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Listen up. If your company is being acquired, or if you’re planning for an acquisition as your exit, you need to know what’s coming. Because a lot of it isn’t pretty.
Good entrepreneurs worry so much about where the next customer is going to come from that we never think twice about whether we should take on, or keep, a customer that's more trouble than they're worth.
* Featured in TechCrunch *
Making a mistake launching a new product feature is costly, and I’ve done it at least a dozen times. Never again. We’re all familiar with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy. What’s gaining traction now is the strategy of repeating the MVP process with every new feature, even down to every new version. How do we do that?
If we’re starting a company that we hope will one day reach a billion dollar valuation or more, we’ll need a different kind of strategy from the beginning.
Let’s talk about when we need to start paying the true believers working for our startup. With actual dollars. Because the alternative is usually promises. And promises in startup are always a bridge built to burn.
At what point does a founding CEO grow the company beyond their ability to grow it even more? It sounds like a Catch-22 of a question, but it’s a standard move that I believe startups get wrong more often than not.
As entrepreneurs, it’s almost impossible to understand the value of what we’re building, and there are several reasons why we’ll sell our product for less than what it’s worth. Let's overcome that.
* A Medium Editorial Feature *
Every entrepreneur comes up with simple sales targets soon after figuring out their most basic price point. We can’t help it, it’s what we do. But when it comes time for real sales projections, the math gets murkier. And we’re usually still just throwing random numbers at a wall and hoping they stick.
Ask anyone who’s been there more than once, and they’ll tell you. Right at about 50 employees is where young companies start to go off the rails. So what should we do when it happens?
* A Medium Editorial Feature *
Let's talk about how we use data to make a better product, raise our margins, and generate more revenue. Here's a really quick way to make sure we're building a strong, robust product that our customers want.
Last week, I got a bunch of questions via my website from “Devin,” a smart young entrepreneur in the healthcare technology space. His MVP, a mobile app, was about six months from completion before he realized he needed to do more work around his business concept. Now his MVP is about a year out, and he’s frustrated because he wants to reach out to his target market to gauge interest in his solution.
Do you feel like an outsider when it comes to startup, entrepreneurship, or starting or running a business? Are there rules and processes and terms you don't fully understand? Does it feel like a closed club sometimes?
Everything You Should Know About Startup is all the stuff I wish I knew when I was first starting out, run through the lens of having done it for so long and still doing it. It's not Silicon Valley buzzwords and mantras. It's nuts and bolts and logic that applies in the real world.