Save the big announcements for big deals — 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…

The more revenue you have coming in, the better the chances you can raise (and not waste) investor funds — 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…

The Trouble With Investing In Charismatic Leaders — I mean, you know I had to write about the WeWork bankruptcy, right? I’ve been targeting WeWork and Adam Neumann for years — as the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the current state of the startup ecosystem. But I’m certainly not taking any pleasure in this final(?) coda to…

Marketplaces Are Experiencing Their First Real Dip Since the Pandemic — Have you ever noticed that ads for insurance companies don’t put the product in front of you? They show you emus and geese and Flo and shit. I wanted to use this article to finally declare digital advertising dead. But I couldn’t. Because it’s not entirely true. I mean, there’s…

A common-sense guide to building your product based on your vision — Every startup’s product has its genesis in the primordial ooze that is the company’s vision, mission and product position. Whenever I get called into a company because their growth got stuck, their vision, mission and position are the first place I go. I could make many and severe changes to…

All the reasons why you shouldn’t run with that billion-dollar idea — On a random Tuesday in the startup press universe, I tripped over another article about another peer-to-peer fashion rental app landing another high-seven-figure seed round from VC investors. And I’m not gonna bury this particular company but… I just want to ask a simple question. Does the world need this…

Here’s a story I see repeated a lot with promising startups — A startup idea isn’t worth anything. It’s the execution that matters. But sometimes, the execution isn’t worth anything either. And that needs to be fixed before it kills a potentially great startup idea. Look, this isn’t clickbait or tough love. I don’t assume that you’re an idiot, walking around thinking…

I’ve been skeptical of Generative AI for over a year, because I know where this is headed — Last month, I wrote an article predicting the end of SaaS, and people lost their minds. Well, people who didn’t read the article lost their minds. Or those people who have a stake in the SaaS status quo, yeah, they lost their minds. In another article a couple days ago…

Years of experience + a major public relations blunder has me asking questions — I was one of the progenitors of viable Generative AI back in the early 2010s. At Automated Insights, we produced machine-written, data-rich articles at the rate of thousands of articles per second for customers like Yahoo Fantasy Football and the Associated Press. …