“No revolution ever started on a full stomach.

Bootstrapping brings to the fore the most important elements of company building. Passion, dedication, focus and vision.

All startups should be forced to go through a mandatory bootstrapping period to help forge the founders and early team.

Bootstrapping credentials should be seen as a far more prestigious badge of honour than closing top tier VC.”

Great post about bootstrapping.

Breaking strategy into these three parts makes it easy – you now have a template, a stencil for describing your strategy. Make a table that looks like this:

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Distribution
Engagement
Monetization

Fill it in with the top 2 to 3 initiatives per quarter. You have just built a board-level roadmap that describes your strategy. Explain it to your board, solicit feedback, then hold a town hall and describe it to your team. Then get back to building your company!

We've got something like this on our Trello board: Product, Monetization, Growth.

I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions. I distinctly remember, as an immature and perhaps arrogant freshman, a guest lecture in one of my classes. After explaining what I thought was a straightforward concept, the guest lecturer asked if anyone had any questions. Looking around the room, every student simply nodded, indicating everything was clear. A question, however, came from a tenured professor who had undoubtedly been exposed to the material before. At the time, I thought nothing of it, and perhaps even thought that I was smarter than the professor because I understood a concept he/she didn’t. Now, I am confident that this professor did not ask the question just to make the guest lecturer feel better, to start a discussion, or anything else. The intonation of the question and the intensity with which the professor listened to the response definitively suggested that the professor’s question was genuine, and that the answer was of great importance.

Based on the research and findings of so many of the students and professors here, it’s clear that this trend is no accident. Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something. Smart people challenge the very limit of human understanding, and push the envelope of what’s possible farther than many people would argue it’s meant to be pushed. Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Smart people challenge everything. (You know who taught me that? A smart person.)

Maybe someday, people will call me a smart person. For now, I’m going to keep asking them questions.

Ask questions.

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

Keep it all in perspective.

Then, in March 2011, I read “Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing” by George Cloutier. There’s some questionable advice in the book, but one thing he said rang true to me: pay yourself first. By that he meant, figure out how much profit you want to take from the business, take it out regularly, and cut costs to make the numbers work. Be brutal if you have to: cut wages, fire people, but learn to run a profitable company.