As a startup, though, it’s exceptionally pretentious to think of ourselves as armies; rather, to use another military analogue, we’re squads and fireteams, bands of specialists that ally toward a common goal, each of us participating equally in the dirty work.

Eston Bond, explains why his startup - isocket - is a titleless one.

I love the description of a startup above and agree wholeheartedly with Eston’s views on why titles actually do not matter.

This is a similar approach to what we have at WooThemes, where we’ve never been overly fussed about titles and specific job descriptions. And the only reason why I didn’t write such an article, is because I’m not nearly as eloquent as Eston, who manages to write an extremely intellectual article on the matter. :)

startup
culture
1 year ago 6 notescomments

I’ve made a decision to stick to what I know best, as well as sticking to those people I know best.

This may sound a little random, but it’s pretty unique in relation to how I see us growing The Rockstar Foundation & turning it into a self-sustaining organization. So who & what I currently know is the tech startup scene that I’ve been working in (via WooThemes) for the last couple of years and I’ve got some great ideas in terms of using those connections and leveraging the startup principles that I’ve learned with the Foundation. Can you say The Startup Charity?

rsf
startup
strategy
1 year ago comments

The video from the “The Designer Startup” talk at DIBI in April. (Slides here.)

startup
design
speaking
woothemes
1 year ago 14 notescomments

The Startup Charity

Towards the end of 2009, I founded a charity to fund the education of exceptionally talented, but disadvantaged, girls in South Africa and in the months since then, we’ve done a lot of work in getting our structures in place to ensure that our first 2 girls are flourishing within their new environments. It is also for that reason that I’ve been purposefully less vocal (compared to some of my other projects) about the charity online…

Today however, I would like to announce the “launch” (and probably the wider, mainstream unveiling) of a brand new era for The Rockstar Foundation, which we’re also celebrating with a superb, new website.

Startup Mode

Since founding the Foundation, we have been very much in startup mode; similar to the kind of startups that I blog about on here regularly. For example: bootstrapping in our world has meant that I have been solely responsible for 95% of the funding of the Foundation and we’ve been fortunate that a handful of amazing peeps (I’ve thanked them here) have donated their skills to help us make the new website a reality.

Going forward, I’m very keen to explore the running of the Foundation as a startup and you can expect me to blog more about my experiences both here and over on the Foundation’s blog.

And if you maybe share our passion in terms of educating the leaders and history makers of tomorrow, we’d appreciate any kind of contribution.

rsf
startup
charity
1 year ago 3 notescomments

Going Back, Changing Stuff

Based on this question about going back & changing decisions we made at WooThemes; is there anything that you would want to change with your startup / business if you had the opportunity to do it over again? Any regrets?

startup
business
musings
2 years ago 14 notescomments
The idea for selling our own software really came out of frustration more than anything else.

David Greiner, on how they came to the idea of building Campaign Monitor.

I know this is something that many VC’s & startup founders have spoken about, but Campaign Monitor’s story again highlights that if you’re building something to solve a problem that you have, you are most likely also solving a problem that others may have.

WooThemes - for example - grew out of our frustration of managing multiple client design & development projects at the same time and we wanted to give ourselves an easier & more efficient way of earning a salary as web designers. Now, we see many designers & developers building their businesses using our themes for their client projects; so the process & theory of solving problems almost goes full circle.

startup
business model
inspiration
2 years ago 20 notescomments

BankSimple

If these guys don’t rely on banking fees to make money, I’m *really* curious to see their revenue model.

revenue model
startup
banksimple
2 years ago 2 notescomments
Here are my slides from my talk - Lessons Learnt from WooThemes - at NetProphet yesterday. If you’re not intrigued enough to view the slides yet, have a look at these compliments that I got via Twitter yesterday… Wow @Adii makes awesome slides. If his slides are this good, you should be buying his themes. ~ @saulkza Seriously ass-kickin’ slide deck by @adii at #NetProphet, be sure to check it out when it’s posted. ~ @PresoRockGods Nothing like a bit of ego-stroking, ey? :)

Here are my slides from my talk - Lessons Learnt from WooThemes - at NetProphet yesterday. If you’re not intrigued enough to view the slides yet, have a look at these compliments that I got via Twitter yesterday…

Wow @Adii makes awesome slides. If his slides are this good, you should be buying his themes. ~ @saulkza

Seriously ass-kickin’ slide deck by @adii at #NetProphet, be sure to check it out when it’s posted. ~ @PresoRockGods

Nothing like a bit of ego-stroking, ey? :)

woothemes
speaking
startup
inspiration
2 years ago 12 notescomments

Bootstrap. That's all.

If you have ever wanted an authoritative article on bootstrapping your startup, then this one is just that. @spencerfry has immense experience in the field of bootstrapping startups and in this article he shares all of those valuable bits. So: read this!

I think the reason that I love this article so much, is because I truly believe in bootstrapping, which is exactly how we’ve gone about building WooThemes. In fact, reading Spencer’s article, I found myself identifying those exact same things in the early WooThemes-days.

business models
bootstrap
startup
2 years ago 6 notescomments
Looking across these nearly 50 companies, the study finds that founding CEOs consistently beat the professional CEOs on a broad range of metrics ranging from capital efficiency (amount of funding raised), time to exit, exit valuations, and return on investment.

Ben Horowitz, explaining why they prefer founding CEO’s (over professional CEO’s) at investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

I’d just like to believe that if it was your idea to start with, you are best equipped to actually implementing that idea. You may need to surround yourself with great people (that contributes specific skills that you may not have), but you will always have the best vision in terms of executing your idea.

startup
entrepreneurship
2 years ago 2 notescomments
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