Coaching your business from its teen phase to adulthood
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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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…
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…
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 trick is to write the ending first and work backwards
Think about your favorite television show.
I’m willing to bet that it started off a little slow, then hooked you. It had a great season in the middle of its run, then ended in a way that was either wholly satisfying or frustratingly flat.
This is how episodic writing creates…
One way or the other, you better recognize.
This week, I answered a question about the stealth nature of starting a side company — asked by someone who has already witnessed legal action taken against someone just like themselves for doing something a little like what they were about to do.
There was panic in that question, and…
It’s time to stop having conceptual arguments and start building
I started a profitable business using only no-code tools and platforms. You can too. But whether or not anyone can scale a business on a no-code foundation isn’t the point of no-code. There’s another, broader movement going on that everyone should be aware of.
No-code tools aren’t just for building…
Whether it’s an IPO or just a seed round, nothing happens as quickly as it seems
If you follow stories about startups, it's not hard to come away with the impression that a fair number of these new companies go from idea to multi-million dollar funding rounds in a matter of months or even weeks.
Of course, this isn't true. But that begs a questions that…
I’ve built several two-sided marketplaces over the years. Here’s why the 2SM is getting a bad name.
Last week, I answered a founder’s question about how to pinpoint the right revenue streams for his two-sided marketplace, now that it was seeing traction on the vendor side.
I detailed the process of quantifying the value that his marketplace provided to both vendors and buyers, and how to derive…
Very few MVPs are complete successes out of the gate
Last week, I took an hour or so to walk a founder through the forensics of her failed minimum viable product (MVP) launch.
As someone who has launched dozens of minimum viable products — from software to hardware to retail and more — I can definitively state that your MVP…
