Book Report – Book Yourself Solid

Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port is a book about becoming a independent contractor. The book lays out strategies for developing business and consulting gigs. From the beginning, the book is more about marketing and selling ones services. It’s a book that you might need to do one or 2 consulting gigs to boostrap your business. not the ideal solution ever but you never know so it’s good to have some knowledge on the field.

The high points of this book include:

Imagine your ideal user/client You have to imagine and characterize your ideal client, much the same way that we have to imagine ShareMeme’s ideal user. When you stray away from seeking out your ideal client, you have a tendency to stress yourself out and not get the most of your independent contracting or service for your client.

Don’t sell everything on the first try. The typical sales cycle should move gradually up from free, less priced services to higher priced services. At some point, the website should give away something for free even without registering. Lower the barrier to entry even more to your website.

Network. The book recommends that when you get someone’s information, that you use it to keep in touch. Even if you never talk to that person again, it’s helpful to have their information. Later on, they can be added to a newsletter or something.

Practice pitching. The basic framework proposed by Port is: 1) explain the target market, 2) explain their primary problem, 3) explain what you do, 4) explain a dramatic result from a previous client, and 5) explain the benefits. This pitch can be pared down to shorter versions for different discussions.

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Book Report: E-Myth Revisited

Luc and I read a lot at ShareMeme, and we really tuned our reading lists to books about entrepreneurship. We already placed some emphasis on book reports before with Geoff Livingston’s Now is Gone. In this series, we really want to nail down the quick hit takeaways from books that might be applicable to web entrepreneurs.

One of the first books that we wanted to highlight was E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. We took away the following lessons from the book:

Document. Documenting everything is an important task and goal. This should include code, sales, marketing, finances, etc. The closer a small startup moves towards that paradigm, it eventually means that we’re more marketable for selling and hiring others to come on board later on. There’s written proof the past practices, successes, failures, and duties. There’s history! The same applies to accounting practices too.

Organize. An organizational chart with responsibilities even between two people is really important. It sets clear guidelines for who does what especially with job descriptions or job contracts, as written in the book. For two people, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we feel it reduces conflict on decision-making and duties. over time, as new people are brought in, they’ll be presented with a clear division of duties and won’t be confused as to how things work in some mysterious ways in small businesses.

Understand. Marketing is understanding the customer and why they buy. For us, the customer buys what’s easiest and quickest to use. The customer also considers how credible the site is, so that his/her friends consider it credible. An easy way to gain name-recognition is to make the experience quick and easy.

The simple, quick message of the book is to become the technician, manager, and entrepreneur. Being successful in a small business requires equal parts expertise, management ability, and vision.

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How it all started – A Retreat Weekend!

Before this summer, Luc and I knew each other from our first year at the University of Virginia back in 2000. As we finished up our respective MS programs at UVA and Georgia Tech, we we looking for roommates in Northern Virginia. Eventually, we moved in together for about a year.

In the next year, I decided to go back to UVA to pursue a PhD in systems engineering, and Luc continued to work for one of the big telco companies. During one lunch during the early summer of 2007, we began to think that we should take a stab at creating a website. We saw how all these new websites were grabbing our attention, and we decided that we’re qualified enough.

Later that summer, we decided to go off to Annapolis for a weekend. There would be few distractions, and we would just come together to brainstorm ideas. We had some laptops and a couple coffee shops and the whole weekend. You can see a screenshot of our Writeboard document below. It’s nothing too fancy or innovative.

The sad thing is that we found a website that was doing something very similar to each idea on our list. Eventually, we took these 10-odd ideas narrowed down to 3. Then, we had a long discussion about those 3 ideas. We decided on one.

By that time until now, Luc has become quite the guy to talk to about Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Ramaze, and Java on Ubuntu. Hence, we started programming in Ruby on Rails.

At first, this was a weekend thing, but we both knew that this summer would be crucial. As a part-time deal, we could both put in the effort into refining the idea, buildings the prototype, and seek funding. Lucky for us, now, we have all three!

In later posts, we’ll start talking about particulars of taking our time to build ShareMeme, and hopefully our example will be a lesson for what to do and not do for others.

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