without clicking a single link.

The solution? A simple home page with very few options, and large, clickable buttons.

Most websites don’t implement this, but the ones that do have very high click through rates.

One of the most difficult pieces of marketing to create is your hook. Your hook is your four-second sales pitch and it should be the headline of your home page. It’s the single sentence that grabs the reader in and makes her know she’s in the right place.

• DotNetInvoice’s hook is “Save Time. Get Paid Faster.”

• FogBugz’s hook is “Bring Your Project into Focus”

• Basecamp’s hook is “The Better Way to Get Projects Done”

• Bidsketch’s hook is “Simple Proposal Software Made for Designers”

• When it launched, the iPod’s hook was “One Thousand Songs in Your Pocket”

These are 5-7 word summaries of your product. Each one conveys an image in your mind. Each one describes what the product does and (in most cases) who it’s made for.

To find your hook you can take one of three approaches:

1. Explain what your product does and for whom. Such as “Simple proposal software made for designers.”

2. Make a promise to the customer espousing a benefit of your product, such as “Save Time. Get Paid Faster.”

3. Describe the single most remarkable feature of your product, such as “One Thousand Songs in Your Pocket.”

A few things to notice that you should include on your own pricing page:

• No small text on this page – no paragraphs of description. Only large fonts.

• A call out to a 30-day free trial in large text.

• The pricing plans are shown with minimal description and in large fonts.

• One plan is highlighted as the best deal. It really makes you want to click it.

• Logos are shown just below the offerings

• There are a handful of frequently asked questions at the bottom (below where this screen shot cuts off) relating to payment and long-term contracts.

• At the bottom, there’s a chance to ask any questions before you sign up

• If you don’t offer a free trial, then at least offer a 30-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. It may sound like crazy talk to do this with something like software, but the number of people who try to rip you off will pale in comparison to the number of people who purchase the product because of this guarantee. I’ve had a money back guarantee at DotNetInvoice for years and I’ve never regretted it.

If you sell beach towels, offer a free report on the Top 10 Expert Tips for Saving Money on your Beach Trip (an actual report I gave away on JustBeachTowels.com).

I recommend shooting for a PDF report from 5-15 pages.

The key is finding a topic that your audience will not only be interested in, but will be ravenous for. Once you have the title, you can create this work yourself or hire a writer to handle the leg work. I’ve had good luck finding writers on Elance.com.

It sounds a bit hokey, but offering a free, five-day email course can be an exceptional draw. In general, more technical or web-savvy audiences prefer a longer report or white paper, while more non-technical users prefer email courses. But there’s not a definitive line here, and the key is to test:

1. First create your report and offer it as a PDF download for one-month. Note the number of sign-ups you receive.

2. Next, break the report up into a five-day email course and offer it for one month. Compare results and go with what works.

Note: The idea of doing an email newsletter is probably the biggest here in this book

What to Send

There are two types of mailing lists:

Relevant Information

If you target a niche with a common interest, such as personal trainers or psychologists, providing ongoing content every 2-4 weeks is the best way to build a relationship. Think of your mailing list as a blog with a new post every 2-4 weeks (to gain SEO benefit from your newsletter content, you should also post it to your blog).

A powerful tip I’ve used extensively is to use an autoresponder series, which is a series of emails sent in a specific order to new subscribers with pre-determined gaps between each email. With an autoresponder series you can write content once and have it be re-used for years.

As long as you don’t cover topics dealing with current events, you should start your mailing list not by sending broadcast emails every 2-4 weeks, but by building your autoresponder series with a 2-4 week gap between each email.

Then, the first person who signs up will receive the first email, then a two week gap, then the second email. And the 500th person who signs up a year down the line will receive the same first email, a two week gap, and the same second email. In this manner none of your content is wasted; you haven’t created throw-away emails early in your list, every email you write will be used numerous times as new people join your list.

A question that always arises is: what kind of information should I send to my list?

The key is to be relevant. Maintaining high relevance is critical to keeping people subscribed.

Idea #1: Monitor Current Events

If you have the option to go with an information list instead of simply product updates, the next step is to monitor the following news sources and report to your audience on new happenings in their niche:

• Google Alerts

• Digg

• YouTube

• The popular blogs in this niche

Take this information and share relevant links with a small amount of commentary. These are the best kinds of posts – easy to write but containing a lot of value for your audience. Most audiences (software developers and web designers excluded) are out of touch with current events in their industry so it’s dead simple to provide relevant content with a few minutes of time every few weeks.

Note: What to email to your subscribers

Idea #2: Q&A

Another great source of content is questions from customers or prospects. Answer the question in your email to solidify your place as an expert in this niche.

