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Rework, the 2nd popular book from 37signals.com’s Jason Fried, and David Heinemeier Hansson, is an easy but rewarding read. It takes me about half a day to finish reading it, without further peruse, the following is the 1 principle, 3 tips about starting a business (a product, a service etc.) that I have found most memorable and rewarding for me.

1 principle: Less is more

Tip1: Start from Epicenter of the idea, product
Epicenter is the core and what a product stands for. Stick to/start with what product stands for and only build features that defines you and your business. Build half the products that you want to build, but not half assed product; cutting out what is merely good, only keep the core and the best.

Tip2: Break down into smaller projects
“Rework” is brilliant on its chapter structure. Each “chapter” has only 1 to 2 pages, making it extremely fulfilling to read since I know I am making progress by moving down to more chapters. I had experiences reading traditional books with long chapters, although I did enjoy the story, I found myself often skipping, flipping pages to see how many more left to finish the chapter, to move on. Building a product for a new business should be the same way, instead of setting up long term goals, 3 months long feature sets plan, breaking them down to mini-sets, weekly feature-sets-milestone will make you aware of your progress more, bringing more motivation and fuel to keep going strong. This is how I am building mine now.

Tip3: Constrain is the resource and Outside money is plan Z
I love this tip. Never take outside money before you build out the epicenter of your product. Resource constraint is a good thing that will force us to build only the most necessary to launch the core of our product, our business, our service.

Bonus tips: teaching is the new promotion
Once you have something built up and to show the world, you will need to promote it. Out-teach, not out-spend your competitors: rework encourages. My full time job is a company that is obsessed with educating our audience; more and more software, product, even service companies are now offering webinars, free white paper, free conference etc. to “educate” and “build” an “audience”. “Teach and you will form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics…earning people’s loyalty by teaching them forms whole difference connection. They will trust you more. They’ll respect you more.. – page 173, Rework.

So, go teach, build an audience, build a bond, establish connection, enable trust. Doing so we will prosper together.

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, rework

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Authentic Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.