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 launch? Because that’s the way it’s been done for ages. But that strategy can actually do more harm than good.

When no one knows who you are or what you do, you need to buck conventional wisdom and launch quietly, without fanfare. It took me almost 20 years and a…

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 pricing a brand new product. It’s an individual exercise, and the right answers are specific to your market, your company, and the as-yet-unknown value of the product to your customers.

Throw in the uncertainty surrounding a minimum viable product, and the pricing process usually generates more questions than answers. I…

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 a trap of wasting time on feel-good tasks that feel like progress but don’t bring in any money.

No entrepreneur is immune to this trap, myself included. It’s part of the drive that makes the successful entrepreneurs successful.

I’ve founded, worked at, and advised a ton of startups, and each…

One of the most overlooked aspects of the customer relationship is that it is, indeed, a relationship. And one of the top reasons why the customer is so often taken for granted is because it’s difficult to maintain a relationship between a business (you) and all of its customers (them).

It’s not hard to understand how this happens. Imagine if you had 100 or 1,000 or 1,000,000 personal relationships in your life. What’s the size of the customer support and success team you’d need to maintain healthy relationships with all of them?

It’s a monumental task to please everyone. …

This week in the Teaching Startup Newsletter, I answered a question about the challenge of hiring in the post-pandemic job market. While that answer covered a few potential reasons why finding talent has become so competitive and how a startup might address those challenges, in this post, I want to expand a little more on just one of those reasons.

It’s about an entrepreneur’s secret weapon: Freedom.

My first job out of college was one of the more highly-coveted placements available — a suit-and-tie role with a successful consulting firm. The firm had their own giant glass building not far…

Every entrepreneur has a failure story like this. About 12 years ago, I founded a startup called ExitEvent. I was in the early stages, but the idea was solid: Create a multi-sided marketplace for the startup ecosystem.

I had already started two successful companies, one of which I was still running. The ExitEvent idea wasn’t a new one. It was something that I had been building and reshaping for years, waiting for the right moment when all the pieces came together to turn it into a scalable business.

When that moment happened, I knew exactly where to go. I brought…

Hiring experienced technical help is one of the most important and most expensive decisions a startup founder is ever going to make. The problem is, most startups bring on dedicated tech resources either too early or too late, and in either case, the results are usually disastrous. So how do you know when the time is right to take such a huge risk?

I’m currently building Teaching Startup, a tech-based product with a self-imposed rule of using only no-code tools — and it has very quickly become a revenue-generating product that already has tons of customers. …

In this week’s issue of Teaching Startup, I answered an entrepreneur’s question about customer acquisition costs (CAC) and how much of a reduction in those costs might be expected as a new startup expands its market.

It was a good question. It was a tough question. I struggled with it, and in the end, I had to reframe it in order to answer it. I couldn’t get past the fact that expectations imply something that happens that’s out of the founder’s control.

And that’s what I want to talk about in the post: How important it is for an entrepreneur…