Note: What to email to your subscribers

Idea #3: Interviews

Short email interviews with a current customer on how they use your software are always interesting. You could also leverage a well known blogger in the industry. These shouldn’t take more than 30-45 minutes to put together since all you’re doing is sending a list of questions to someone (once you have their permission) and publishing them in your email. In exchange, the customer/blogger gets exposure for himself.

Note: What to email to your subscribers

Idea #4: Hire a Writer

Hire a writer from Elance59 and have them write an original short-form article on a subject of your choosing. It will cost $20-30, but if it contains unique information, it can make your subscribers happy, and may also get your email forwarded, which will grow your list.

Here are seven critical tips for improving deliverability and getting people to open your emails.

1. Time of Day/Week – It isn’t apparent at first glance, but the time of day and day of the week you send your email will have a major impact on how many people open it. The real answer to “when should I send?” is to test for yourself by splitting your list and sending the same email at different times. But as a general rule, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days, between 7am and 10:30am.

2. HTML vs. Plain Text – The answer is: you should always send at least plain text, since many mobile devices don’t read HTML emails. So the real question is: should you bother with HTML? It depends. If your audience is designers, marketers, or people otherwise interested in attractive packages then you should. If you’re dealing with technical types or lay-people, you can very likely get away with text emails. Both of the providers mentioned above provide HTML email templates so you can segment your list and try both options to see which converts for your audience.

3. Never Send Attachments – They hurt deliverability and many will be stripped by spam filters. Upload the file to a server and send a link instead.

4. Pay Attention to Your “From” Name & Address – Look at an email in your email client – notice how the “from” address reads. It’s surprising how many emails I receive with “Admin” in the “from” name. At least put “[ProductName] Support” or “[ProductName] Newsletter” to provide some indication of who you are. And if you have a more personal relationship with your audience feel free to put your real name.

5. Your Subject is Your Headline - Perhaps the only factor that determines if your mail gets opened is your subject line. You must hone and craft your ability to write engaging subject lines in 7 words or less. Here are some guidelines:

a. The shorter the better.

b. Ask a question in your subject and answer it in the emails. Example: A DotNetInvoice Super-Bowl Ad?

c. Make a partial statement with “…” at the end and continue the sentence in your email. Example: A Free Copy of DotNetInvoice Every Day…

d. Use the recipient’s first name in the subject line. Example: Rob, DotNetInvoice is Free for 24 hours…

e. Include your product’s #1 benefit in the subject. Example: Save 5 Hours of Time This Month

f. Don’t exaggerate. Deliver on anything your subject promises.

g. Avoid spam filters by watching your spam score. MailChimp will parse your subject and body and tell you if your email looks spammy. This is most often caused by using words like: free, money back guarantee, click here, and using all caps in the subject. See this article60 from MailChimp on some other (common sense) things to avoid.

6. Have One Goal for Each Email – Is this a relationship-building email filled with information, or do you have a call to action for it? If you have a call to action, make it prominent and ask people to act. As a rule of thumb, every fourth or fifth email can contain a more sales-y message.

7. Test, Test, Test – It’s all about finding out your audience’s preferences. Both email services I recommend have the ability to segment your audience while sending broadcasts. Test the time of day, day of week and subjects. It will be obvious fairly quickly which approach is superior.

Chapter 5 - Startup Marketing

Top Shelf: Traffic Strategies that Will Sustain a Business

1. A Mailing List

2. A Blog, Podcast or Video Blog

3. Organic Search

Second Shelf: Supplemental Traffic Strategies

1. Social Media / Social Networks

2. Pay-per-click Advertising

3. Forums

4. Press Releases

5. Guest Blogging

6. Affiliate Programs

7. Banner and other advertising

Building an audience through a mailing list, blog or podcast is by far the best source of traffic. I encourage you to try at least one.

And finally, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must. At a minimum you should create a keyword list and perform on-page SEO, with your next steps focusing on link building strategies to raise your organic search rankings.

My recommendation for PPC is to use it for finding keywords that convert for you, and spend the time and money to search engine optimize for those terms. Pouring a never-ending supply of money into Google AdWords is no way to build a business.

As discussed in chapter 4, building a mailing list is not only pivotal to The Ideal Launch plan, but it should be the #1 goal of your website. Getting people to engage with you, to listen to and trust you will have more impact on sales than any other marketing approach.

Over time, your list will become an incredible asset. If you treat your list right, offering insight, discounts, perks and useful information, over time it will become invaluable to your business.

The best day revenue your startup ever has will be the day you cash in a bit of your list equity and email them with a time-limited promotion. You will be shocked at the number of sales you can make in 6 hours.

Blogs, podcasts and video blogs require a certain amount of unique insight or expertise. If you don’t have this, partner with someone who does. For every person like yourself looking to gain the audience of a market so you can promote your software, there is someone with insider knowledge looking to be recognized as an expert in that same market.

Realistically, the choice of blog, podcast or video blog depends on your skill with the written/spoken word, and the kind of content your market niche consumes. The latter is far more important than the former.

