Thoughts on technology start-ups in Scotland
February 25, 2011 2 Comments
OnStartups is one of the blogs that truly inspires me. Run by Dharmesh Shah, it has a great collection of articles from Dharmesh and his guest authors. Not only is the content great, it is pretty much the definitive example of inbound marketing in action.
February 23, 2011 1 Comment
Uncustomers can be hard to identify - they aren't all faceless zombies!
When I work with a new product or service I generally need market feedback, and one of the best ways of getting this is to go out and talk to people. Often, I get positive feedback from them, and many of them will ask me to come back and give them more information, do a demo, eventually even run a pilot project. Some of the people I meet will always be Uncustomers. They will give you a lot of their time, may give invaluable feedback, and will be delighted with the attention you give them.
Uncustomers also have a darker side: they will never, ever pay for my product or service.
Here is the letter that an uncustomer might write if I could lace his or her coffee with truth serum…
February 18, 2011 Leave a comment
If you are already familiar with LinkedIn then the idea of KILTR will be familiar to you. It’s a new professional networking site aimed at those with some relationship or affinity to Scotland.
What this means in practice is that KILTR is smaller and friendlier than some of it’s better known counterparts. While I use those mostly to keep in touch with people I know, I have made more new connections through KILTR. An advantage of being a new site is that it can also take advantage of modern user interface design without having to consider legacy users.
I must declare an interest in that I am an associate for KILTR because I admire what Brian Hafferty, Stewart Fraaser and the rest of the team are doing. I hope you won’t mind me giving their project a plug here!
February 17, 2011 Leave a comment
I attended the first Tech Law for Startups meetup last night. For a full account of the event check out the live-blog from StartupCafe which includes some pictures. Our host Dug Campbell from MBM Commercial gave a really good introduction to the range of legal issues tech startups face, and the attendees were a diverse group so there was good participation. This has the potential to build into a really useful group as future sessions delve into a some of the topics raised last night in more detail – which is exactly why I thought it was worth a quick post to recommend it!
February 15, 2011 6 Comments
Bad hires can put morale into a downward spiral.
Every hire affects the average of the employees in your company. Hiring someone good brings the average up, hiring someone bad takes it down. Even hiring someone that is no better or worse than average consolidates my position and makes it harder to improve with good hires later.
For startup companies where the team is small, the influence of each new hire on the average can be huge. It’s not just that you have a team member that isn’t performing – it can created a downward spiral of falling morale.
One of the worst mistakes I have ever made was hiring the wrong person for a job. What makes it even worse is that I knew inside he wasn’t the right guy for the job from the start.
At the time, I justified the decision using a series of arguments, for which I now repent. I have heard these arguments used by others many times since then, so I will list them here in the hope that they might help others avoid making this mistake.
February 11, 2011 1 Comment
Take a break from whatever you are doing for just a few moments, and enjoy a bite-sized piece of wisdom from a great author with The Startup Daily
.
Karl Krantz has recently started this site, which provides a useful quote from a business book every day. You can subscribe by RSS, twitter or to by e-mail, which is exactly what I have done. That way it sits in my inbox until I get a quiet moment to look at it. It makes a very welcome break from the tasks of the day, and gives me the opportinity to step back and think about the bigger picture.
Some of the snippets are new to me, some are neat ways of looking at an issue that bring a smile to my face, and some are just welcome reminders.
The posts also reference the book from which they are taken – some of which are now on my wishlist…
February 9, 2011 5 Comments
I came to a realisation earlier this week. Most investors I have met believe in magic, but not in mythical creatures. Let me explain this rather startling claim! 
February 4, 2011 1 Comment
In the spirit of Follow Fridays (#FF) on twitter, I’m going to try to make a regular friday post linking to sites I find useful and interesting. I’m going to try to avoid the glaringly obvious, but please excuse me if you are already familiar with what I post this week or others.
Today’s link is inspired by a conversation I was having with an entrepreneur last night, and is to Edinburgh based blog StartupCafe. Here are three reasons why I think it’s worth subscribing or bookmarking, and why I keep telling other people about it!
February 3, 2011 1 Comment
Hello, and welcome to this new blog!
Salient Point helps young companies make sense of the complex world around them. This can include customers, markets, suppliers, competitors, business models and investors. This blog is intended to share thoughts from my colleagues and I that might be of interest to our customers, and to others involved in technology startup businesses in Scotland and elsewhere.
I’ve had a few interesting conversations recently about the difference between the numbers that are useful in managing businesses, and the numbers that are usually used by accountants. I am very familiar with this from working in a larger consultancy earlier in my career, where none of the key numbers (forward load, utilisation and average fee rate) would ever appear in any formal financial statement.
These days I do most of my work with startups, which are often funded by investors and don’t have any sales to speak of. Until startups companies generate significant sales, the numbers I always want to see to manage the business are burn rate, runway and “drop dead” date. Since these don’t have formal definitions in conventional accounting, I thought I’d post the definitions I use! If you are using different numbers for the same purpose, perhaps you could post a comment and share your version with us!
