startups

Do Things that Don’t Scale Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. Fragile Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure. ...

Default Alive or Default Dead? Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out. The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it’s default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory? ...

Explore vs Execute | A Smart Bear The two main business modalities are more different than you expect. When you hit PMF, it’s a culture-shift to switch from one to the other. … So, what needs to be done? A radical shift in working style, from “Explore” to “Execute”: Explore Figuring out what works, as quickly and flexibly as possible. Execute Becoming excellent at doing what works, while scaling. Explore vs Execute # ...

fundersandfounders: Too Late To Start? quarter-life crisis and mid-life crisis

Customer Self Service Achieving significant revenue at a low price point naturally entails driving complexity and cost out of the purchase to clear the floodgates for high volume. **Transactional Sales ** As price increases, customers become less willing to part with their cash without at least knowing there are actual trustworthy human beings behind your website URL. **Enterprise Sales ** While most SaaS startups gravitate toward transactional sales or customer self-service, some SaaS startups have products that provide so much value per customer and are so complex to buy that their natural starting point is traditional enterprise sales. ...

Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod Zip drives ate floppies. CDs ate Zips. DVDs ate CDs. SD cards ate film. LCDs ate CRTs. Telephony ate telegraphy. Text messaging ate talking. Tablets are eating our paper … Great analysis of the disruptive effect of The Magazine in the publishing industry.

Pitchenvy | A gallery of startup pitch decks. Showcasing the best startup pitch decks

Dodd’s Blog: How My Side Project Generated Sales and 66,000 Unique Visitors in 1 Month doddcaldwell: At the end of February, I launched a side project, Loft Resumes, with a friend of mine, Emory Cash. Our tagline is “Style-Conscious Resumes for the Standout Job Seeker.” As you can tell from the Google Analytics screenshot below, from the time that we first tweeted about it on February 21st to mid-day March 31st, we’ve received over 81,000 visits (over 66,000 of them uniques,) and over 209,000 page views. ...

Startup Death Clock The startup death clock tells you what day your startup will run out of money.

Startup Exercise: What can’t be solved with money? (…) show how the important problems facing your business are those that can be solved with money, because money is what they’re providing . Even if you’re not pitching this is a useful exercise, because if you’re good at the things money can’t buy, you’ll remain competitive even when confronted by a well-funded competitor. (…) The pattern: concepts , behaviors , knowledge , and process cannot be fabricated with money, and possibly cannot even be accelerated. Once you know what to do or, more likely, you know how to learn quickly, then money becomes an accelerant . ...

Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.” So the principle is easy: Set the conditions of “yes” such that: If they say “yes,” you’re happy because the terms or money are so good, it more than compensates for the distraction, possibly even funding the thing you really want to do. If they say “no,” you’re happy because it wasn’t a great fit anyway, so it’s not worthwhile for a small return on your time and effort. So that’s the punch-line, but before you go I’d like to over-emphasize the idea of “funding the thing you really want to do.” ...

Your time is $1000/hour, and you need to act accordingly. Jason Cohen , founder of WP Engine in How should a startup founder value her time?

Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley But what is ‘design’ actually? Is it a logo? A WordPress theme? An innovative UI? It’s so much more than that. It’s a state of mind. It’s an approach to a problem. It’s how you’re going to kick your competitor’s ass. This handy guide will help you understand design and provide resources to help you find awesome design talent.

The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it. Steve Jobs ( Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000 )