If you spend a year or two writing engaging, original posts, submitting them to social media sites, and prominently displaying your RSS and email subscription icons, you will gradually build an audience of readers who learn to know and trust you.

If you need a reference for on-page SEO, I recommend the book Search Engine Optimization an Hour a Day69.

Tags: book

Guideline #1: Not All Links Are Created Equal

The ideal link for your website is a link from an aged website that itself has tons of incoming links. The ideal link would come from a page with a high PageRank and few outgoing links – the more outgoing links from a page, the more the PageRank is diluted. Finally, the website should be extremely relevant to the topic of your site.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have a new or un-trusted domain, a page with hundreds of outbound links, and a site that’s totally unrelated to your topic.

The first kind of link can be worth orders of magnitude more than the second link.

Guideline #2: Vary Link Text

The search engines are smart these days. If you build a large number of links pointing to your home page in a short period of time, all using the link text “Invoicing Software,” you’re going to set off a red flag.

This is why you should optimize a page for multiple related keywords. Instead of just “Invoicing Software” you could also use “ASP.NET Invoicing Software,” “Software for Invoicing” and “Invoice Program” (assuming your page is optimized for these terms).

My general rule is to focus 50% of your links on your most important term for that page, and the other 50% spread across the other 3-5 terms that page is targeting.

Guideline #3: Build Links Over Time

Did I mention search engines are smart? If you build 120 links in a month, or 10 links per month for a year, the second scenario is going to play out far more in your favor.

The engines know that authoritative websites receive constant, ongoing citations from around the web. Receiving a big chunk of links at once is only helpful if you continue to build links at a steady pace each month.

Approach #1: Directories

Directories have lost a lot of impact as search engine algorithms have improved. But there are still directories worth submitting to.

The general directories where I submit my websites are:

• DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) – Free. Although its importance has diminished over the years, it’s still worth submitting to. You only get one crack at it, so link to your home page and choose your link text carefully. A DMOZ listing can be worth 10-20 links from lower end directories.

• JoeAnt (www.joeant.com) – $40

• Gimpsy (www.gimpsy.com) – Free for a 6-month turnaround, and increasing in price to $49 for a 3-day turnaround.

I haven’t found an automated submission package worth the $5 you’ll pay for it. Save your time and money.

Approach #2: Niche & Local Directories

If you sell software relating to graphic designers, do a Google search for the following terms:

• graphic design software directory

• design software directory

Many directory submissions are free. Choose your link text wisely and submit to each one by hand.

Approach #3: Competitor Backlinks

Websites that link to your competition will more than likely have an interest in linking to you. Using Yahoo! Site Explorer70, look at your competitors’ backlinks and determine if it’s appropriate to email the linking site’s owner and ask for your site to be added to the list.

Approach #4: Google Alerts

Google alerts71 is one of the most under-used tools in online marketing.

Create an alert for all variations of your product names, company names, competitors’ names, and your name, as well as quoted terms with high relevance to your product. You’ll want to make them highly relevant and quoted to avoid an overwhelming barrage of results every day.

If someone is talking about a problem that you can solve, make an intelligent comment or contribution and include a link to your product. You must be careful to walk the line of sounding non-commercial, especially when commenting on a blog.

Approach #5: Publishing Articles

Article marketing is an under-utilized startup marketing tool. Article marketing is a good way to get targeted links into the hands of article repositories, with the potential of having your article reprinted on websites and blogs that use syndicated content from these directories.

Note: the pages of the article repositories themselves don’t typically rank in Google since the articles are re-printed all over the internet and Google doesn’t give much credit these days for duplicate content.

Of the thousands of article repositories on the web you should consider three:

• EzineArticles (ezinearticles.com)

• GoArticles (www.goarticles.com)

• iSnare (www.isnare.com)

The key to article marketing is to submit unique, focused niche articles that link back to your website using specific link text to help your SEO (remember to choose keywords carefully, and to follow the article guidelines set up by the websites regarding the number and nature of the links you can place in each article).

• For articles, 500-700 words is best. You need 500 to be over the minimum length requirements, and over 700 words most people won’t read it.

Approach #6: Offer a Free Academic/Non-profit Version of Your Product in Exchange for a Link

Do some good for the world and get a link out of it.

The best part is that academic and many non-profit organizations have authority status in Google because they are long-standing websites and don’t link to many commercial sites. Their links can be easily worth many times that of a link from a typical website.

Approach #7: Testimonials

Contact companies whose products you use and offer to provide a testimonial if they will include a link to your website. When you send the testimonial, be specific about your link text, which should include your keywords if possible.

Approach #8: Buy Links

This will be the most controversial strategy discussed and is considered a questionable approach by some. Most of the webmasters I know buy and sell links.

