Jeff Magnusson

Here’s a few more resources that have surfaced since my post on Agile Budgeting / Startup Cash Flow Management:

Geof Harries (@geofharries of subvert.ca) pointed me at Pulse (pulseapp.com), which encapsulates much of my process in a nice web tool.  I haven’t had the chance to try it out, but it looks like it captures the key steps of estimating, scheduling, repeating, and editing.  One benefit of using our Excel spreadsheet was that we could do 30-second “what-if” experiments.  Move a customer payment to a later date and see if you still make payroll.  Increase your monthly billing by 10% and see if you can hire another developer.  This flexibility and control is key to this being something you are willing to use.

Fred Wilson’s (@fredwilson) excellent MBA Mondays series has included a few posts that introduce the basic accounting reports of balance sheet, profit & loss, and cash flow.  My post focused on the cash flow, as it’s the most important real-time report for a bootstrapped / low-capital startup.  He also has his own post on Budgeting in a Small, Early-Stage Company.  I’ll explain why I disagree with his recommendation (at least for the very early stages) but you should go read everything he’s written.

I still think that annual budgeting, as he recommends, is not useful in the early stages, when your business plan, revenue model and cost structure are changing frequently.  Focus on your market fit, your repeatable revenue model, and watch your cash.  Once you’ve accomplished those (reaching the Optimize and Scale levels of the Startup Pyramid – @seanellis) then your company will be static enough to spend the time on annual or semi-annual budgets.

Moving forward, I hope to crank out a few more posts on lean processes that I’ve used in the past so we can get away from old BDUF time wasters throughout the company.

I love books.  I’ve done almost all of my learning from books and web pages.  So following up on a post by Boris about finding startup books in Vancouver, I wondered what would be the required reading list for a startup (or a Bootup cohort company).

Here’s my tentative list, from personal experience.  What else needs included?  Is there a great Drupal book?

Business

• Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank – on my TO READ list, the bible of customer development.
• Startup Lessons Learned – 2008-2009 – Eric Ries – I’m not listing blogs on this post, because there’s plenty of resources for that.  But I get to cheat and include this book form compendium of Eric’s posts.  This material is invaluable, for the detailed discussion of continuous deployment practices and the lean startup business model.

Engineering

• Test Driven Development by Example – Kent Beck: the how-to book for applying test-driven development (a great Extreme Programming technique for rapid reliable code, and very applicable to continuous deployment) and unit tests.
• Refactoring to Patterns – Joshua Kerievsky: if you’re writing a lot of code hopefully you’ve read both Refactoring and Design Patterns, but this book puts the two together and gives you strategies for migrating spaghetti legacy code to nice patterned code.
• Facebook Cookbook – Jay Goldman: this is a great book that covers all aspects of Facebook platform and Connect programming, from ideation and planning to viral marketing and API code samples.  The only downside is that the API is constantly changing and portions of this were already out of date when I bought the book last year.

Personal

• Getting Things Done – David Allen: on my TO READ list – sounds like the least gimmicky, most lean and effective way to stay focused on what’s important and cut out your wasted cycles.
• Getting To Yes – Fisher,Ury: how to negotiate effectively in all areas of your life (with employers, investors, spouses, fishmongers) by avoiding positions and addressing underlying interests.
• The Seven Principles for Making a Marriage Work – John Gottman: <preach>Some things are more important than your next round or release.  Without strong support at home you can’t succeed, and whether your startup succeeds wildly or flames out, you will have failed if you lose what’s important to you.</preach>

Please, let’s fill this in with more.  And then get Chapters or Amazon to sponsor a set for new cohort companies

From the book New Venture Creation, which lists common responses when entrepreneurs are asked an open ended question about what they believe to be the most critical concepts and skills:

1. Do what gives you energy – have fun.
2. Figure out what can go right and make it.
3. Say “can do” rather than “cannot” or “maybe”.
4. Illegitimi non carborundum: tenacity and creativity will triumph.
5. Anything is possible if you believe you can do it.
6. If you don’t know it can’t be done, then you’ll go ahead and do it.
7. The cup is half full.
8. Be dissatisfied with the way things are – and look for improvement.
9. Do things differently.
10. Don’t take a risk if you don’t have to – but take a calculated risk if it’s the right opportunity for you.
11. Businesses fail; successful entrepreneurs learn – but keep the tuition low.
12. It’s easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.
13. Make opportunity and results your obsession – not money.
14. Money is a tool and a scorecard available to the right people with the right opportunity at the right time.
15. Making money is even more fun than spending it.
16. Make heroes out of others – a team builds a business, an individual makes a living.
17. Take pride in your accomplishments – it’s contagious!
18. Sweat the details that are critical to success.
19. Integrity and reliability equal long-run oil and glue.
20. Accept the responsibility, less than half the credit, and more than half the blame.
21. Make the pie bigger – don’t waste time trying to cut smaller slices.
22. Play for the long haul – it is rarely possible to get rich quickly.
23. Don’t pay too much – but don’t lose it!
24. Only the lead dog gets a change of view.
25. Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.
26. Give back.
27. Embrace sustainability.
28. Never give up.

A few old chestnuts in there, and a few that really ring true.  I especially like 8, 11 and 16.