Microtransactions: A new successful model that came into vogue with online computer games, and is now being tested to try to save newspapers, is microtransactions.

Plan: This is a predictable, recurring

Improve Conversion Rates in Sales: Always focus on improving the conversion rates from your leads. As you see in the bottom-up calculations, there is a huge cost associated with chasing deals that you don’t close. Getting higher conversion rates on leads opens up the funnel so more deals get through, increasing your revenue and decreasing your

There are many resources that go into more depth about finding good co-founders. Probably the single best and most rigorous book on this topic is Harvard Professor Noam Wasserman’s book, The Founder’s Dilemmas. For other valuable perspectives, here are a few articles that may be helpful: Paul Graham, “What We Look for in Founders,” PaulGraham.com,

The 24 Steps are discrete and can be grouped into six themes.

Focus is very important because entrepreneurs have very limited time and resources and so must be hyper-efficient. Focus is so crucial to determining your target customer that I refer to the first five steps of the 24 Steps—from Market Segmentation to profiling your Persona—as “The Search for the Holy Grail of Specificity” (see Figure 0.1

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. The day someone pays you money for your product or service, you have a business, and not a day before.

The following items from the Full Life Cycle Use Case (Step 6) will be the basis for mapping the process to acquire a paying customer. You do not need to do additional work on these items in order to use them in this step. How customers will determine they have a need and/or opportunity to move away from their status quo and how to activate

A business model is a framework by which you extract from your customers some portion of the value your product creates for them. It is the idea that the amount of money your venture gets paid is based on how much value the customer gets from your product, and not some arbitrary markup based on your costs.