There is a large link economy that flies under the radar of Google and the other search engines. Google will penalize or drop your website if they find out you are buying or selling links.

There are two main strategies for buying links:

1. Link Rental. The most prominent company for buying and selling links is Text-link-ads.com (TLA). They are so prominent that you cannot find them in Google, even if you search on the phrase “text link ads” (though you can find them when searching on “text-link-ads.com”). They offer reasonable pricing and an informative guide to link buying72 I recommend you read if you’re going to explore this route. The major drawback to TLA is they are a “link rental” service, meaning you pay a recurring monthly fee for your links. This gets expensive rather quickly.

2. Buying Links. The other option is to find services who will build permanent links for you. A Google search for “contextual link building” will unearth many such services. Expect to pay $5-$20 per link for permanent contextual links, depending on the page rank of the website.

Chapter 6 - Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing

The lesson is that before you launch your product, what are some processes you can avoid automating? How about reminder emails? How about monthly billing? Could a human being run a report once a month and send emails or charge credit cards?

As a startup, you’ll have plenty of time before you need to scale, and you may never need to scale if the idea doesn’t work. Every hour spent writing code is wasted time if that code could be replaced by a human being doing the same task until your product proves itself.

The Two Points When a VA is Most Helpful

There are two key points during the life of your startup where your life will be much easier if you use a virtual assistant (VA):

1. While proving out your product

2. After your product launch

I tasked my VA with finding blogs that deal with startups/microISVs and rank in the top 100k in Technorati. The deliverable was a Google spreadsheet containing the blog URL, blogger’s name and blogger’s email.

Outsourcing is a learned skill, just like writing code. If you rush into it too quickly, you’ll wind up disappointed with the results. This is most often due to the fact that you don’t yet know how to work with a VA.

The key to learning how to work with a VA is experience. The question is: how can you get started easily and with little risk? The steps are:

1. Find a VA

2. Start with a single task and gradually increase the amount of work as you gain comfort

3. If things don’t work out, find a new VA

I’ve had the best results hiring VA’s in the Philippines. This is not to say that the U.S., India, Bangladesh or other countries do not have quality VA’s, but the Filipinos learn English in school, do not tend to be entrepreneurial (thus are less likely to steal ideas), and are culturally service-oriented.

You may find another country to be more compatible with your management style, but after working with 10+ VA’s, I now work almost exclusively with Filipinos. The main exceptions are my audio and video editors in the U.S. and Canada.

My current favorite is ODesk.com. I’ve had exceptional luck with oDesk, and their project management tools are helpful in making sure your VA is working on your tasks. Their time clock takes screen shots of the VAs screen at random intervals so you can see the task they are performing.

Chapter 7 - Grow It or Start Over

• Business of Software (businessofsoftware.org) – The premier conference for “real” software companies. One of the best software startup networking opportunities I’ve found.

• LessConf (lessconf.lesseverything.com) – Relatively inexpensive, LessConf covers everything from “startups to design to marketing to business.”

• Future of Web Apps (futureofwebapps.com) – A worldwide conference for web developers and entrepreneurs.

• OnStartups (onstartups.com) – Dharmesh Shah has owned multiple successful companies, raised venture capital, and he shares his insights on this, one of the best startup blogs.

• MicroISV on a Shoestring (www.kalzumeus.com) – Brilliant Micropreneur Patrick McKenzie shares every last detail about his microISV.

• A Smart Bear (blog.asmartbear.com) – Jason Cohen grew and sold his software company. Now he gives back to the startup community by sharing his knowledge here.

• Steve Blank (steveblank.com) – Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley veteran, but many of his insights apply to self-funded startups.

• Lessons Learned (www.startuplessonslearned.com) – Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Methodology closely parallels the Micropreneur Methodology I’ve laid out in this book, and his knowledge of the startup process is unparalleled.

• Single Founder (www.singlefounder.com) – Mike Taber shares his insight and wisdom from 10 years in the entrepreneurial trenches.

• Paul Graham (www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) – Though venture-focused, Graham’s insights into the startup process are unique and powerful.

• Software by Rob (www.softwarebyrob.com) – My blog, where I talk about all things self-funded.

• The Micropreneur Academy (www.micropreneur.com) – A paid membership community of bootstrappers and Micropreneurs, brought together to learn, be accountable, share community, and launch successful startups.

• Answers.OnStartups (answers.onstartups.com) – A question and answer community geared specifically towards startups.

• StartupToDo.com (www.startuptodo.com) – A productivity application for startup founders built by Bob Walsh.

• Business of Software Forums (discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz) – A forum frequented by the microISV crowd.

Even if you never plan to sell your startup, you should be collecting and reviewing the data that will ultimately allow you to facilitate an easy sale.

You need to know this information to understand and improve your product, so use this as impetus to start tracking it in case the day ever comes where you need to sell.