founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
Last Tech Tuesday I wrote that the companies which do well on hiring engineers are the ones that "prioritize both hiring *and* having a great work environment." The post went on to talk about some of the best practices in hiring. Today's follow-up is about creating a great work environment for engineers. ...
|
Via: Continuations
VC at http://usv.com |
While browsing the web, I came across a very insightful comment on burnout by Isaac Yonemoto. I'm surprised that, with all the writing that's going on about burnout and how to combat it, this isn't more common knowledge (it's certainly the first time I hear about it). ...
|
Via: Stavros' Stuff
Astronaut, part-time dad, F1 driver, liar. |
Gabriel Weinberg is a serial entrepreneur (latest startup: DuckDuckGo), an insightful blogger, and quality contributor to Hacker News. He is writing a book on how startups get traction due out this summer that includes interviews with folks like Patrick McKenzie, Jimmy Wales, and Paul English to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives.I was delighted when he approached me to take pa ...
|
Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
Maybe more than anything else we've produced, our company's research has been the most critical to growing our brand and gaining new customers. Three years ago, the Content Marketing Institute partnered with MarketingProfs to develop a benchmark study for the content marketing industry. Today, this research is shared and engaged in by more marketing professionals than any other piece of industry r ...
|
Via: Fruit Business
Content Marketing Institute (@CMIContent). Get Content Get C |
People approach creating products from many different perspectives. Some seek out customer pain and dedicate themselves to solving their problems. Others follow the technology and strive to deliver solutions that are just now possible. Some like to follow competitors and deliver better solutions in a fast-follower model. Others are simply trying to find a way to make some money so that they can ...
|
I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
When Dropbox launched, there were at least half a dozen other "online storage" businesses in existence. The Apple iPod entered a market litered with crappy MP3 players. Google was famously the Nth Internet search engine. Some good ideas have a lot of bad implementations before someone comes in and does it well enough to win big. ...
|
Via: Eladgil
|
Results matter. I'd much rather hear from an entrepreneur about their traction metrics than an idea with no results yet. Once the team and product are in place, it's time to focus on traction. ...
|
Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Remember your first business loan? Or, if you're like many entrepreneurs, you may have initially bootstrapped your startup by buying some stuff on your credit card. You were excited and apprehensive: Excited because now you had the cash to invest in your business, apprehensive because you had just taken on a debt you would have to repay. ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
In a competitive landscape, one of the most important consideration is standing out from the crowd. For startups, this is crucial because the barriers to entry are relatively low, while new or innovative ideas can quickly be replicated by agile ...
|
Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
If you've ever wondered what a "Co-Founder" really is, you're not alone. We've challenged ourselves to answer this question and to explore a process to discover and develop what might become a co-founder or co-founding team. ...
|
Via: StartupWeekend
Co-founder of @StartupWeekend with @marcnager and a great t |
What if I said there was something you were doing right now that was actively reducing your SaaS customer success? What if that thing you're doing was standing in the way of driving higher levels of engagement and was reducing the amount of expansion revenue you're generating while potentially increasing churn? ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Last month, Ryan Hoover had a great post about building email into your startup first, before moving on to other platforms. His awesome points: Email lets you validate ideas quickly. Since email is async, you can fake functionality with manual processes ...
|
Via: Sachin
Please follow @agarwal. |
When I advise entrepreneurs to build their own MVP many ask me, "what language should I use." Since technology is rarely a business risk for startups, I advise entrepreneurs to make the decision based on community instead. Pick a popular technology based on the availability of people who can help you when you get stuck. ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
This new manager had to fire someone for the first time—and while she knew it would be hard, she couldn't have anticipated some of the challenges she'd face. Read on for three important lessons every manager should know. ...
|
Via: Daily Muse
|
I have known Dr. William Miller (co-founder of Value Centered Innovation) for a number of years and every conversation with him on business model innovation and beyond has been delightful and insightful. Hers is a quick interview with him on the topic. ...
|
Via: Rajesh Setty
Bringing Ideas to Life. With Love! Rajesh is an entrepreneur |
In my first startup marketing job I was given the task of attempting to call a couple hundred customers to try to rustle up a dozen or so customer references. That task opened my eyes to how important customer insight was for our startup's marketing efforts. ...
|
Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
It's been interesting over the years to observe which vertical marketplaces take off sustainably and which fizzle, especially in light of the two dominant horizontal liquidity behemoths: eBay and Craigslist. For a while it looked like vertical sites would take away eBay's business category after category as experts in each vertical with the right community credentials built something better attune ...
|
Via: Fabrice Grinda
Entrepreneur, student and lover of life and aspiring Renaiss |
A startup's first two hires. Once you raise money, the default action is usually to hire more programmers to build fast and experiment more. Unfortunately things won't move in the pace you expected it to. A lot of things fall into your plate. This leaves very little time to think about product ...
|
Co-founder @hackerrank & @interviewstreet |
So yesterday I got an e-mail from a WooThemes customer, which read: "Thank you for your answer! This confirms your superior support reputation." My immediate reaction was to smile, because the customer was happy, and this is something that we proactively strive to achieve at Woo. But then, I realized how easily that could've worked out differently too if the customer didn't have a great experience ...
|
Via: Adii
Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of |
When companies talk about their new product or service, they talk about what it does. Features, bullet points, checkboxes. Maybe, if they're particularly enlightened, they'll shift a bit and talk about what problems it will solve. What normal people tell their friends about a product or service, they talk about what it replaces ...
|
Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
In a startup (or any new product) where you don't yet know whether what you produce will generate customer value, you are better served by limiting or completely forgoing production (through an MVP or concierge MVP, for example) to first test value creation. You have to first find a problem worth solving before committing resources to build and scale a solution. ...
|
Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
I've recently traded a series of interesting emails on the evolution of social products and how the things that worked years ago- importing addressbooks and blasting out invites, no longer work today. A friend of mine, Sangeet, wrote up a longer analysis on the topic and I wanted to share that with you today. Enjoy! ...
|
Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product. Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerate to the dissemination of ideas ...
|
Via: Sachin Rekhi
Entrepreneur, product guy, and software engineer. Founder & |
When a company launches a new product, the temptation is to immediately ramp up sales force capacity to acquire customers as quickly as possible. Yet in our 25 years of experience with start-ups and new-product introductions, we've found that hiring a full sales force too fast just leads the company to burn through cash and fail to meet revenue expectations. ...
|
Via: AVC
I am a VC |
We always glorify the struggle of the entrepreneur. Late nights, poor diet and little contact with friends. It's cliche because it is real but we gloss over just how big of a toll it really takes. ...
|
Via: StartupNorth
VP http://Salesforce.com / Co-Founder of @goinstant / Co-Fou |
This is not going to be an easy topic to talk about, but it needs to be said. This post is about failure, the way we talk about it in the startup world, and the disparity between the way we talk about it and the way it is. ...
|
Via: Jordan Cooper
NYC based entrepreneur...Sling the Venture Capital rock on t |
Earlier today I got into a conversation with a colleague about the relative importance of a startup idea vs a startup team. Naturally, both the concept and the people are critically important, but if you had to pick one, which would be most important? ...
|
Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
I had discussions with 2 entrepreneurs who have received angel investor interest thanks to Angel List. They are doing well, getting traction and starting to get interest from potential seed stage investors. The question they had for me was to learn the art of the close. Much as I dislike the word closing a deal ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
Here is a tried and tested triangulation framework to size your opportunity Top-down: You can get an estimate of this from several secondary market research reports and analyst reports. Remember reading certain analyst firms predicting cloud spending reaching $xyz billions by 2016? That is top down estimate. ...
|
Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
If there's one thing startup entrepreneurs crave, it's media and blog coverage. Attracting the media spotlight can arguably be as important to them as getting customers. How come? In many respects, media coverage somehow validates what an entrepreneur is doing ...
|
Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
I mentioned "Expansion Revenue" and "Negative Churn" in my post SaaS Churn Rate: What's Acceptable? and I wanted to expand on those concepts a bit. I honestly believe that fully grasping the power of these two concepts could change your SaaS business forever. No pressure, but you might want to read this post carefully. ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Imagine you were asked to invest in ten startups. Given numerical ratings on the Team, Product, Market and Traction but knowing nothing about the specifics of the team, the exact product or the domain they play in, can you pick those that actually received a term sheet? Take this quiz and see how you do. Do not read ahead before you do the quiz. ...
|
Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
Most people expect us to give them sales pitches about our products. When we instead start asking Customer Development questions about their habits and problems, the conversation can seem really weird to them. I've found that framing the meeting by (1) asking for advice, (2) keeping the meeting short, (3) giving them unique industry insight, and (4) framing the background questions ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
You might not think you have stories to tell but stories can be found everywhere from current events to hiding in your own customer data. ...
|
Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
AngelList "corporate policy" is that team members should ask forgiveness, not permission. We would rather have someone do something wrong than ask permission to do it. Or better, we would rather have someone do something right and not need permission to do it. This is the most common outcome. ...
|
Via: Venture Hacks
I started @angellist and @venturehacks. |
Use the natural wiring of your brain to your advantage and wrangle that illusive problem-solving insight by taking a break and being open to serendipity. ...
|
Via: The99Percent
We're now posting under @99U - come follow for insights on m |
For many SaaS and Cloud providers, email will be the main fuel for your Engagement Engine that you use to drive potential customers through your Free Trial to conversion or to drive new customers to become deeply invested in your service. ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
This is part of my 4-year bootstrapping retrospective. Part 1: Why Bootstrapping Was The Only Logical Choice. A couple months ago, I found something I wrote accidentally on Hacker News. Having vitriol spewed at me. (Surprise! Some might say those two phrases are redundant! ...
