The Bootstrapper's Blog

You have to have the right cultu re in place to drive fast growth but what does it look like?  C ulture eats strategy is a much-toted truism these days and despite that it should be as it is completely correct. While this can have an impact in large corporate cultures, or I certainly hope it can, it is much more powerful in the startup world especially when you start to grow. If you don’t have the right culture in place, you simply will not to be able to grow fast or scale up

How to use AI to find your McDonald's burger November 26, 2025  One of the persistent myths about startups and founders is this supposed lightbulb moment. A founder or founders are sitting around and suddenly notice something none else has or ask a question ( usually devastatingly simple and obvious but groundbreaking) that results in an amazing original idea which leads to a huge new startup being founded and successfully scaling to a unicorn. This is incredibly rare. Most s

Moving from working 'in ' the business to working 'on' the business There are lots of small businesses that do a fantastic job of getting themselves up and running when they launch. They successfully grow to a team of 10 to 20 people with anything from $1.5 to $5 M in revenue and are led by a driven charismatic super smart founder or co-founders. However then they stop there. For a variety of reasons they don’t continue to grow rapidly from that point on. Sometimes it by choi

The three Es of sales Last week I wrote about the four Ps that every founder needs – persistence, pressure, pride and passion. While I’m not going to disappear down an alphabet soup of advice each week, this week I’m going to look at the fact that every salesperson and every founder who is selling needs the three Es- energy, enthusiasm and expertise. Founders who have never sold before are understandably nervous. It is simply not possible, unless you have a co-founder who sel

The four Ps- why every founder needs them   The are many different skills or traits that every successful founder has and a huge amount...

The benefits of cofounders   If founding a business is like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down, to quote Reid...

The rollercoaster life of a founder August 28, 2025 This has to me my favourite way of describing the roller coaster ride of being a...

The value of culture August 13, 2025 Ask most founders, especially when they’re just starting, about what their culture is and they’ll...

Lessons in leadership from pirate captains July 30, 2025 A few weeks ago, I wrote about how founders need to think outside the box,...

How focusing on this drives success July 23, 2025 This is a famous quote from the comedian and actor Steve Martin which he always gives...