A friend of mine asked for some war stories of entrepreneurship over a couple of beers.
My best advice was to point him in the direction of Eric Ries super book, almost a manual, certainly a must-read ... The Lean Startup.
At its heart, though, my experience is one of focusing on a few simple principles:
In addition to the necessary and sufficient test, and turning Weaknesses into Strengths, we actively use our geography to help us.
My programming colleagues have continued to be based in America, though not necessarily where I used to live. I'm now operating out of GMT time zone again from the UK. Sure, there are some costs and inconveniences that this brings.
But overall it's a huge benefit ... By being rigorous in our use of project management and communication tools we can extend the working day. Many is the time when I've done background research, assembled resources and started a ball rolling with, say, a database schema set up so that my US-based programmer can hit the ground running when he wakes.
And there've been times when he's worked on in to my early hours, writing code, doing a build of a test application, documenting a problem while I sleep. I can wake and do some testing, or find a solution to the problem, before he wakes so that we don't lose momentum...
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