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…

An unconventional method to increase the lifetime value of your customer base — If you want real, valuable, revenue-generating customers, your app has to walk a perfectly balanced line between customer friction and data collection. In other words, when you ask a customer to “sign up and get started,” your app needs to collect all the information you need to provide a great…

When Is a Side Hustle a Scam and When Is It Just Sketchy? — I usually write these posts to dispense strategic and tactical startup and business advice, the kind that’s difficult to follow. As you can imagine, advice that’s difficult to follow doesn’t exactly burn up the Internets. On the other hand, I feel like I could write about startup scams and sketchery…

A lot of what ChatGPT writes is useless, but it can also be harmful — Ask most people to describe the downside of Generative A.I, and they’ll usually bring up one of two scenarios. People who know nothing about Generative A.I. will talk about a foregone conclusion when the machines eventually rise up and take over. This is Skynet. It’s the Matrix. It’s any science…

Don’t freak out. This happens to every new business. — Here’s a cold hard truth. No legitimate startup ever goes from a handful of sales to $1,000,000 in revenue overnight. By the time you and I read about a startup’s overnight success, they’ve likely already sunk a lot of time and money into a slow and steady climb that eventually…

I think I figured out the next billion-dollar opportunity — A ton of ink and money is being dropped on figuring out what Generative AI can do to generate even more ink and more money. But while that hype tornado continues to swirl, I wonder if there’s a contrarian bet to be made on being uniquely human. Here’s my theory…

Low-tech solutions make it easy to go fast and break stuff, and that’s a problem — If you’re going to use low-tech solutions within your business, in any capacity, whether it’s building an app from scratch on a no-code platform or integrating a pre-built credit card form into your order flow, there’s one golden rule you need to stick to: Just because you can do something…

Predicting outcomes is a much more valuable proposition than creating content — There are a lot of reasons why the current hype around artificial intelligence is overblown. Don’t get me wrong, the recent advancements in generative A.I. are impressive, game-changing, almost magical. But those advancements are advancements only in a specific niche of A.I., and they’re most definitely not magical. You can…