“This is a story about control My control Control of what I say Control of what I do And this time I’m gonna do it my way I hope you enjoy this as much as I do Are we ready? I am Cause it’s all about control And I’ve got lots of it” – Janet […]
Archive | General
Two Questions To Ask Before Writing Any Code
Which customer am I doing this work for? How will this work help my business? So often we do work without having definitive answers to these questions, and many times it’s because we have people working for us full time and, well, they need something to do! My challenge to you is, for every feature […]
The Scott Barstow Show, Episode #003 – Mike Schneider, CEO of First.io
Our guest for this show is Mike Schneider, the CEO of First.io. First helps real estate agents identify who amongst their list of contacts is most likely to move in the next six months using publicly available data and a super-secret algorithm they’ve built from the ground up. Prior to starting First, Mike worked […]
Build a Culture of Energy
I recently finished reading Scott Adam’s latest book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. The book is jammed full of practical advice and tremendous stories from Adams’ life. One of the chapters in the book is called The Energy Metric. As I was reading it, I started thinking about all the […]
What Makes a Great Development Organization?
It’s a tempting headline, isn’t it? The answer to creating a great development organization lies just behind the click of a mouse. Spoiler alert: There is no secret formula, and anyone who tries to sell you that is, well, selling you something. There are, however, some principles that I’ve seen work in fast-moving organizations like […]
The Scott Barstow Show Episode #002 – Janice Smith, CEO of Mission 100 Percent
I’m really excited about our guest for this show, I think you’re going to love it. Janice Smith is the founder and CEO of Mission 100%, a practice-based teacher development platform that helps teachers and teacher coaches learn and implement best practices from the most successful classrooms in the country. As you’ll hear in our […]
The Essential Skills of Starting a Tech Company
I was reading this article by John Saddington yesterday on being a “Full Stack Founder”, and it prompted me to think through all of the skills required as a founder of a tech company (in addition to the general willingness to learn anything you need to learn and do anything that comes up as John talks […]
Gret Glyer – Untechnical Founder of Donor$ee
Gret Glyer is a world-changer. Gret’s story starts with an African safari in high school and leads us to today, where he’s living in Malawi building $800 homes, a school for girls and a really interesting new technology product. I met Gret a few months back, and when he came to me with his idea […]
The Scott Barstow Show Episode #001 – Jared Pelo, CEO of iScribes
In this, the first episode of the Scott Barstow Show, we talk with Jared Pelo, CEO of iScribes, about how he and his co-founders conceived of and built their product as untechnical founders. Jared is not only the CEO of iScribes, but is also a practicing ER doctor as well. iScribes helps doctors reclaim hours […]
The Untechnical Founder Death Spiral – Stage 3
This is the last in a series of posts where we’re talking about some of the most common pitfalls that un-technical founders face when starting a technology company. I’ve called this the Un-Technical Founder Death Spiral because once you get started, it’s very hard to pull out and course-correct. As a quick review, we identified three […]