Damir Perge's Blog: Entrepreneur Insights from the Trenches, page 12

The Gestation of a Startup Vision

When you are obsessed with something you see in the future, the present becomes the future.

I see a thought pattern within the entrepreneur mind—the gestation of a vision. Your entrepreneur vision may come to you in a flash, as a Eureka moment, but the clarification and transparency of the vision could go through a gestation period of several years.

At first you may need to narrow down your vision. Perhaps the market is not evolving fast enough and must catch up to your vision. You may be force...

Lean Startup Lesson Learned as a College Entrepreneur: Buy Low, Sell Low

As a student at Southern Methodist University, my friend and I started a corporate advertising company that developed an advertising campaign to combat drinking and driving for college students. It was a cutting-edge marketing campaign. We conducted an extensive study with our college friends and they all loved it because it didn’t preach to them about drinking. The message made it cool for them not to drink and drive. I still haven’t seen a campaign like it and believe it would be effective...

Startup Re-Alignment the Silicon Valley Way (Part 1)

The first traditional thing high-tech startups do in Silicon Valley is form a founding team. I was on the phone recently with a friend in Silicon Valley who's been working on a startup in a sector outside of high tech. And because his startup isn't high tech related, he didn’t do some of the traditional things. He hadn't yet formed his founding team.

This entrepreneur is extremely smart and experienced. And he formed his founding team first in his software startup.

“Dude, I don’t get it.” I tol...

The Diminishing Value of a Service Before Being Served

Here's one business saying that should be modified pronto: The value of the service diminishes rapidly after the service has been done. Here's the change I suggest: The value of the service diminishes rapidly before the service is begun. You should apply this concept to your business as well as to your entrepreneur mind.

I met with a very smart entrepreneur a few days ago to discuss the concept of building a market. We hit on the subject of recognition of value for services performed. I can’t...

Espressopreneur: The Late Bird Gets the Worm

I met with an entrepreneur friend of mine early one morning. “How are you doing?” she asked. I realized I looked tired from working late the previous night.

“I’m tired. I am a night person so I work late at night. But I’ve also learned over the years to be a morning person too."

“You know the saying, ‘The early bird gets the worm’ and it is so true,” she replied. “I am a morning person.”

“That’s why I learned to burn the candle at both ends,” I explained, "I used to hate getting up early.”

"It’s...

Espressopreneur: The Responsibility of an Executive (or Startup Founder)

I was recently talking with John Miller, executive director of NTEC, North Texas Enterprise Center — an incubator in Frisco, Texas, about entrepreneurship. Because of his extensive experience as an entrepreneur, I made it a point to shut up and listen. When you meet with experienced entrepreneurs like John, it's wise to listen carefully. Although some dynamics of the market might have changed, the fundamentals of entrepreneurship remain constant.

John gave me many valuable words of entrepreneu...

Startup Capacity Dependency

The capacity of your startup to produce value in the marketplace is limited by the biggest bottleneck within your organization. The same applies to any business.

The bigger the bottleneck—the slower the startup. The most important asset in any startup is to have and maintain extraordinary speed. Sometimes bottlenecks in your startup or growing business are small, but there can be more of the little devils in your process than you expect or even see. The many little bottleneck devils together c...

Espressopreneur: The Mathematics Behind Business Assumptions

Whenever I've encountered a business problem, it wasn’t due to a flaw in the mathematics and logic driving that particular business decision.

If your business model is not making money, don't blame the math supporting the business model.

If your product didn’t launch into the marketplace the way you wanted, don't blame the logic supporting your decisions regarding the launch.

If you chose the wrong businessperson to become part of your startup team, it's unlikely your data about the person that...

The #1 Secret to Startup Entrepreneur Success: Complete Focus

The first secret to startup success is to be focused and stay focused. Startup entrepreneurs succeed only when they're focused on getting one thing done as quickly as possible—as in getting it done yesterday.

The entrepreneur mind is creative and innovative. It has a tendency to come up with far too many ideas within a particular startup focus as well as outside of it. This carries the danger of diluting the efforts of the entrepreneur mind, body and soul. Dilution of effort in a startup can c...

Startup Speed Founder Dating

I was talking with an entrepreneur friend of mine from Silicon Valley the other day and the subject came up of finding partners to become startup founders. The process of finding the right business partner for any startup is difficult.

Look— Actually, it’s easy to find a business partner for your startup—but it’s hard to find the right partner to be your founder. My friend is an experienced entrepreneur so he understands the art of the startup. But even as experienced as he is, he made some cr...