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HomeShop at BookSurgeReligionBuddhismZen (see also Philosophy/Eastern/Zen)Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 16 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 37 found the following review helpful:
 How much does editing cost? Jan 12, 2006
By Rob from Mill Valley
This is probably the worst edited book I have ever read. Every second page a sentence with a missing verb or something equally important. Then there are the "missing or misplaced quotation marks. Finally, many sentences have a mysterious, comma dropped into them. All this brings reading to a halt as you stop to figure out what the author is trying to say.
Honestly, how much would it have cost to hire a grad student in English Lit to read it over?
In terms of the content, it was less than impressive. This book borrows ideas heavily from Paul Hawken's Growing a Business and Amar Bhide's articles in Inc magazine. But the book never acknowledges either writer. Instead the author tries to come across as if all this is new and original material.
Here is his advice in a nutshell:
Before investing any money into your startup, make a list of your proposed products features (before it exists), and then call 200 potential customers to ask if they'd buy such a product.
If it's affirmative, then have the product made and start selling it via telephone from your kitchen table.
Don't spend any money on anything until you have enough sales for positive cashflow.
That's it.
18 of 22 found the following review helpful:
Old Wine in Used Skins Jan 06, 2006
By Giles Panieur
My wife got me this book for XMAS thinking it would help. It didn't. It can be distilled down to two points everyone already knows:
* Selling is job #1 in a startup. Forget about every other aspect of the business until you have a steady stream of sales.
* Don't take on any fixed overhead until the sales are achieved.
Thanks for the clarification, guys.
*yawn*
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 A good book for those with no business background - from someone who is "bootstrapping" Jun 06, 2006
By Kyung Hei
"Smart Shopper"
After reading a few of the other reviews for this book, I had to leave my own. First of all in response to the complaint about this book not being about "online businesses", this book is about starting a company without any outside investors, no angels, using only your own cash and whatever loan you could squeeze from the bank (otherwise known as "bootstrapping"). This book was not marketed as a book about online businesses so I don't understand where such an expectation could come from. I mean, just read the title. However, many of the examples in the book involve people who have online businesses and I found those examples to be interesting and illustrative of the points that were made in the book.
We come from a background of very little business experience, but a lot of experience with technology. A lot of our business education has been through trial and error. If I had read this book earlier I would have avoided a lot of those errors.
I haven't read Inc a lot or a lot of other business books so I don't know if the information in this book was recycled from those, but that is irrelevant to me. I only care if this book is a good one and in my opinion, it is.
All the other books I have bought on starting and growing a tech business spent too many pages on how to get venture capital, how to find investors, how to please investors, how to solve problems with investors, etc. We have none of those problems. This was the first book that adressed the exact problems that we have had - about 10 problems that have caused us a lot of headache - that we would have avoided if we had read this book earlier. The book offered solutions that I had not thought of but wish I had. From my own experience with the problems that this book warns new business owners about, I think the advice in this book is astute.
So, in conclusion, this book was everything I've been looking for. It is perfect for me because it taught me a lot of things I've needed to know.
12 of 15 found the following review helpful:
 Disappointing Dec 05, 2005
By John Rockwell
I was really disappointed by this book. Basically, the book is an attempt to cash in on the Inc magazine article from a few years ago. Many books published these days have the same origins in an article. Go to Inc site and read the article for free instead of buying the book which is basically the article and a ton of filler fluff.
Don't waste you money on this one. The Rob Adams book A Good hard Kick in the A** is a lot better.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Good reminder to put first things first, make sure people will buy the product before building it Apr 25, 2008
By Henry Cate III
Greg Giantforte has a different take on starting up a business. His advice is not to first build the mousetrap, but to call a bunch of potential customers. If you have an idea for a business Greg's suggestion is to ask people:
"Would they buy a better mousetrap?"
"How would they use the mousetrap?"
"What features do they want in a mousetrap?"
"How much would they pay for the mousetrap?"
By spending a couple weeks doing market research before developing a product you have a much better idea exactly what customers want and what they would pay. If you don't find enough interest you've only lost a couple weeks, instead of months and thousands of dollars developing the mousetrap.
Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson is a quick read, packed with lots of good ideas.
I have been fascinated by out Paul Graham's thought that cheaper computers means startups are much cheaper. This trend continues to accelerate for example Google recently announced App Engine as a service to reduce operating costs for Web startups.
If you are interested in starting up your own business then check out Bootstrapping Your Business.
See all 16 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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