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Jeremy Clarke’s Followers (2)
Jeremy Clarke
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Low Life: One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point
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published
2011
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3 editions
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Low Life: The Spectator Columns
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published
2015
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3 editions
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Low Life: The Spectator Columns: ‘The Final Years’
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published
2024
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Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
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Necrotrivia vs. Skull
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published
1989
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The Charles Dickens Miscellany
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published
2014
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5 editions
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The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History
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published
2013
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6 editions
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Nobody's Jesus
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Handyman's Handbook
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God Is Love
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“Get Other People to Sell the Product for You A great way to grow your sales is to have more people selling your product. Obvious, right? You can hire salespeople or find external resources to sell the product for you, but at some point your sales force has to consist of more than just you. As a small team of one, I needed to leverage as much help as I could to distribute and sell WebMerge. My primary approach to scaling our distribution was using consulting partners and integration partners. I built a large network of people who liked working with WebMerge and would recommend it to their customers/clients”
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
“Server Automation This is very specific to a tech start-up, but server stability is a very important part of the product. Our customers relied on WebMerge in their business every day, and it could have a domino effect on their day if something went wrong. The easiest automation for server tracking is simple up-time tracking. This checks to make sure the app is loading every minute, every day. I set up alerts that if any downtime was detected, it would send a text message to my phone and also send me an email every minute. The text message was the most helpful, and I could often jump online in minutes to fix any issues. Over time, I started to run into server issues in the middle of the night. I had to set the alert tone on my phone to the emergency tone so it would wake me up. Well, often it took a few alerts to wake me or an elbow from my wife! I was waking up at 3:00 a.m. a few times per week to address issues. This couldn’t continue. To fix this, I created an internal system that would check the app uptime, and if there were issues, it would automatically restart services in the app that were most likely causing the problem. This auto-healing process worked like a charm, and I rarely had to wake up in the middle of the night again (or deal with many issues during the day). Is your product or service critical to your customers? If so, try to implement as many automated processes as you can to keep the service running at all hours. Your customers (and your sanity) will thank you.”
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
“Minimize the Single Point of Failure Risk As a sole founder, you are the business. Your customers know you. Your partners know you. Without you, there’s probably no business. That’s a risk you have to deal with. Since I was the only founder of WebMerge (and the only employee for many years), there was a major risk that I could get hit by a bus someday and the business would be destroyed. This was a major concern, so I set up a backup plan just in case something ever happened to me. I put together a lot of documentation around how everything worked behind the scenes. I even had a secret USB drive hidden in my house that someone could use to get all the crucial info to run the company. I also had contact information for people who could help take over the business (developers, businesspeople, etc.). I was confident this backup plan would be good enough to keep the business running without interruption. I worked hard over the years to make the business self-sustaining, so with exception of answering support tickets, the app could pretty much run itself.”
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
― Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees
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