|
Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
"He cares deeply about... the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands." - Laurene Powell Jobs on her husband, Steve Startups aren't here to change the world, they're here to save the world--by bringing us innovation that advances humankind. ...
|
Via: Venture Hacks
I started @angellist and @venturehacks. |
It's inevitable that any startup will lack expertise in some key areas needed to grow their business. The question is: should you hire and bring that expertise in-house or outsource it? ...
|
Via: Version One Ventures
Early-stage investor through Version One Ventures (35+ inves |
Sometimes your customers know that you provide a feature they want, but for some reason, they don't use it. Why... Read more... You're reading Price is what you pay, Value is what you get. ...
|
Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. ...
|
2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
It's not unusual in our line of work to see the exact same landing page convert at 11% one month, and 55% the next - without making any changes. How so? The quality of traffic. The right traffic with the right expectations makes all the difference. ...
|
Via: ConversionXL
I make websites sell. Conversion optimization pro. Founder o |
UVP. USP. Value props. Whatever you wish to call 'em, yours needs to be communicated early and often. (Of course, I'm making the assumption that you're here because you have a product or service to sell on your Web site or mobile site.) UVP = Unique Value Proposition (aka Unique Selling Proposition) To save words, I'll simply refer to it as your value proposition. ...
|
Via: COPY HACKERS
Copywriter at http://CopyHackers.com. Staunch advocate of co |
All founders define their business as being "better" than the encumbents. But most don't say anything beyond that. Being specific about "better" leads to the good stuff. ...
|
Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
Being a startup founder is hard, tough, frustrating and rewarding - possibly all within the space of a nanosecond. And yet, it is like a high none other. I have experienced it in others. And quietly, I have lived it for over six years. Here are some lessons I learned from my journey. ...
|
Via: Om.Is.Me
Founder of GigaOM. Venture Partner at True Ventures |
How does one find new startup ideas? Every business is built around solving a customer pain. Solving a customer pain creates value which in turn, if successfully harnessed, can be monetized. Platform Thinking and Startup Ideas One of the patterns for new startup ideas, that I often see in platforms, is the following: Match an unmonetized/unvalued surplus with an unsatisfied scarcity. ...
|
Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
I deliberately let this commonly repeated statement be the title without qualifying it. Of course statements like these, (this particular one made famous by Loyalty Effect) cannot stand by themselves regardless of how popular the Guru who said this is. Let us look at this closely. ...
|
Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
Is 5% a good monthly SaaS Churn Rate? Read on to learn the answer... As a consultant to SaaS and Cloud providers that are looking to grow, I get asked what an acceptable SaaS churn rate is all the time. ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
The term "pivot" is probably one of the most overused and abused terms in today's product teams. If you're not familiar with the concept, see Your Business Plan Is Wrong. As I work with different teams I find the term used in so many different ways. Mostly the different uses of the term are pretty harmless. It is often used as a synonym for "change." ...
|
I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
Our Partner Reid Hoffman posted a very thoughtful, relevant post today that all of the entrepreneurs that work with Greylock should read and think about. Since it covers the the delicate topic of Founder-CEO, it could ruffle a few feathers. Still, it's a discussion that should be had. ...
|
Via: Greylock VC
|
Although Customer Development can give us tremendous insight into market problems, it takes a lot of time - time that's wasted if we do it incorrectly. Worse yet, poorly worded questions can cause us to reach wrong conclusions about what people want. The best questions don't require customers to speculate about their behavior. ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
"I was looking for some core fundamentals that would be applicable to most of you around making money. I found that with a Swedish group of philosophers and economists in the 1970's. They are called ABBA. In their masterpiece "Money, Money, money" they have outlined everything you need to know about sales." From the business model canvas to gold mining profiteering. ...
|
Via: HackFwd Blog
in arcadia ego |
Not using any structured approach for getting traction is one of the most common traction mistakes, and yet there are simply not many traction frameworks out there to help you make sense of the process. In our upcoming Traction Book, Justin and I present the Bullseye Framework for getting traction. ...
|
Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
Our inability to decide on executing one specific strategy resulted in procrastination, doing irrelevant work, or just having endless brainstorming meetings without ever taking action. I've come to believe, that in order to achieve flow in startup and get the business going, you need to keep the time your team spends on alternative directions to a minimum. ...
|
Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
The purpose of this post is to clearly delineate the differences between Strategy and Tactics, and show how they work in tandem for your organization. Often, we use the terms strategy and tactics are used interchangeably and often haphazardly. ...
|
Industry Analyst, Partner at Altimeter Group. Some tweets pu |
how to hire a tech guy if you're not techie yourself? Here are some of my additional thoughts from a techie point of view. ...
|
Via: pragmatic startup
|
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching. One of the key learning for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. ...
|
Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. ...
|
Via: Sachin Rekhi
Entrepreneur, product guy, and software engineer. Founder & |
Here's a lie that feels like the truth: "A mother is a person who, on seeing only 4 pieces of pie for 5 people, promptly declares, 'I never did care much for pie.'" That's a lie that turns moms into martyrs, which is not what moms are supposed to be. It's one of many lies [...] ...
|
Via: COPY HACKERS
Copywriter at http://CopyHackers.com. Staunch advocate of co |
I went to meet Jason Fried so I could learn how to stop selling software by accident. Since I started programming 10 years ago, I've made a fair amount of money online. But those sales were mostly coincidental. By that I mean, I never thought deeply about how and why products were bought. I would [...] ...
|
Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
WTF!?, I cried as I discovered that half of all the company's cash equivalents suddenly had been withdrawn from its bank account. But when I found out who had made the withdrawal, I realized. We had not been screwed. We had been robbed. Investors' money, my face. It was gone. A short week earlier the company had held a board meeting. The director of the board and my co-founder (who' ...
|
Via: The Methodologist
Founder of Business Model Press. Lecturer of entrepreneurshi |
A startup CEO sent me a pained email the other day. The gist was that a competitor (loosely defined) had just released a great new feature to their product. That feature had been on the drawing board for this CEO for months, and they even had a prototype built. But they hadn't finished. ...
|
Via: Nabeel Hyatt
entrepreneur, investor, geek, product guy. vc @ spark. |
Creating a positive company culture is much like creating a positive classroom culture. As former teachers and camp counselors, this is something we enjoy actively considering. When intentionally attempting to improve company culture, I recommend following these three tips: ...
|
Via: Silicon Prairie News
Reshaping grading to be about learning instead of points wit |
"It's one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it's socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn't come much from money or cool-power -- all the money in the world can't buy you a searing sense of ccomplishment." Umair Haque Recently Umair Haque wrote a great piece for HBR on meaningful work. ...
|
Via: Usman Sheikh
Co-Founder of IDENTIFI. On a mission to get the right people |
Startup ideas that involve two sided markets are notoriously difficult to get off the ground. It's the age-old chicken and egg problem. You need lots of buyers for the sellers to be interested, and you need lots of sellers for the buyers to be interested. The same goes for the recruitment space, and many other verticals too. ...
|
Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
Take a look at this image courtesy of Planet Money What you see are the annual revenue numbers for MegaBloks and Lego. Since Lego does not have (any more) exclusive rights to make the bricks, anyone can make them. And MegaBloks does. Its bricks are perfect replacement (as for as I know) for Lego bricks only cheaper. ...
|
Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
It's time again for all those year-end blog posts about design trends. They're fun to read, but they contain a hidden implication you might miss: design and fashion are easily confused. ...
|
Via: Studio Fellow Blog
Designer & coder. Author of http://BootstrappingDesign.com. |
Q: Where can I get some good starting salary information for a SaaS startup? I need the information for CEO, CFO, CIO, CINO, Director of Sales. How much should the starting salaries vary for a startup? ...
|
Via: Ask The VC
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
Am I taking enough risks? Am I being daring enough? Am I being a hero? Answer: Not often enough.So, here's advice to my future self and all of you: *DO* be a hero. ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
Here are five tests you should be able to pass when your team decides "We'll run ads" is your business model: ...
|
Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
It's okay if you don't know exactly where you're going - because things are always changing - just so long as you're focused on the Right Things. BUT, this is really hard at a startup precisely because everything is always changing. It's essential that your developers are okay with these points. ...
|
Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
Q: In our startup we have 4 founders, two of whom are not full time. We've all put in a good sum of cash thus far. The two founders with the least equity happen to be the two tech founders. Some of us feel that we made a mistake when allocating shares in the beginning ...
|
Via: Ask The VC
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
When evaluating a startup idea, it's important to leverage the collective wisdom of what makes a startup successful, including evaluating the market opportunity, understanding how your product will significantly improve upon what already exists, evaluating the team's strengths, understanding your user acquisition strategy, and critiquing the business model. ...
|
Via: Sachin Rekhi
Entrepreneur, product guy, and software engineer. Founder & |
The Lean Startup method strongly advocates experiments - and for good reason. It's critically important for a startup to acquire validated learning as quickly as possible. How quickly can you get through a learning cycle? How efficiently can you get to the answers to crucial questions? ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
How did Pinterest grow from 3,000 users to 25.3 million monthly unique visitors? According to Pinterest's CEO, Ben Silbermann, it was mostly marketing. Rather than focusing on the technological capabilities of Pinterest, Silbermann went out and connected with community, mainly to bloggers to start spreading the word ...
