It was bound to happen sooner or later, and since writing my last blog post, it did: We’ve had our first churning customers. Three customers. Four paid seats. € 59.8 MRR in total. It sucks! It freaking sucks big time! But it also turned out to be a lesson
It is incredibly difficult to gain traction as a new and unknown brand in a blood-red and highly competitive B2B ocean. In this post, I’ll describe my approach, what I’ve found to work, and how I’ll try to scale it. It’s my impression that most B2B
When starting a company, the talk is about “Going from Zero to One”. Peter Thiel, the famous entrepreneur and investor, wrote an equally famous book about creating a product and starting a company called “Zero to One” (if you're into entrepreneurship, do yourself a favour and read it
After I posted about transitioning to fully remote, I received some questions about what software, tools, desk setup, etc., I now have and am using. So, I’ll dive into that in this post. It’s about tools I’m using to build and run Herodesk, not the tech stack
Every time someone asks for or shares ten pieces of advice for start-ups, one of them will surely be “Celebrate your wins!”. I’ve tried doing it over the years, but honestly never quite enough or heartfelt enough. As soon as we’d high-fived and said, “Well done, guys!” my
After spending the last 6-7 years in an open-spaced office, I’ve decided to go fully remote with Herodesk.io . In this post, I’ll share my experiences from the first 8-9 months of working like this. For starters, “fully remote” doesn’t mean “work from home” or “sometimes in
I regularly listen to podcasts. One of them is Lenny’s Podcast. In February, he had Jason M. Lemkin on to talk about “Building a world-class sales team”. For those of you who don’t know Jason, he was the founder of EchoSign, which was sold to Adobe in 2011,
This wasn’t the post I was planning on writing today. I had one planned called “The Year of The Product”, but that’ll have to wait until next time. This is because we had our first outage this week. I’m writing about this for three reasons. First, I
In the last post, I introduced Herodesk’s business plan and how and why I’ve used the Business Model Canvas framework. If you haven’t read that post, start there. In this post, I’ll go through the last four elements of the business plan. Ready? Let’s go!
I’ve been ranting about the traditional “business plan” for a long time. Hour after hour was spent writing business plans for SpeedGaming and (initially) Meebox, writing up what felt like endless pages of fantasy business plans, and trying to predict the business's 3- and 5-year future. I
When analyzing a market’s competitive situation, it’s pretty normal to talk about it using the “red oceans and blue oceans” business strategy framework (see the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, it's great). A red ocean describes the situation where you will compete in
July, 2023 During my break before starting Herodesk.io, I thought a lot about what had happened during the past 15 years of my work life as an entrepreneur and intrapreneur. It started as a bunch of unstructured notes but ended up as my Principles of Entrepreneurship. The Principles of