Ask anyone who’s worked at more than one startup and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: Young companies start to go off the rails once they hit 50 employees. I call this the “teenager” startup phase, and I’ve been there several times, both as an employee and an executive.
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If you want to give your new business a decent shot at success, you need to build traction — clear, measurable evidence that people are interested in what your company is offering. And that won’t happen on Day One.
So why do startups make big, splashy announcements the day they…
Let’s talk about how much you should charge customers for something when you’re not totally sure what that thing is yet.
A startup has to get its pricing right or the product will be dead at launch. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules for…
At startups, the difference between survival and running out of runway always comes down to taking our eyes off revenue.
We don’t want to do this, and we certainly don’t do it on purpose. But when we’re in the middle of the startup run, it’s pretty easy to fall into…
I’d like to debunk some conventional wisdom about success and failure in business. Namely, this broken circle of logic:
A. Entrepreneurs and business leaders have to take risks in order to succeed.
B. Younger people are more likely to take risks than older people.
C. When taking on a new…
Every good entrepreneur starts a new business with the best of intentions. …
Twice in the past three months, I’ve recommended bringing on a product owner at two of the high-tech, high-growth startups I work with.
In both cases, the startup’s leadership wasn’t exactly sure what I meant. Don’t get me wrong, these are startups with multimillion-dollar run rates, led by people with…
Here’s a move out of the venture capital playbook that tends to punch entrepreneurs in the gut.
Investors give your startup a bunch of money to scale, they expect you to hire seasoned people for critical roles, then they start asking why your burn rate is so high.
The next…
Are you good at inbound marketing? Would you consider yourself technically proficient? Have you ever closed a high-dollar sale? Could you balance your company’s books in a pinch?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you’re not alone. And it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in those areas.
Look, there aren’t any get-rich-quick secrets in this post. I actually never meant to build a business around a subscription-based newsletter. It happened kind of accidentally.
But because that business (TeachingStartup.com) took off, I get a lot of questions about how to make a subscription-based newsletter successful. I’m not kidding…