|
Via: Under the Radar
|
Who doesn't love a good story? I know I do. Storytelling has been gaining in popularity in the business world. Following the trend, I've also been using stories to help clients understand user / customer experience better. A lot of times, I find that non-UX stakeholders find it more difficult to make sense of how a particular usability issue affects their bottom line. I've found that using storie ...
|
User experience designer, software developer, Room to Read v |
A question I often get asked by entrepreneurs is what is Flybridge's investment philosophy - do we make our investment decisions based on people or on themes? The glib answer is both, but as I've thought more about this question... ...
|
Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
This sounds pretty straightforward: Make sure your product is retaining your users, THEN work on growth. Don't work on growth until your product is working. However, it's an oversimplification. For fundamentally social products, it's hard to separate retention/engagement and virality. Turns out that for fundamentally social products, retention causes virality, and vice versa too. ...
|
Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
Entrepreneurs aren't quitters. To succeed you need to be resilient, thick skinned and borderline crazy. You need to have just the right amount of delusion to believe you can succeed, spurring you on despite the absurd odds. But sometimes, you have to quit. On the other hand, sometimes you need to pivot. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs use the pivot as an excuse to remain delusional ...
|
Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
We all wish we could spend $50,000 to hire an awesome design agency for every new idea we have. But for early stage startups - especially bootstrappers - that isn't always a sound investment. True, a high quality, custom-built brand and website is going to make all the difference someday - and it's great that you're into design, man (should be read in hippy voice) - but today you want to focus on ...
|
Via: COPY HACKERS
|
It's risky to try to improve any part of a product without understanding the job that it does for customers, and what their success criteria are. ...
|
Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you'll get 10 different answers. It's about office design, it's about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it's about values, it's about fun, it's about alignment, it's about finding like-minded employees, it's about being cult-like. So what is culture? ...
|
Via: Bhorowitz
|
A couple of years ago, I was working with a startup looking for media and blog coverage after launching a new online service. It hired a U.S. PR agency that promised the stars and the moon, and then the startup ... Continue reading →A couple of years ago, I was working with a startup looking for media and blog coverage after launching a new online service. It hired a U.S. PR agency that promise ...
|
Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
"Behind every startup are amazing lawyers, mentors, exec, coaches, recruiters etc. that never get the full credit they deserve." ...
|
2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
Problem: You've launched your product, it's getting plenty of coverage. People are signing up, but no one is actually using it. ...
|
Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Does your company have a "Growth Hacker?" 2012 has definitely been the year of the Growth Hacker (or at least the ethos). If you arean't familiar with the term, Andrew Chen wrote a great piece called "Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing" where he proclaims "No traditional marketer would have figured this out" ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Our friend Cass Phillipps knows a bit about failure. After all, she produces FailCon, a conference where leading entrepreneurs and designers speak about their own failures. So it's no surprise that she's got a story or two of her own. And she's got a good one on how failure turned into her passion. ...
|
Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
I often reflect upon the differences between my previous startup and Buffer, and think about what changes to my mindset affected the better outcome this time compared with my previous attempts. The key thing has been to focus on a goal of succeeding overall with creating a startup, rather than to focus on being successful with a particular idea. ...
|
Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
I was recently speaking with a colleague of my fathers who works in education and had an idea for a product in the tutoring space. He specifically wanted to know where he could find someone with technical skills to help build out a prototype. ...
|
Co-founder of @Ridejoy, a community marketplace for rideshar |
We're all very well aware of Steve Jobs' contributions to technology and society. Without Steve, and Apple, we would all be using Motorola Razors or some other "cool" phone (ah, those were the days) or tablets would be just a failed Microsoft project.But there's one thing that Mr. Jobs has indirectly contributed to that I'm not a big fan of. ...
|
Via: Treehouse Blog
Expert Teacher at @treehouse, husband to @hpremaratne, autho |
The startup world today loves hacks. Growth hacks. Venture hacks. Social hacks. The result ends up being a focus on the means, rather than the ends. And I think that's a shame. In one sense, hacking a startup is a great thing. Who doesn't want to get rich quick? I certainly wouldn't turn down easy money. But in another sense, it's a terrible thing. ...
|
Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
Are you in Beta and getting ready to move to production? Did you already publish your prices on your website? Or are you thinking about running an extended Beta testing period for your new app? Well, you only get ONE chance to exit Beta... don't screw it up! ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Do you know why your content marketing campaign is going to fail? It's not because you can't write great content... it's actually because you don't know how to promote it. You can learn how to write great content, but if no one reads your content and links to it, there's no point in putting it. ...
|
Via: Quick Sprout
I'm Kind of a Big Deal |
The great dilemma of lean. When do you pivot or quit, and when do you persevere? There is no firm answer. I doubt there will ever be one. This isn't color by numbers. Entrepreneurs need incredible fortitude, resilience, and persistence, because success does not comes easy. Even the seemingly "instant hits" are very hard to build. ...
|
Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
In my hurry to launch my first product, an eBook called The App Design Handbook, I almost made a mistake that would have cost me over $10,000, a mistake that I see being made with products all around the web. Luckily for me, a few people were kind enough to lead by example and show how important it was to fix this. ...
|
Via: Think Traffic
Founder and Designer at Legend. App designer, writer, travel |
"If you plan to be doing the coding in a year or two, you're doing it wrong," one of the advisers told me when I was starting my first startup a few years ago. ...
|
Via: Fruit Business
A geek with a hat |
The great content marketing debate over quality information versus frequency raged on last week. Following the debate I realized content burnout is an issue I suffered from in the past and resolved. Here is my answer to the inevitable issue of burnout. ...
|
Marketing strategist. Author. Agent for change. Amateur phot |
Is the European tech industry building companies poised to change people's lives, or just wasting everyone's time with pointless apps? Matthew Bostock worries it might be the latter. ...
|
Via: THE KERNEL
I write stuff. I read stuff. |
I continue to be fascinated with the changing art of product management. This week, I taught a class at Intelligent.ly on the topic. After running through a series of slides reviewing modern product management techniques and the search for product-market fit (drawing from leading thinkers and a class I teach at Harvard B-School), I had the students break up into teams of 8 to create scrums to addr ...
|
Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
Should you test one thing at a time? Or many at once? A poor experimental workflow can waste loads of your time. Here's an extreme example: We've seen a company take six months to do something that took another company thirty minutes.To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capab ...
Founder Feedback gives you insight from the startup trenches. In a post from his blog, Dave Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Bundled.com and Director of the Seattle Founder Institute, explains how to hypothesize appopriate product pricing. Instead of putting off pricing until the last minute, Founders should begin thinking about and planning their financial model early on. ...
|
Husband, Dad, Entrepreneur, Board Member, Founder @OneAccord |
As consumers grow accustomed to automated payments and pay-per-use solutions, the benefits of fostering repetitive customer contact and creating recurring revenues through a subscription model are obvious. However, subscriptions should not be considered the end game for the billing world. ...
|
Via: Marketing Profs
|
Have you ever been on a project team with great people? I'm not talking about super-smart people, although they might have been some of those great people. I mean a project team where the team meshed. Where the team jelled, where the team knew how to work together. Now, I bet that team didn't magically jell on day one. But I bet that team had a lot in common from day one. That's called cultural fi ...
|
Via: Johanna Rothman
|
One of the most common objections you hear from investors is that the market you are going after is too crowded. I have been on the receiving end of this many times and had to convince investors about the vision we saw for disrupting that market despite the existing players. ...
|
Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning. Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance ...
|
Via: Up and Running
COO at Palo Alto Software: @bplans & @liveplan. Passionate a |
"Become indispenable to your employer." That's the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. Hence, employees fight back by being the only person in the company who knows how to accomplish a critical task. ...
|
Via: Rand's Blog
|
Hey, there. Four years ago this December, my husband and I launched our first software as a service, Freckle Time Tracking. Since then, it's grossed nearly $700,000, and we've grown, shrunk, hired, fired, stagnated and worked our tails off. To celebrate, I'm writing a series of blog posts about what we've learned. ...
|
Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
Instagram: Bought for $1 billion, over 100 million users Dropbox: Worth $4 billion, over 100 million users Foursquare: Worth $760 million, 25 million users Twitter: Worth $8 billion, more than 500 million users What do all of these products have in common? Outside of being wildly successful, they are simple and have a small feature set. ...
|
I work with @KISSmetrics. Likes: @TheRyanAdams, reading prod |
It's now 2 years since I launched Buffer, and the company has grown from just myself (working from my bedroom) to a team of 7. It seems rather obvious in hindsight, but only after growing a team over 2 years have I realised just how gradual and progressive building a startup culture is. ...
|
Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
We live in a time where we are always trying to work more, be more efficient, increase our productivity. We strive to do more, so we get involved in more projects ...
|
Via: Adii
Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of |
For many SaaS companies, the effectiveness of the inside sales team is the key to scaling up. After all, other marketing channels often either hit a ceiling (i.e. inbound marketing, PPC, etc.) or simply aren't efficient enough (i.e. all offline marketing activities). However, managing an inside sales team is tough and you need a well-oiled machine in order to get customer acquisition costs inline ...
|
Via: Version One Ventures
Early-stage investor through Version One Ventures (35+ inves |
I was recently speaking with an entrepreneur whose company is in the same space as my previous company, Performable (which was acquired by Hubspot). He was asking how I thought they should compete with a particular competitor. This competitor is good at producing software quickly and extremely adept at copying its competitors ...
