Startup Sales and Marketing

When I set out to write The Next Step: Guiding you from idea to startup, I imagined someday I’d go back to provide more details on each of the topics covered within that book.

Many diversions later, I’ve finally started fulfilling that vision.

Today, The Next Step: A guide to startup sales and marketing is now available, here on this site, as well as on paper and Kindle via Amazon.

Why do we need another book on sales or marketing?

Most books on sales and marketing assume you have an established company, marketing budget, and sales team. The Next Step: A guide to startup sales and marketing is instead for startups, guiding you though the steps in getting your startup known, and in making your initial sales.

Both marketing and sales are complex topics, and like my previous books, I’ve done my best to break these down into small, bite-sized steps than anyone can follow.

Next up in this series, a guide to build a startup financial plan.

Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...

Despite the fact that stock markets have been operating for over 400 years, how exactly they work at the level of individual participate and individual role is rarely documented. Here in the 21st Century most of the accounts are how to make money as an investor, two or three steps away from the actual transactions taking place within the exchange. Which is why it was so fascinating to find and...

If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...

Nine of every ten startups fail. For the the last decade I’ve been sharing my 30+ years of experience to help lower that horrible statistic. And it is working. Eight of our ten of the companies at Africa Eats are still running, the oldest now over 10 years old and many soon to reach that milestone? How? Business planning. By not stopping with a Plan A, as Plan A rarely succeeds. By not only...

Do you remember my journey down the 8-bit computing rabbit hole? Well… if you are going to do something for fun like designing an upgraded 1976 CPU and writing a 1979 personal computer operating system, you might as well go all the way and write the accompanying book too, in the matching late-1970s style. I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much...