Converting Content-Audience Fit to Product Traction
Jason Lemkin has a new post out about gaining traction after your product ships. He says it’s hard, much harder than building the 1.0 product which was already hard, and he makes some concrete suggestions on how to go about gaining traction: – Finish hiring your core team. Presumably you’ve left the sales and marketing [...]
The Very First Thing a Founding Team Needs to Do: Achieve Content-Audience Fit
A lot of entrepreneurs, when faced with the question, “What’s the most important thing to do first?”, would answer, “Build a product.” Big mistake. The most important thing to do first is to find an audience. It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to [...]
Most Hiring and Investment Decisions are Terrible Due to Pattern Matching
One often hears venture capitalists refer to their decision making process as “pattern matching“. This reference to machine learning (and a fuzzy match really ought to be pattern recognition, but hey, the techies aren’t using this language so much) is intended to sound smart. One envisions coupling years of hard-earned experienced with the biggest neural [...]
Saw the Microsoft Surface Tablet and Liked It
I was at Houston’s Galleria mall during the Thanksgiving weekend and got a chance to spend some time in both the Microsoft and Apple stores there. I had read a few articles praising the device, such as Jeff Atwood’s piece (which fairly gushes), but was skeptical. I’m not at all an Apple Fan Boy nor [...]
Gaining the Wisdom of Crowds in a Bootstrapped SaaS Company
When you’re bootstrapping a small company, sometimes it’s hard to do the things larger organizations take for granted, like making sure you’re listening well enough to your customers. On the other hand, you can take advantage of your nimble nature and the availability of some great technology to do some things that even a lot [...]
What Makes Your Business Different?
Wanted to vector you onto a business strategy post from my other blog, CNCCookbook. It goes like this: Having founded 4 Silicon Valley startups and participated in success and failure at 3 others, I’ve learned a little bit about making a business successful. I write another blog called Smoothspan that specifically discusses business strategy for entrepreneurs, but I [...]
Entrepreneurship and Leadership is About Eliminating “They”
Something to think about for Bosses, Boards, and Workers: “They” don’t think we ought to be in that market. “They” won’t give us the budget for that program. “They” insist we focus the next release on mobile and have it out by Christmas. “They” believe we have to focus on attacking the competition. “They” are [...]
The Unsustainability of Hyper Growth VC Startups
B2C Internet plays are all about fashion trends and I’m not an arbiter of fashion. I can’t tell you whether this is the right time to make millions using sock puppets to sell pet food. I can tell you how to solve a hard problem that has valuable ROI in the Enterprise. I prefer the latter as a way to maximize the value of my career investment portfolio.
How to Position a VC Startup for Acquisition: You Can’t
How do you position and maneuver your VC-funded startup for acquisition? The short answer is, “You can’t.” The VC’s didn’t sign up for an acquisition. They are seeking a billion dollar revenue opportunity because that’s what it takes to move the needle on their portfolio. If they are willing to talk about an acquisition at all, [...]
Google Still Doesn’t Get How to Beat Microsoft Office
I just saw the announcement that Google is backing away from support older Microsoft Office file formats. In many ways, this is a non-event. It only affects people that use both pre-2003 Microsoft Office and Google Apps. On the other hand, it is symptomatic of why Google doesn’t take a lot more share away from [...]