|
Via: David Cancel
Entrepreneur. Chief Product Officer at @HubSpot. Previously |
Recently I talked to a sharp entrepreneur with tons of energy. Over the past year he's been working part-time on a startup with a couple friends that had already been at it for a year before he joined. Product launch is right around the corner and exemplifies the challenge of working on startup part-time ...
|
Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
A growing startup can be bliss. When Circle of Friends was growing rapidly, I'd wake up suddenly at three AM, my heart jumping with a mix of excitement and nervousness. Because our technology was brittle, I'd walk out to the kitchen and look at my laptop to make sure the site hadn't crashed. And I'd notice that, amazingly, our traffic for the period between midnight and three AM was our highest e ...
|
Via: Numerate Choir
http://t.co/rPjQvufk; help w/ data/growth (@500startups); st |
Should connecting emotionally with your customers be your marketing's top priority? Not on planet startup it isn't. ...
|
Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
To create an anxiety relievable only by a purchase... that is the job of advertising. Advertising is used to increase... Advertising increases familiarity, reminds consumers about your product, and spreads product news. We covered all that before. Today we're looking at a fourth job advertising does: it defeats inertia. ...
|
Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
For any piece of content to be successful, it has to be personalized and speak to a specific person (a potential buyer), with a specific need, at a specific point in his or her buyer journey. Put another way, you have to have targeted content that reflects a deep understanding of who your audience and where they are on their way down the path to purchase. ...
|
Via: Convince & Convert
Director of Content Strategy @OpenViewVenture; world travele |
How do you determine which interview candidate to hire? How do you evaluate the candidate you decided you want to hire? (or decided you want to flush?) How do you make a call on which group is performing better? What metrics do you use? What data do you collect? And how do you analyze that to make a call? ...
|
Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
Language - be it Objective C, Chinese, Ruby, or Klingon - isn't something you learn through study, it's something you learn through use. The best way to learn how to build your startup MVP is to start building your startup MVP. ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
Successful salespeople don't pressure or bullshit the prospect into a sale. They are persistent, but they are always focused on achieving a deal where it will benefit all parties. This means that a great salesperson will never be selling something that they don't believe actually helps the customer. And that has to be the starting point of every conversation with a potential customer. How can I he ...
|
Via: Swombat on Startups
Cofounder of GrantTree and Woobius, Blogger @ http://swombat |
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the markets for startup financing. Many of the discussions use words like "valuations" "bubble" "crunch" etc. Words like that generally mean the writer is discussing the world through the lens of finance. This is a useful lens, but I'd like to suggest there is another lens that is also useful: the product lens. ...
|
Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
By now we all know that successful startups focus on learning about their users -- figuring out what features, branding, and messaging resonate and perform best. Smart teams invest valuable time designing, building, testing, and iterating their own designs and prototypes based on learning from analytics and user studies.But don't forget to test your competitors' products too! ...
|
Via: Design Staff
User Experience Designer, Prototyper, Storyteller. Partner a |
A startup just had its big launch. The fundraising is over and the champagne has been poured. For some, this is the great beginning. But, for others, it's the zenith. The problem? Momentum is easy to lose, especially after a big adrenaline rush. ...
|
Via: James Yu
Co-founder of Parse, the mobile application platform. I'm an |
Over the years I've talked with hundreds of clients and potential clients... conversion optimization wannabees ...
|
Expert Direct Response Copywriter & Split-Testing Specialis |
If you're trying to attract awesome developers, you need to create an awesome candidate experience (CX). Something that makes them go "WOW!". It's like UX -- but for the people interviewing to join your team. ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
In my 14 years of developing and launching products, I have launched early, late and at "just the right time". Truth is there is no "right time" if you have been working with customers and getting feedback. At that point the launch event tends to be largely a PR ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
Sree Vijaykumar is the founder of TradeBriefs, which helps every professional become an industry expert through daily email newsletters. Sree explains how he acquired 400,000 subscribers to his newsletter. ...
|
Via: 500 Startups
Entrepreneur, Thinker, Doer in Online Media and Retail. Libe |
A lot of startups rightly aim to release a minimum viable product (MVP) as their first initiative. The goal of an MVP helps a team rally around a concrete product design that they can get out the door in a limited amount of time. And it's every startup's hope that once the MVP is released, early adopters will flock to it eagerly and tell their more mainstream friends by the millions. ...
|
Via: Mark Hendrickson
|
Some successful community professionals express surprise that community building is such hard work. They launched their communities and it just took off. Yes, this really happens. Communities can go from inception to maturity in a matter of weeks. ...
|
Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
Years ago I wrote a blog post about how important keyword research is to SEO. The basic point is that you don't want to be optimizing for content that people aren't searching for. My favorite example is that people search for "car" and not "automobile", it simply puts why keyword research is important. ...
|
Via: Tony Adam's Thoughts
Founder & CEO of @eventup - we're changing the way people bo |
Deciding to build a second product is a very difficult decision. Especially when you're a small bootstrap company. While we do well with our main product, HelpSpot, we don't have a lot of cash to just throw around. So in planning Snappy, I knew we had to maximize our dollars. I'd much rather spend money on the top notch developers we've hired than other consultants or services. ...
|
Via: Ian Landsman
Founder of UserScape. Creators of http://www.helpspot.com an |
By using this email for all these purposes, it blunts our ability to be effective and to get quality responses from others. We've all had that situation arise where we try to get a response from someone and we either get a lame/vague response that requires another 8 messages to get everything nailed down, or the dreaded "no reply at all." Here are some thoughts on improving your email response and ...
|
Via: Chris Brogan
CEO&President, Human Business Works, a business design compa |
You're following the advice of Ash Maurya or Steve Blank and trying to talk to customers but are having trouble finding them. In this post I offer a way forward: (1) stop and regroup, (2) troubleshoot the source of the problem, (3) pivot based on what you've learned, (4) be patient. ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
There are many levels of success (across any definition of the term), and there will generally always be people more successful than you in any endeavor. What's not obvious is that as you become more successful you actually increasingly meet and become friends with even "more successful" people. As a result, envious feelings can still easily become an issue after having a successful exit, and more ...
|
Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
A lot of companies still talk about being in stealth mode and aiming for a big hoorah type launch. It doesn't usually work. Worse still, startups that are in stealth mode rarely talk to customers, prospects, users, partners or anyone else before their big reveal, which means they have little to no validation for what they're doing. ...
|
Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
In the early days (less then 10 customers) of a startup, the founder typically is expected to do most all of the selling to get the early adopters. This helps solve the problem of understanding the customer's buying process which aids in hiring the right sales person for your startup. ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
how do people respond when they are presented a product or service without a corresponding price? I am specifically referring to situations where the seller invites the buyer to name his own price for something of value that is being offered by the seller. Evidence shows that when the user is asked to name his price he often quotes $0! ...
|
Via: Filepicker.io
Co-Founder Filepicker.io. Growth hacker. Software sales & bi |
I always enjoy reading Paul Graham's essays and his latest one How to get startup ideas is another great read.I'm going to focus on one of the by-products of Paul's essay which is a list of indicators that an idea might be good or an idea might be bad. ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Andrew Parker had a great post a few years ago where he sketched out all the startups going after pieces of Craigslist: Startups that have tried to go head-to-head against the entirety of Craigslist (the "horizontal approach") have struggled. Startups that have tried to go up against pieces of Craigslist (the "vertical approach") have been much more successful. ...
|
Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Listening to my the family talk about dividing up the cooking chores for this Thanksgiving dinner, including who would peel the potatoes, reminded me that most careers start by peeling potatoes. KP - Kitchen Patrol One of the iconic punishments in basic training in the military was being threatened by our drill instructors of being assigned to KP - Kitchen Patrol - as a penalty for breaking some r ...
|
Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
When recruiters ping me about open positions at hot companies, I tell them "thanks, but the next company I work for will be (another) one I start myself." It's not clear whether I'm masochistic or just dumb; life was a lot easier before I got started on this whole founder thing. ...
|
Via: Numerate Choir
http://t.co/rPjQvufk; help w/ data/growth (@500startups); st |
Every so often, I meet an entrepreneur who has big ideas for their startup but who never seems to get anything done. It's a pattern that I see in smart people who haven't had experience building real world products. "It's gonna be huge! Revolutionary is only the beginning of how you would describe it." ...
|
Via: James Yu
Co-founder of Parse, the mobile application platform. I'm an |
Most technical founders are not comfortable with the sales process or the disciple of selling. They tend to treat it as beneath themselves and "sleazy". Given that most entrepreneurs I interact with are engineers, I usually walk them through an engineer's approach towards selling, which tends to mirror the agile development process they are familiar with. ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
I was reading Paul Graham's latest essay, How to Get Startup Ideas, and the second paragraph jumped out at me. He says: The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...
|
Via: MattMaroon.com
|
I recently launched Sidebar, a new project (more about that another day). Sidebar simply gives you the 5 best design links of the day. So as part of the curation process, I get to see a lot of design-related content. And reading all this content, I can't help but see a trend: lazy writing. What do I mean by this? I mean blog posts that do not require their author to do any research, talk to anybo ...
|
Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
An entrepreneur named Nick Jones recently reached out to me after reading The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. Nick is the founder of Lavish Longboards. "Skateboards?", you might be asking yourself? Yes, I might answer you, "skateboards". You might then ask, "But don't Lean Startup and Customer Development only pertain to technology startups?" ...
