10 Software Entrepreneurs Share Their Best Business Advice
We asked 10 software entrepreneurs a simple question – “what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?”. In this episode, we discuss why these made our ‘top 10 list' and how the advice might just help you get the breakthrough that you've been looking for with your business.
Summary
#1 – You Don’t Learn, Until You Launch
“You don’t learn until you launch”
– Dan Norris, WPCurve
Dan Norris is co-founder of WP Curve, one of the world’s fastest-growing WordPress support companies. He’s an entrepreneur with an obsession for content marketing and was voted Australia’s top small business blogger by ‘Smarter Business Ideas’, Australia’s largest business magazine. He’s also the author of ‘The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch’.
#2 – The Only Wrong Reason Is To Do Something for the Money
“The only wrong reason is to do something for the money”
– Trevor Owens, Javelin & Lean Startup Machine
Trevor Owens is an author and entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Javelin.com – the makers of QuickMVP and Lean Startup Machine. QuickMVP is a service that lets you quickly and easily test business ideas. And the Lean Startup Machine is workshop that teaches you how to build something customers want and run the right experiments to steer your business in the right direction. Trevor is also the author of the book, The Lean Enterprise, which details how corporations can apply more innovation and Lean Startup to launching new products.
“Do things that don’t scale”
– Paul Graham, Y Combinator
Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which in 2014 got 12 million page views. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 800 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit.
#4 – Don’t Let Someone Else Set the Agenda for Your Life
“Don’t let someone else set the agenda for your life”
– Rob Walling, Drip
Rob Walling is the founder of email marketing tool Drip and the owner of SEO keyword tool HitTail. He’s also the author of the book “Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup”. And his blog “Software by Rob” is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month.
“Make today better than it was yesterday”
– Wade Foster, Zapier
Wade Foster is the CEO and co-founder of Y-Combinator startup Zapier. Zapier lets SaaS users create integrations that push data between hundreds of best-in-breed web apps without having to write any code or deal with APIs.
Peter Coppinger is the Co-Founder & CEO of Teamwork, an online collaboration tool that allows teams to work together more efficiently. Peter and his co-founder Daniel Mackey founded the Irish based company in 2007. Peter and Daniel have bootstrapped the company and to date Teamwork has almost 1.5 million users and $14M in annual revenue.
“Screw it, let’s do it”
– Andrew Wilkinson, Metalab & Flow (via Richard Branson)
Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of MetaLab and Flow. Metalab is a design agency that Andrew founded when he was just 20 years old and has grown it into a business with over 60 employees. MetaLab is the design team behind Slack which is now valued at $2.8 billion. And Flow is a task management SaaS application for teams which is used by companies like Etsy, Tesla, Adobe, and TED.
#8 – You Don’t Have to Give Up On Yourself or Your Company
“You don’t have to give up on yourself or your company” – Tom Leung, Anthology
Tom Leung is the co-founder and CEO of Anthology, a Seattle-based startup that was formerly known as Poachable. Anthology enables employed tech professionals to explore new career opportunities anonymously. The company has raised around $1.8 million to date and its investors include Vulcan Ventures. And companies recruiting through Anthology include Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Dropbox, Facebook and around 100 venture-backed startups.
“Trust your gut” – Omer Khan, SaaS Club & Host of The SaaS Podcast
Omer Khan is the founder of SaaS Club and host of The SaaS Podcast. SaaS Club is an online community for early stage SaaS founders and software entrepreneurs. The SaaS Podcast helps founders to build, launch and grow successful SaaS products. Previously, Omer was director of product management at Microsoft working on the Bing search engine.
