Jason's Business By Bootstraps

  • My three words for 2012 (preview)

    I’ve been working with Chris Brogan‘s idea about three words that define what I want my upcoming year to be about (you can see his for 2011, 2010, and if you follow the links in those pages, back much further than that.) Basically, you pick the three words that you’ll be building around for the […]

  • For premium pricing, what you don’t do matters more

    By all accounts, competing solely on price is a horrible strategy, but it’s also the easiest.  Still, even if you aspire to being a luxury brand with higher than average margins, there seems to be a puzzle there, especially if you seem to be doing all the same things that your competitor is doing. Here’s […]

  • Overcoming obstacles with “Have to” vs “Get to”

    My latest weapon in overcoming obstacles and taking action is the Have To/Get To distinction.  Here’s the breakdown: It started with a no brainer: I spend my Fridays with my son, and I don’t do this because I have to (though someone definitely does or Children’s Aid is going to come a’knocking) but because I […]

  • Marketing-driven design

    I hate when I have to admit that someone else was right, especially when I held such a strong position for so long. For millennia (internet millennia, anyway, or at least since the dawn of software made for sale) there’s been a strong divide in many companies between sales/marketing and engineering. Marketing would seemingly promise […]

  • Getting over the fear of duplicate posts

    Have I talked about this one before? Actually, it’s not this post, but another one that I haven’t read yet.  I kinda think I wrote about it once before, but a quick Google didn’t find anything.  So I’ve got 3 choices: Read through a few hundred posts looking for it. Drop the idea in favour […]

  • What the MythBusters cannonball incident means for SEO

    Well, by virtue of the fact that you’re reading this, if you didn’t get here from the home page or the RSS feed, I think the easy part of the question has been answered. But this isn’t just a headline test to see where I can rank on a subject making the news right now. […]

  • Reusable email for greater leverage

    I send a lot of emails every day.  Like I once mentioned, that’s the realization that cured me of writer’s block. But emails are super-temporary objects, at least the ones that don’t come back to haunt you, anyway.  They take an hour or so out of every day to write, and then they’re gone.  The […]

  • Innovation is the enemy of systems

    I’ve been thinking more about systems, but this time it’s other people’s systems – why are they so hard to implement?  Is entrepreneurship really a thinly veiled desire to do things your own way as much as possible?  It seems like it sometimes. I’ve tested countless techniques, courses and systems, and I can’t really tell […]

  • The dangers of problem solving

    If you’re good at puzzles, you probably picked up the problem solving skill before you learned about marketing. Too bad. Here’s the deal: lots of marketing, particularly direct response stuff, is full of clever positioning, open loops, and reframing products and services to raise the curiousity level of the reader. Sometimes, it’s a little cheesy, […]

  • Five figure thinking

    I’ve reached an age where the reflection starts on how I got to be the way I am; what early experiences led to certain personality traits and so on.  And I think it’s the same with my approach to business. Unfortunately. See, the longer you have a job, I think, the harder it is to […]