|
Via: Vlaskovits
CMO at @GetDrumbi. Wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustD |
A bit of bullshit is no bad thing when you're a scrappy company, punching above its weight. But must we really bestow the term "chief executive officer" on every self-promoting booby with a website? ...
|
Via: THE KERNEL
Journalist. Founder & Editor-in-Chief, @KernelMag. Advisor t |
There are only 2 reasons why companies buy from startups - The person buying has a very good relationship with the entrepreneur, or the person buying has a dying pain that she feels can be solved by the startup's solution. ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
The standard nonprofit process of building a digital strategy -- or a standalone campaign -- can often be a shot in the dark. Organizations spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on a theory that users will click or donate or share or engage, and success is by no means guaranteed. To borrow a phrase, the accepted model is "build it and they'll come." We suggest that a better model, follo ...
|
Digital strategist, founder of Social Contxt, social media e |
Joel Gascoigne has a thoughtful post called "The maker/manager transition phase". He grapples with the shift from early-stage startup "maker" mode to scaling-startup management mode. It is a major mental shift to go from doing to delegating. ...
|
Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
All online businesses want links. To get links using content, it seems like an easy equation: epic content = a lot of links. But what exactly does epic content mean? Oftentimes the task of developing epic content is left to creative types; leaving them with little more than the goal of having it "go viral". Sure, there are a lot of really great ideas out there that can be categorized as "epic", bu ...
|
Head of Outreach @Distilled. Blogger. Graphic Designer. Food |
If you're running a lean startup, "launch and learn" is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that's a potentially make-or-break issue. We've collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier. ...
|
Via: Design Staff
User Experience Designer, Prototyper, Storyteller. Partner a |
At long last, Lean Startup has become a global movement. While more an more of us are talking about Lean Startup, far fewer are talking about how tedious, frustrating, and tough it is in practice. In this post I share what my personal experience has been like - and it hasn't followed the Lean Startup script. ...
|
Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
Here are some examples of startups that did very well focusing on one marketing technique (and some who are still doing it). While I am not privy to why they chose the technique they did, they are all consistently improving over time. ...
|
Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
This is my favourite quote by Winston Churchill: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Unless you're the absolute except to the rule (like the one-in-one-hundred-thousand such as Zuck) as an entrepreneur ... ...
|
Via: Urban Horizon
Digital Entrepreneur with an interest in writing & film. Fou |
I've had several conversations with potential entrepreneurs who have an idea and are looking for a technical co-founder to help with the implementation. Often they are surprised that every coder they talk to doesn't immediately quit their job to sign on. After all, this is an awesome idea, so why can't I find a coder ...
|
Via: The Agile League
|
The language we use for startup stages (discovery, validation, customer creation, company building) is abstract. The lines are blurry. And if jumping ahead of yourself is the #1 cause of startup death[1], that's a problem. So here's another way of thinking about the stages of a startup in visual terms using the business model canvas ...
|
Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
"Don't Wake Up With Your Website in a Ditch" Expand Your Content and Your Contributors to Keep Your Content Marketing Strategy Humming. As content explodes around you, if you are the only person contributing to your content marketing strategy, I hate to break it to you, but you're going to be in trouble ...
|
Via: Duct Tape Marketing
Vice President Marketing & Strategy for Percussion Software, |
Call them hackers, 'ninjas', or 'rock stars' if you'd like. Other than being very talented developers, they all share one thing in common -- it's unbelievably hard to bring them on-board your company. And as if competing with other companies for the same talent was not enough, being a startup just adds more challenges to the equation. ...
|
Via: On Startups
2X entrepreneur and co-founder at Takipi http://t.co/mCt1Lat |
As a VC, I have a simple motive for investing: get out for way more than I paid. My fund only makes money when we sell our companies. So, it's all about exits. You will often hear that the best companies are bought not sold. That's bullshit. ...
|
Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
"Going viral" is often the holy grail for Internet startups, who hope to quickly scale to hundreds of thousands of users (then hundreds of millions) with relatively low user acquisition costs. However, in a recent blog post and presentation, Andrew Chen argues that SaaS products aren't viral ...
|
Via: Version One Ventures
|
Does your team have a smiling face, who sits behind a desk and pitches content marketing all day? That's your sales team -- I mean, your blogger outreach team. Fortunately, your blogger outreach team is selling what people want: free, mutual-benefit content. To improve the placement rate of your blogger outreach team, you should leverage the following sales lessons as methods for proving value. ...
|
Via: SEOmoz
Chief Development Officer for an online media company. Entr |
Every meeting is either won or lost. There are no "good" meetings. You've lost the meeting when you leave with a compliment or a stalling tactic. The parody version is "Let's talk again after Christmas... Don't call me, I'll call you[1]." ...
|
Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
So, you've run your chosen business terms through a keyword research tool and come up with a few potential phrases that will form the basis of your on-site and off-site SEO campaigns. That's a great start, but relying too heavily on a single tool could set you up for failure ...
|
Entrepreneur & Internet Marketer. CEO of @SingleGrain |
The heart and soul of an entrepreneur lies in two things: the need to solve problems and the desire to change the world. Now, that might seem like a very glamorous thing to many people, but, what people don't realize is that it's not. You have to be ready to give up your entire life and learn to live, eat, breathe, and sleep your endeavor. ...
|
Via: Tony Adam's Thoughts
Founder & CEO of @eventup - we're changing the way people bo |
'm asked "How do I find a mentor?" all the time. I've never had a good answer. The sad fact is this: people you want as mentors don't want to view themselves as pro-bono life coaches. So what to do? ...
|
Author of #1 NY Times bestsellers, The 4-Hour Body and The 4 |
There have been some interesting posts on Hacker News of late around side projects. Some have pointed to their potential to distract. Others, the importance of having an "end" in mind. And while these are very real considerations, I keep feeling as though the obvious has yet to be stated. The obvious being; life needs side projects. If nothing else, they are the lifeblood of creativity. ...
|
Via: Swombat on Startups
Founder @Rocketr / EiR @JetCooper / Speakers Coach @TEDxToro |
After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit. I just quit my day job to work on it full-time, and I have a few thousand more dollars I can put into it. What should I do next? ...
|
Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
It's easy to take for granted just how good we have it as software makers selling on the internet. This is truly a unique period in human history with unprecedented commercial freedom. ...
|
Creator of Ruby on Rails, Partner at 37signals, Co-author of |
I got this question on a panel last week, and coincidentally, I had a couple folks on Twitter tweet out the same question. Generically speaking, the question is "how do I get in touch with a potential investor about my company?" ...
|
Via: Robgo.org
Cofounder of NextView Ventures. Founding advisor at Boundle |
Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, wrote a good answer on Quora to the question Why doesn't Netflix offer "Advanced Search" on their site? It's a great Product Management lesson: Nothing is purely additive unless everyone uses it. ...
|
User experience design & strategy at @flow_sa. Contributor t |
Spoiler: You can't hire out sales because in the early days it's about learning, not selling, and hired guns can't bring back bad news. ...
|
Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
You know how it goes in economic theory: To maximize your returns, you find the maximum price each of your customer segments is willing to pay and charge them that amount. In practice though, this doesn't always play out the way our Econ 101 professors taught us. ...
|
Via: Venture Beat
Software Entrepreneur focusing on Team Productivity. Involv |
This is the post that got me kicked off my original shared hosting service and prompted the move to SquareSpace. I couldn't figure out why so many people were reading this article. But they kept on coming. The site went down and I was told to vamoose. It finally dawned on me nobody actually cared about the article, it was the name Kevin Rose that was magic. ...
|
Via: High Scalability
|
Whether you are recruiting a new colleague, naming a product, or planning an investment, there are no easy decisions. Should you analyze the options slowly and systematically, or stop thinking so hard and just go with your gut? ...
|
Via: The99Percent
Writing Great Myths of the Brain. Creator/editor @ResearchDi |
Paul Gollash, the founder and CEO of Voxy, just came and spoke at our NYC Lean Startup meetup, and I wanted to share some of his stories. These notes are from my memory, but hopefully reasonably accurate. Voxy is a language learning startup that is around 2 years old ...
|
Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
The idea of a partner wanting to renegotiate their terms can be a major pitfall that sinks a startup, according to Noam Wasserman (The Founder's Dilemmas). This dilemma is common because we don't know well enough the contributions of each partner early in the project, and roles often change throughout the process. When a partner believes they are contributing more and their worth has increased, th ...
|
Via: Swombat on Startups
|
When startups fail (and the vast majority must, by the laws of probability), it's hard not to search for a scapegoat. After all, doesn't everyone deserve a glowing profile in TechCrunch? Often, embittered entrepreneurs fall back on two explanations: Luck, and connections. ...
|
Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
The story of why we started a fully focused content marketing strategy here at Buffer is actually one that isn't glamorous at all. It was born out of pure necessity that we couldn't get any press coverage for the launch of Buffer. For the first few weeks I was on board, I tried restlessly to [...] ...
|
Via: Buffer Blog
Co-founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share Tweets, Fac |
This post dives deep into how we're developing and launching Fizzle, our new video training platform for online business builders. A little over a month ago, we intentionally launched a very unfinished product. Functionality was missing, content was meager and many questions were unanswered, yet we opened the doors to real customers anyway, on a date we had scheduled months in advance. ...
