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.
What does this look like?
Employee one through 10: At a certain point, the original employees stop learning new people’s names. They won’t come right out and say it but they start to resent having to show yet another noob how to do the same simple things. …
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 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…
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 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…
Getting customers is one thing, keeping them is another
Digital marketplaces have been a popular startup trend for a while, and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight.
I still get a couple questions a week from founders of two-sided marketplaces (2SMs), the digital middleware between customer and vendor that takes a cut of every product or service transaction conducted within its digital walls. In return, said marketplace purports to make each transaction frictionless and cost-beneficial to both the customer and the vendor.
2SMs seem like a no-brainer of a business model that can be applied to any field or industry. Put psychiatrists or plumbers or dog-sitters…
In this week’s issue of Teaching Startup, I answered an entrepreneur’s question about how to find more time.
See, when you’re an entrepreneur, time is your most valuable asset. You can raise money, you can hire talent, you can generate new ideas. Time, on the other hand, can’t be bought, copied, or outsourced.
This entrepreneur’s particular time problem was one I hear a lot. He already owns and runs a steady consulting business that’s paying the bills and even scratching his entrepreneurial itch a little. But he also has a dream idea for a product. …
Avoid the lazy mistakes that come with poor pitch planning
There’s this game I play with a couple of my friends where one of us starts describing what our company does while the other is armed with a buzzer taken from a Taboo board game.
Any time the speaker spits out a trendy business buzzword (“disruptive”), they get a single buzz. Any time the speaker leans on the crutch of a startup-related platitude (“democratize the web”), they get a double buzz.
The winner is the one who goes the longest and says the most without getting buzzed.
I know. We’re startup super nerds. In our defense, we only play this…
Even after a 20+ year career as an entrepreneur that includes a couple of nice wins and my share of lesson-packed failures, I still seek advice from other entrepreneurs every chance I get.
I’m lucky in that I work with folks who are smarter and better than me. I also pester other entrepreneurs who have had bigger successes than me (and far more painful failures) — people I’ve lucked into becoming friends with over the years.
Two problems. 1) I’m indeed very lucky to have this kind of access to these kinds of people — it’s taken decades to build…
You might want to check your motivations, because they’re directly related to your success
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about the reasons why you want to be an entrepreneur, but you should. I can tell you from experience that knowing those reasons and acting on them are ultimately going to be the difference between your successes and failures as an entrepreneur.
Not long ago, I ran a poll in Teaching Startup asking our member entrepreneurs what success looked like for them. …
When the going gets tough, it’s time to experiment
Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to save your sinking business? And, more importantly, would you know where and how to start bailing the business out?
Every company — no matter how big or how small, how new or how old — eventually hits rough seas , a point at which the money coming in is nowhere near enough to cover the money going out. We saw this over and over again as the economic damage from the pandemic accelerated quickly and broadly, dragging all kinds of companies underwater.
But it doesn’t take a once-in-a-lifetime global quarantine to…
