“ Start and grow a successful company with almost no money ”

by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson

Book Cover

Outline

Define what you want to do and will be sellable, make selling it the priority for actions and hiring, persevere against issues and competition, and make some noise through talks, clients, prospects and press.

Ideas / notes

  • An alternative to paying the first employee is giving aggressive commissions and options
  • Look to be paid for efforts and be prepared to have to collect money from bad payers
  • Allow experimentation, and test innovation against market ASAP, if people don’t see the need for what you’re demonstrating, let it go
  • Have an atomic, simple, clear and consistent message when it comes to marketing
  • Personality and behavior is more important than skills, ask lots of behavioral questions and put interviewee in situation. A senior salesman not able to design a website will not be hands/actually qualified on and is not a fit for a bootstrapping company
  • Have a good, honest and quick customer service, but ignore the 2-3 percent of humanity that is simply impossible

About Reading Notes

These are my takes on this book. See other reading notes. Most of the time I stop taking notes on books I don't enjoy, and these end up not being in the list. This is why average ratings tend to be high.