|
Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
Most job posts suck. Not because the founders didn't try. Not because the company and compensation are bad. They're just so damn uninspiring. When you're trying to hire, I think it's important to stop thinking like yourself. Most people don't. This is why the order in most 'job posts' is generally: 1. Description of the company 2. Requirements 3. Perks. ...
|
Via: Jason Shah
product manager @yammer; creator @heatdata; learned some thi |
The common refrain "We don't know anything until we launch" is completely false. Here's why. At a recent design meetup here in Boston I was talking to a product manager who was anxious about an upcoming release. He was talking about several new features they were adding that they had high hopes for but didn't know how well people would use them. To sum up his thoughts he said "Well, we'll just hav ...
|
Via: Bokardo
Director of UX at HubSpot, Co-founder @performable, Founder |
Ash Maurya's 10 steps to product/market fit. ...
|
Via: Spark59
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
Some people get excited about building something new that the world has never seen. Others get excited about making something more beautiful than it was before. Others like making things faster. And some others get off on making something less expensive. To differing degrees, these are all personal driving factors of mine as well. But the one that stands out above all the others is. ...
|
Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
At TechCrunch Disrupt, legendary venture capitalist (and Sun Microsystems co-founder) Vinod Khosla warned entrepreneurs against the dangers of hype: Generating buzz too early can inflate a startup's market cap and make them a less lucrative investment of time and money for the top-tier advisors they need. That leads to critical missteps like poor hiring decisions that can doom a startup. ...
|
Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
What Is A Startup Miracle? A startup miracle is the key difficult thing you need to pull off for your startup to work. It could be hitting product/market fit, a key business deal, a specific regulatory change, or the like. If your startup needs zero miracles to work, it probably isn't a defensible startup. ...
|
Via: Eladgil
|
In my previous career as a journalist, I received hundreds of story pitches with press releases attached every day. Like so many other well-meaning journos, I'd make a valiant attempt to at least skim the first two lines of every one. In those two lines, I (and almost all the journalists I know) made a rapid judgement on the newsworthiness of content, never spending enough time thinking about what ...
|
Via: On Startups
S12 @Seedstartup participant. Former travel/tech journo. Fou |
You know the feeling when someone scratches a chalkboard? I get the same thing when a startup entrepreneur declares their company has no competitors or no direct rivals. ...
|
Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
As entrepreneurs, we easily whip out our credit cards to pay for online courses to "fix" ourselves or our businesses, or we splurge on the latest software to stay current but. Suddenly, when it comes to actually hiring someone to help us, we get skeptical. The fact of the matter is that your company's biggest leaps are probably only going to happen when you free yourself--physically and emotionall ...
|
I'm a Suitcase Entrepreneur addicted to travel, Frisbee & us |
Listening is hard - The most obvious reason why we focus so much on monitoring and jump into analyzing is that listening is hard. ...
|
Via: Conversation Agent
Sr. Director Strategy, Empathy Lab. [Make sense. Make do. Ma |
Try asking your members this. Create the thread, turn it into a sticky thread, include it in your mailing list, add your own problem, and see what response you get. ...
|
Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
What's your equity split of this business and why? Are we comfortable with the thinking behind that? What is the scope of our business? What is outside the scope of what we want it to do? And More... ...
|
I'm an ordinary guy with nothing to lose. VC at Brooklyn Bri |
There is no love like a first time entrepreneur's love with nondisclosure agreements. They are a romantic dream: secret pacts bonding two economic entities together as one, if only for the transaction. Promises of futures together and sweet nothings exchanged. The Humbled MBA nailed it - newpreneurs love NDAs. ...
|
Via: Dan Shapiro
Google acquired @sparkbuy, so I now work on www.google.com/a |
Carlo Matic, the founder of Interactive Pioneers and HackFwd Referrer just posted a video showing how he prioritizes tasks in his startup. He calls it Prio-matic and the spreadsheet is available for download. ...
|
Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
If you keep treating your business like a baby, it will keep acting like one -- in the form of infantile profits, sophomoric growth rates, underdeveloped vendor relationships, and an overall juvenility that will cripple your ability to accomplish long-term goals. Fortunately, there's a solution for this: Cut the cord ... as in, the umbilical cord. But how do you let go of the fear that's tethering ...
|
Via: Venture Beat
Entrepreneur, Author (www.EffortlessEntrepreneur.com), Speak |
You probably even have a system in place to captures all those ideas no matter where you are. Later, you then go through and decide which ideas are the best, most worth your time, etc. This leads to one of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make: before too long they are overwhelmed by how many projects they have going at once. ...
|
Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
I often get asked about finding cofounders and I usually give the standard list of characteristics of what I look for in a founder. And I emphasize the value of a founding team with complementary skills sets - i.e. the hacker/hustler/designer cofounder archetype for web/mobile apps. But Jessica Alter, Cofounder ...
|
Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
Company culture can have a real impact on your bottom line. Two stories from Mikey Trafton's Business of Software 2012 presentation. ...
|
Founder and CEO of Fire Ant Software. We help doctors get pa |
The movement towards data-driven marketing makes creativity the most important asset they can offer. Specifically, great marketers will engage in creative destruction of data driven norms and disrupt market standards to stand out. ...
|
Marketing strategist. Author. Agent for change. Amateur phot |
One of the hardest lessons for an entrepreneur to grasp is to hire slow and fire fast. Every new entrepreneur thinks it won't be a problem. It sounds easy until they are faced with the situation. I have no idea how many people I've hired over my career, but I know how many peopl e I've fired - twenty-three. It's stressful on everyone. It never gets easier, but with more experience, the faster you ...
|
Via: Under30CEO
I share info about start-ups, business, and entrepreneurshi |
I've long been a fan of the CEO setting top level goals for a startup and then having those goals cascade down through the business with each function head setting more detailed goals for their department which in aggregate add up to the CEO's goals, and then each employee setting still more detailed individual goals. ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Profitability is one goal that most of the SaaS CEOs who ask me for help all share. Though, while they're all focused on achieving profitability, how that is measured varies from company to company. For the sake of this post we'll consider profitability to be achieved once the Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) have been paid back ...
|
Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Brevity rules. Brevity works. Brevity is super-cool. Why? Because it makes you a kick-ass writer. That's why. Good, concise writing is more than just writing. It's art in its purest form. It's expressing your thoughts like no other. ...
|
Via: Copymatter
Innovative ideas and practical how-to advice to help you bec |
I enjoyed doing this interview (embedded below) with Starto.TV. I think it captures a bunch of good stuff, such as: The one big thing that changed my (business life) How TechStars got started My graceful failure and the hard lesson I learned and much more. ...
|
Via: David G Cohen
Founder/CEO of TechStars. Investor 150+ Amazing Startups. Ge |
The team were "killer smart", witty and - looking back - a little insecure, just enough to give a feeling of "we can't screw this up; we can't let each other down." ...
|
Via: Venture Beat
|
SaaS products aren't viral from Andrew Chen I recently gave a short talk to the portfolio companies of a SaaS investor, and prepped some notes around the topic of SaaS products and virality. For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, getting to virality is hard enough. ...
|
Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
I wrote the post ExactTarget and Pardot Join Forces detailing how we had just sold our company and were super excited about the future. Today, I want to talk a bit about the human side of selling a business -- it's incredibly emotional ...
|
Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
To be successful at anything, you first need to know WHY you are doing it. Anyone who blogs for business (and every other organization) needs a content marketing mission statement - an answer to WHY. Do you know why your business exists, why you do what you do? ...
|
Via: Fruit Business
Geek, published researcher, award-winning teacher, eternally |
When you are part of a small team at a fast-growing company like Filepicker.io, there is a constant push to focus only on the immediate task at hand, to Get Things Done. This focus is incredibly important, and many fledgling companies fail because they try to do too many things before they're ready. On a personal level, however, it's important to actively devote time to growing your personal ...
|
Via: Filepicker.io
|
I often find myself advising entrepreneurs to be cautious when predicting sales volumes through distribution partners or sales channels, so I thought I would reproduce my thoughts here. In my experience these distribution deals where small company does deal with big company to sell small company's product disappoint more often than they deliver. ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
When used appropriately, snippets can improve the level of service you provide to your customers, helping you to quickly handle the eighty percent of cases that require routine support, giving you more time to focus on the twenty percent of cases that might need advanced troubleshooting and a more detailed response. ...
|
Via: Fog Creek Blog
Becoming a better version of myself. I do the CrossFit/Paleo |
Have you ever wanted something and not gotten it? I know I have. I've noticed a HUGE PROBLEM of entitlement with our generation and younger. ...
|
hi* |
About a year ago I was approached by a stranger and was asked to join a Seattle startup. This stranger, my soon-to-be-cofounder, asked me to take the CEO role in the startup. It has now been more than a year since this fateful day and I feel it's as good of time as any to review some lessons I have gathered through my first year as CEO of a fledging startup. ...
|
Via: So Entrepreneurial
CEO of Seconds, Entrepreneur and Blogger |
Klaas Kerstin of Flare Games gives a fantastic talk about company culture and the merits of an asshole-free company. "You are spending a great deal of your life at work, and choosing energy in where and who you work with is always a good investment." Klaas spoke at one of the HackFwd build events where all of our companies are invited to meet and build the future of their companies ...
|
Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
A common way to think of business regulations is by analogy to sports: the rules are specified up front, and the players follow the rules. But real regulations don't work that way. Businesses follow regulations as much as regulations follow businesses. Sometimes the businesses that change regulations are startups. ...
