Jason Fried:

Making money takes practice, just like playing the piano takes practice. No one expects anyone to be any good at the piano unless they’ve put in lots practice. Same with making money. The more you practice the better you get. Eventually making money is as easy for you as piano is for someone who’s been playing for 10 years.

This is one of the reasons I encourage entrepreneurs to bootstrap instead of taking outside money. On day one, a bootstrapped company sets out to make money. They have no choice, really. On day one a funded company sets out to spend money. They hire, they buy, they invest, they spend. Making money isn’t important yet. They practice spending, not making.

Bootstrapping puts you in the right mindset as an entrepreneur. You think of money more as something you make than something you spend. That’s the right lesson, that’s the right habit, the right imprint on your business brain. You’re better off as an entrepreneur if you have more practice making money than spending money. Bootstrapping gives you a head start.

As usual, some nicely crystallized advice for startups/entrepreneurs.

Quite a bit, actually.  This is one that you should look at deeper than the headline.

Last week, Appirio announced that it bagged Series B funding upwards of $5M by Sequoia Capital.  It’s worth noting that Sequoia is the same firm that underwrote upstarts such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal.  The pedigree is Midas-esque in its strength.

Jeff Kaplan of THINK IT Services nails it in a smart piece entitled The Market Implications of Sequoia Capital’s Funding of Appirio:

Many analysts and trade pub reporters have questioned whether there is a role for consulting and professional services in the SaaS market. There is no question that traditional professional services firms such as Accenture and CAP Gemini are still searching for the right way to scale down their methodologies and costs to fit the on-demand services market. However, Appirio’s revenues have grown more than 400% in the last three months, during which over 1500 customers in 80 countries have adopted its on-demand solutions.

In other words, the SaaS consulting market, as a market differentiated from blue-chip ERP/enterprise IT consulting, has been financially validated.  This isn’t “so-and-so customer chooses so-and-so SaaS vendor, so check out how SaaS is maturing.”  This is an order of magnitude stronger than win stories or market buzz: this is $5M of real dollar validation by an investment firm that has a history of picking winners.

Here at MiPro, we continually are trying to refine our methodologies, delivery timetables and cost structures for our on-demand (Workday, Authoria) clients.  We know the SaaS market is a different animal entirely than, say, our mainline PeopleSoft ERP practice.  On the macro level, it’s good to see the validation Kaplan suggests from a broader market vitality perspective.  In a more subtle level, it makes me proud that we are working in the exact same direction as some of the biggest names in SaaS/on-demand consulting.  Cool stuff.