|
Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Today I'm going to share the 2 things you should NEVER say in an email to someone you don't know. (Especially if you want that person to promote your blog and business to their readers) And then I'll walk you through a word-for-word script that I personally used to get influential people I didn't know. ...
|
Via: Social Triggers
I'm 99% useless, but that 1% when I'm not, I'm dangerous. Fi |
Konstantin Guericke knows more about marketing than the typical engineering graduate. As a LinkedIn co-founder and the founding marketing vice president of the company, he helped grow the social network from zero to six million members. ...
|
Via: Venture Beat
|
When I was a kid, "The Graduate" was a generation-defining hit movie, with Dustin Hoffman playing an aimless college graduate. In the middle of a graduation party, an older businessman takes the wayward Hoffman aside and delivers some wise advice: "plastics." That should be the field his generation should focus on, the field that would shape the future. Today's advice for aspiring graduates is als ...
|
Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
Marketing is one of those disciplines that is a bit of a black box to startup founders who come from more of an engineering background. I've heard founders think about marketing both as something that doesn't really matter (since all that matters is the product) or something that matters a lot and requires hiring a fancy CMO or VP Marketing. ...
|
Via: Robgo.org
Cofounder of NextView Ventures. Founding advisor at Boundle |
Nearly every entrepreneur has heard the refrain, "Get back to me when you have some traction," while seeking funding. From an unsophisticated investor ...
|
Via: Infochachkie
You can check out my startup advice blog at: http://www.info |
There's no doubt technology entrepreneurship is becoming its own kind of celebrity. Here is a quick rundown of its appearances on the national stage: The story of the founding of Facebook receiving a feature-length Hollywood portrayal in The Social Network; Hollywood celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, MC Hammer, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber investing in technology startups ...
|
Via: Startup Genome
Founder of the startupcompass.co, Student of life. The wor |
Every entrepreneur wants to believe their product is taking on a big market. Sometimes they're kidding themselves. If they are making something fun, they'll say- "we're competing against TV! The market is huge!" If they are making something utilitarian and functional, they'll say, "everyone wants to save time- there's millions of people who want that ...
|
Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
I strongly believe that a founder should be able to explain what they do in one paragraph. Here's an email exchange that I had in the past 24 hours with an entrepreneur. ...
|
Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
Let's face it, if you're starting a business, one of your main concerns is going to be growth. It won't matter how great your idea is if you fail to gain any traction. In today's world, there are countless strategies. IN this post 8 Startup Founders Reveal Their #1 User Acquisition Tactic. ...
|
Via: Treehouse Blog
User Growth Team Lead @treehouse |
Successful businesses are often not distracted by a hundred different metrics but laser focused on one metric that is the best predictor of scale. How does a business identify such a metric? ...
|
Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
Somehow there is this theory that Accelerators are the new version of the Old-age Incubators. IMO, that is not true. It is also my belief that in a mature and functional ecosystem, we need both the players. I'll tell you why that is so. ...
|
Via: The Startup Guy
The Startup Guy. Talk to me about The Startup Centre (@start |
I've done a lot of interviewing, hiring, and firing in my career. It's inevitable as you start to build your own companies, become a team leader, or move into management. I fully subscribe to the notion that you should hire slowly and fire quickly. ...
|
Via: stu.mp
Co-founder of @sprintly, @attachmentsme, and @simplegeo. Cyc |
People who tell you that VCs won't look at a company with an even equity split are being silly. That has never once, in my experience, been even a slight hiccup, let alone a dispositive factor in a seed investment.→ ...
|
Via: Gust Blog
Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, angel investor |
I'm TIRED of answering this question so I'd rather write it out and just point people to this post. After running AppSumo for over 2 years I've finally understood that Facebook made the right decision to let me go. ...
|
hi* |
Every one fails at some point or another. However, very few can survive so many failures, and fewer would take one hit after another, and turn them into a lifetime of accomplishments. The following is the true story of a man who did exactly so... ...
|
Via: Amir Khella
Made in Egypt, Assembled in America. Entrepreneur, UX , hack |
Today one of our portfolio companies is holding their internal management training in our offices. They have asked me to talk a little bit about my own experience with the challenge of going from being an individual contributor to being a manager. I remember this being a very rough transition for me and it took me quite a long time to get comfortable as a manager. ...
|
Via: Continuations
VC at http://usv.com |
Gamification is the craft or framework to derive all the fun and addicting elements found in games and apply them to real-world or productive activities. Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and trust between people, and develop their creative potentials. ...
|
Via: Yu-Kai Chou
RewardMe Co-Founder. Gamification Expert and Lecturer/Speake |
I love, love, love numbers. But with time, touchy-feely neurons sprouted within my data brain. Minimum viable products, "release early, release often" philosophies, feedback loops, and A/B testing help optimization and decision-making but they can't guarantee that a product is awesome. ...
|
Via: Elaine Wherry
co-founder of meebo |
Problems can often be classified as either leaky bucket or power law problems. A leaky bucket requires you to fill all the holes before it will hold water. By contrast, a power law problem exhibits the Pareto principle, where you can get 80% of the effects (holding water) by focusing on just 20% of the caues (holes). Power law solutions are all about focusing on one piece the ecosystem that happen ...
|
Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
Despite the recent success of this blog over the past year (250,000 uniques, hundreds of new subscribers, republished in Lifehacker and others) the truth is that I've been a failed blogger for far more time than I've been a successful one. ...
|
Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
"Can you bring me up to speed?" We all hate to hear those words, as it implies a big disruption to whatever we're currently doing. At The Agile League, that phrase is taboo. Instead, we humbly ask to bring each other down to speed. Here's why: Giving status updates and explaining things is very time consuming. There are people whose entire jobs consist of sitting in meetings and either bringing pe ...
|
Via: The Agile League
|
Early in the life of a startup, the founders dream of dominating their industry. But things may take a wrong turn. The founders may shift from being ambition-driven into "try not to die" mode. While this crisis mode can be focusing short term, it can often lead to a startup to fail or to sell too early relative to its trajectory. A founder can get stuck in "try not to die mode" even after the ...
|
Via: Eladgil
|
We've been talking a lot about story lately, both on this blog and around the office. What makes for a compelling story? Are we even telling the right kind of story? These are some of the questions we ask each day. Building a compelling story is essential and, as Forrest highlighted recently, can help you survive a design change. And we all know the consequences if you get it wrong. Look at Fa ...
|
Via: ZURB Blog
Editor @ZURB, Writer, Educator, and occasional Starship Com |
I tend to get one particular question over and over. It is some variant on "How is the UX for my product/site?" In order to get in touch with some of your users, I'd recommend that you do the following: Figure out exactly what you are concerned about with your site or product. ...
|
Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
If you want to stay in business forever, you have to focus on the long term. You must construct a business model that builds confidence and trust with your customers and keeps them coming back day after day, year after year. ...
|
Via: AVC
I am a VC |
A few days ago, Indeed (a job aggregator site) announced that they had been acquired by a Japanese company called Recruit Co Ltd. One story I saw pegged the acquisition close to a billion dollars. I've heard through the grapevine about some very happy investors. Indeed is a big company (25,000 employees, 80 million unique visitors per month.) ...
|
Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
"The elevator to success is out of order. You'll have to use the stairs...one step at a time." ~Joe Girard As a community, I think entrepreneurs have gotten more knowledeable over the years. We know the difference between pre-money and post-money valuations. We've read "The Lean Startup". We've dug into the details of SaaS economics. ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
One of the top questions entrepreneurs ask is about how to find right co-founder. Business people are looking for technical partners, and programmers are looking for business people. So how do you go about this process, and how do you know who to pick? The following guide will walk you through why finding the right co-founder makes a big difference and what you need to do to find the right one(s). ...
|
Via: David Hauser
Young Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of @grasshopper, @chargify, @ |
There is a myth that a successful salesman must be confident, slightly arrogant, outspoken, and convincing; a salesman must have a silver tongue and be able to parry any potential-customer objections with ease. This myth leads to a fear of sales. Many entrepreneurs fear sales, choosing to exclusively focus on product development as oppose to [...]. ...
|
Founder of @TourWoo, the easiest way to book a tour online. |
We've all been there: You finally carve out the time to work on a big creative project and then you... choke. After counting on this break to really produce something, you're suddenly paralyzed by performance anxiety. But instead of showing up as fear on the surface, it manifests itself as guilt. If you don't proceed with caution, you can soon fritter away your creative fortune on nickel and dime ...
|
Via: The99Percent
We're now posting under @99U - come follow for insights on m |
One question I really like to ask idea stage entrepreneurs is how they've split up their equity. Now, for a startup with traction, investors, etc that question can be like asking how much money someone makes, so take it lightly. For two entrepreneurs that are just getting started on their idea, it's usually no big deal. Almost always the answer to that question is that the equity has been split ev ...
|
Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Innovation Accounting effectively helps startups to define, measure, and communicate progress. That last part is key. The true job of entrepreneurs is systematically de-risking their startups over time through a series of conversations. Success lies at the intersection of these conversations and each has a specific function and protocol. ...
|
Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
"We" is a bad, bad word in copywriting. You should reword every line of copy you have that begins with "we". Whether in an email. Or on your website. Because your visitors don't want to hear about you. They want to hear about themselves - about their problems, about their needs, about their futures. ...
|
Via: COPY HACKERS
Copywriter at http://CopyHackers.com. Staunch advocate of co |
Building an enterprise software company used to be largely about sales, because enterprise software was sourced and purchased by high-level business people. Those business people needed to be charmed and convinced, an activity that was distasteful to many technologists. ...
|
Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Stay in stealth mode until the last minute. The last thing any startup needs is people finding out about it. You can get attention later -- that's not difficult. You don't need the distraction of customers clamoring outside your office while you're still refactoring your NoSQL database structures. ...
|
Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
When I first started working on my own business ideas, I didn't understand how important it was to do something unique. I borrowed other ideas without contributing anything new or noteworthy and then scratched my head when my implementation never took off. The next time around, I decided to take the complete opposite approach. I then thought you had to invent something completely new to succeed. T ...
|
Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
It take significantly longer for most companies to hire their first employee than it does to hire subsequent ones. Reasons ...
|
Via: Eladgil
|
This post is targeted at tech startups that are looking for an execution focused, front-line sales person. Filepicker.io is a good example of this kind of a company. This post is not about bringing on a business co-founder or hiring your first senior business person. ...
|
Via: Swombat on Startups
Tech sales & biz. dev. enthusiast with an intimate knowledge |
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. ...
|
Via: Paul Graham
|
BLOGTASTIC is a free book by Rajesh Shetty that will make you think about how you can contribute more, make a difference through your blog AND accelerate your own growth. If you have a blog or even if you are remotely interested in blogging, you will get something out of the book - now and for the future. ...
|
Via: Rajesh Setty
Bringing Ideas to Life. With Love! Rajesh is an entrepreneur |
What's more exhilarating than jumping feet-first into a brand-new business idea and investing every waking hour into bringing it to life? For entrepreneurs, not much. The luxury of spending all that time on a new venture, however, is something few have at the very beginning. ...
|
Via: Grasshopper Blog
Social media and community manager at Grasshopper, Shopping, |
"Everybody should have a voice, but not everybody should have a vote." That's what Tom Fishburne told me when I asked him about ways that organizations could harness the creative potential of their teams without getting bogged down or distracted by the wealth of ideas that groups come up with. ...
|
Via: Marketing Profs
Writer, ironist, doctor of philosophy. Also, editor at Marke |
There is a lot of focus on investment deals and negotiating with venture capitalists but bootstrappers prosper closing deals with customers and partners. Here are some tips if you are new to making deals. ...
|
Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
The best way to learn how to code is... well... to code. Simple as that. Of course, the theory can be really helpful, but the actual learning happens when you put it in practice. Unfortunately, a vast majority of marketers (the ones with business degrees like myself) learn their craft differently. ...
|
Helping startups kick ass at marketing. Running a blog about |
There's a lot of good suggestions out there for how early stage startups can approach (or improve) board meetings. There's a range of different approaches from the somewhat traditional to the more radical (e.g. single slide board mtgs). I personally think there's no single template that's "right" for all startups. Regardless of what template or style you choose, the common facets I've seen from ...
|
Via: AGILEVC
Co-founder & Partner of NextView Ventures, former entreprene |
Q: I see a lot of opportunities for a startup, but I am not sure how to evaluate them? A: Here is a short checklist we use to help entrepreneurs sort through where they are, this is typically most useful in the "idea / team formation" phase or in preparation for "open for business" and complements the "First Seven Questions" that focus more on the product than the team's core competencies, the unk ...
|
Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
As a founder of five startups, I've seen thousands of resumes and interviewed hundreds of applicants in search of talented employees. It's caused me to realize that it's not always easy for businesses to find the employees they're looking to hire or for job seekers to stand out in the application process. ...
|
Via: David Hauser
Young Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of @grasshopper, @chargify, @ |
Personal discipline is one of my hallmarks. I have thought a lot about how and why I do what I do so that I can get a lot of important stuff done. Doing stuff inefficiently or spending time on unimportant stuff sends me round the twist a little. Staying disciplined is an ongoing process ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
The phrase "Shut up and take my money!" may have come from a cartoon, but it's not a myth. "Shut Up Money" (SU$ for short!) has happened to me and I've watched it happen to my students ...
|
Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
There's a specific step every entrepreneur needs to take that isn't talked about nearly enough. So, what is this secret phase that almost every successful entrepreneur has gone through, but that no one cares to mention? Keep reading and I'll tell you. ...
|
Via: Think Traffic
Founded http://PocketChanged.com | Film Maker http://calebwo |
Startups don't need growth hackers - at first. They need products that are really working in the market. This means users love it, that there's lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. ...
|
Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
A lean startup teams use the Validation Canvas to explicitly list their core assumptions, the assumptions that if proved false would sink their business. Then they identify the assumption that is the most important and most risky and then test it. But what happened if the first insights failed your assumptions. ...
|
Via: Lean Startup Machine
product manager/designer/foodie/musician/husband/father and |
The importance of thinking about 'why' in addition to 'how' and 'what' has been coming up a lot for me over the last couple of months, most recently in this fabulous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
How the hell did 37signals go from an unknown little consulting company to a bootstrapped product juggernaut? Below is a video lesson from my 30×500 Product Launch Class which explains how. It's called Stacking the Bricks, and it's a no-nonsense look at how 5 businesses got started, and how they grew and are growing ...
|
Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
I get a lot of questions around how to get into startups. Here's my advice: ...
|
Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
You don't have to be a developer to start a tech-based company, but you'll definitely have to work with one at some point. And throughout the process, there are things that many non-technical founders learn the hard way. Here's what to know, before you get started. ...
|
Via: Daily Muse
@Webgrrls CTO, Speaker, @NYCWebgrrls chapter leader, Founder |
A few reasons why I don't like Net Promoter (at least for us as a B2B SaaS provider) and think it shouldn't be used as a growth predictor ...
|
Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
There is a very good chance anyone reading this is already familiar with the concept of evergreen content; or content that is perpetually relevant. Most of us have experienced at least one piece of content that holds timeless in the usefulness of its information. Creating content that is just as useful five years down the road as it was the day it was published is not easy, but it's possible. ...
|
Via: SEOmoz
VP Digital Strategy at W.L. Snook & Associates. Partner @Fac |
Can a services company like an app development house become a product company, and, as Silicon Valley VCs typically demand, command high multiples? ...
|
Via: Venture Beat
I tweet about the web, social media, tech, and startups. Wr |
Case studies they are by nature more realistic than tutorials, and they often raise the hard questions that normal articles can easily sweep under the rug. Plus, there's the big advantage that you can usually experience the finished product for yourself. Case studies are also a big part of how I happened to learn design myself. I remember Jesse Bennet-Chamberlain's posts in particular being a big ...
|
Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
Let's talk about money, baby! Whether it's funding or acquihires, angels or convertible notes, debt or income, money is the topic we all looooove to talk about (and pretend not to care about). Lemme be straight with you: I love me some money. ...
|
Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
Culture at a startup is like capital - once you've started running out, it becomes harder to raise more; and once you're out, you're done. I've twice worked at startups that doubled in size within a year. The first time, it was bad - for morale, for productivity, for overall quality. ...
|
Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
Not all of these are quite "deadly sins", but the "47 common mistakes of entrepreneurs" didn't quite have the same ring to it. Enjoy. ...
|
Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
One topic that has been debated in the startup community forever is whether or not you should keep your startup in stealth mode until it is ready for the big release. Most people, especially the ones with experience, will tell you not to be afraid of someone stealing your idea and avoid being in stealth. ...
|
Helping startups kick ass at marketing. Running a blog about |
Entrepreneurs put off what they are most afraid of - failing. For most, that's selling their idea. They will stick their head in the sand and build a product for 6 months, come up for air, only to realize no one wants it. ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed that wealth was unequally distributed in Italy. He noted that 80% of the land and wealth was owned by 20% of the people. A similar relationship can be observed in the wealth and income across most countries. It turns out what Pareto observed isn't limited to wealth and income. ...
|
Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Q: How does taking a scientific approach to your startup allow you to feel passion for the product you are building. It would seem to place you in the position of taking orders from the customer ...
|
Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
Eric Ries uses the phrase "vanity metrics" to refer to metrics that founders cite to demonstrate progress but that are actually false signals. A related concept is "vanity milestones": achievements that are more about making you feel good than helping your company. ...
|
Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
It's the problem the startup needs to solve to get to the next level. That could be the next financing, or hiring people or finishing a key project. ...
|
Via: Continuations
VC at http://usv.com |
We see a lot of business plans that describe themselves as the [insert name of recently hot tech company] for [new vertical or market sub-segment]. Recently we have seen a lot of Pinterest for YY and Etsy for ZZ. Sometimes we get 'my company is a cross between [massive company x] and [massive company ...
|
Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Wait what? INCREASED support requests? Isn't our goal at startups to reduce the support requests? After all, support requests means time taken away from developing code right? ...
|
Via: Phil's Blawg
Startup guy, Founder of BudgetSimple, Soccer player, beer dr |
... We weren't getting work done very fast. We were putting in long hours, but it always seemed like there was more motion than their was progress. We didn't realize it at the time, but we had run afoul of one of the most important rules of startup productivity: If two people work on a task, it takes twice as long. ...
|
Via: Dan Shapiro
Google acquired @sparkbuy, so I now work on www.google.com/a |
I find it really interesting to see how investors and entrepreneurs shift their money and efforts from one sector to the other. I think some of this behavior is just driven by human nature. We like looking for shortcuts and we like following the crowd. But the more crowded a space gets, the less attractive it becomes. When a few successes become apparent in other areas, the crowd shifts in that ...