View from Seed
MARCH 19, 2015
'If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Startups launched around seemingly mundane, insular problems glow about their abilities to change the world.
Steve Blank
MAY 19, 2015
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. These shortcuts add up and become what is called technical debt. And the size of the problem increases with the success of the company.
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Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 19, 2015
Business leaders have many tasks to accomplish and prioritizing stuff can be hard. Yesterday I wrote about the need to “ do fewer things, more often ” in which I described that frenzied world we live in and why the shiny objects and distractions stop us from living up to our true potential. Today I’d like to give that advice in more tangible terms and with a framework to think about your tasks – the funnel.
The Next Web
JULY 10, 2015
The goal of agile programming is to provide early and continuous delivery of valuable software. But it’s not so easy to implement methodologies that can deliver on the agile promise, and the blame typically lands on people: they’re just not the tech elite. Agile is an iterative software development methodology, as opposed to the more linear traditional methods.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
Startup Lessons Learned
AUGUST 31, 2015
The following is a guest post by Kirsten Cluthe and Ritika Puri from The Lean Startup Conference team Wondering what’s new in the Lean Startup community? With hundred of thousands of global practitioners, the supply of ideas and best practices is endless. What’s more challenging is finding the right information that will influence positive change within your organization.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 4, 2015
These are the tools that we know, love, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend—many of them we use ourselves. Use them to propel your startup into success and growth. Accounting software. Quickbooks: In the U.S., QuickBooks is hands-down the most popular accounting software out there. If you’re working with an accountant, chances are that they’ll ask you to use QuickBooks.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
ConversionXL
AUGUST 17, 2015
There’s a philosophical statistics debate in the optimization in the world: Bayesian vs Frequentist. This is not a new debate; Thomas Bayes wrote “ An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances ” in 1763, and it’s been an academic argument ever since. Recently, the issue has become relevant in the CRO world – especially with the announcement that VWO will be using Bayesian decisions (Google Experiments also uses Thompson sampling , which is informed by a Bayesian pers
K9 Ventures
JUNE 5, 2015
Note: This is a long post and it’s based on reflecting on a couple of years of observations in the venture industry. It’s a work-in-progress and I expect to update and refine the content in this post a bit, especially in the next week as I prepare for a talk I’m giving at the Premoney conference in SF next week. It is published here in relatively raw form.
David Cohen
SEPTEMBER 29, 2015
Alex King recently passed away after a two year battle with cancer. Alex was not one of my closest friends, but his passing hit me very hard. I was riding in a car from the airport yesterday when I got the news from his wife, and I just started crying. I got to know Alex because he was a mentor in Boulder in the early years of Techstars. He totally leaned into mentoring startups and never for a moment asked what was in it for him.
Version One Ventures
SEPTEMBER 16, 2015
Back in July, we wrote about network effects in marketplaces and social platforms and how they are critical to defensibility. In the post, we talked about the difference between direct and indirect network effects, and how they may or may not relate to virality. Since then, we have been further developing our investment thesis on social platforms and want to add more nuance to the discussion.
View from Seed
APRIL 30, 2015
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. What is it, and how should founders think about it? As a startup grows, venture debt becomes a viable option to continue that growth.
Steve Blank
MAY 6, 2015
I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Unfortunately the Build, Measure, Learn diagram is the cause of that confusion. At first glance it seems like a fire-ready-aim process. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups.
OnlyOnce
JANUARY 20, 2015
'ReturnShip Program. Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.). Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments.
Start Up Blog
JULY 2, 2015
If you haven’t already realised, cars are no longer machines, but rolling computers. This also means that cars will move from being powered by fossil fuel engines to electric motors. It’s already started, and it is going to happen much more quickly than we anticipate. I’d go as far to predict that there will hardly be a petrol car on the road in 10 years.
Startup Lessons Learned
MARCH 13, 2015
'We live today in a golden age of writing and resources for entrepreneurs. There are books on most (but not yet all) of the critical topics about startups, and of course a massive amount of information on blogs and Twitter. Elite VCs - from Brad Feld to Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel - write books and tweet constantly (or at least one does). As the ecosystem develops, this information is getting more and more specialized, which is awesome.
Jeff Hilimire
OCTOBER 8, 2015
Wow. I’m just finally getting my feet back under me after the inaugural 48in48 event last weekend. When I first conceived of this event over a year ago, I never envisioned it would be so successful. The amount of support and passion that people showed was awe-inspiring, and we did it! We built 48 nonprofit websites in 48 hours! I’ll be sharing more details soon, but I thought I’d start with sharing the weekend via some pictures I took along the way.
Hearpreneur
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
Summer is over. While many were going on vacations and traveling, business was still being completed for many entrepreneurs and business owners. The time flew by and as school starts, the weather changes and the temperature drops, we decided to connect with entrepreneurs and business owners to see how their summers went and what were some of their accomplishments.
ConversionXL
AUGUST 24, 2015
TechValidate’s research found that “30% of companies using gamification improved registration conversion rates by upwards of 50%.” But how can we use it to retain more customers? Why Gamify Customer Retention? Gamification is the “application of game-thinking in non-game contexts.” We borrow the mechanics of traditional games and apply them to uncommon concepts, like customer retention.
Duct Tape Marketing
JUNE 24, 2015
5 Ways Writing A Book Will Supercharge Your Online Presence written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. Let me tell you right off the bat, writing and publishing a book is a lot easier than you think. In September of 2014, when I became a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant, I provided a list of ten reasons why joining the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant network is a no-brainer for digital agencies.
Diego Basch
APRIL 26, 2015
A few days ago a neighbor in her eighties offered me a piece of advice regarding my six-month old son: “start a college fund.” For some reason it sounded to me as if she’d told me there’s a great future in plastics. I have no intention of starting a college fund for my son, and this post is an attempt to explain why. When I entered the workforce in the early nineties I had only one tool to increase my chances of getting the job I wanted: my resume.
Software By Rob
MARCH 26, 2015
'Between this blog, my podcast , MicroConf and the Micropreneur Academy , I’ve had the privilege of watching hundreds of entrepreneurs launch products over the past decade (even into the thousands, depending on how you count). After a while, I started to notice a pattern emerging among the pool of bootstrappers who were able to successfully replace their income, buy back their time, and quit their jobs.
View from Seed
MARCH 3, 2015
'Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast. NextView Ventures: Thinking back to before anyone knew HubSpot or the company was headed towards an IPO, where did you even start to market the company?
Steve Blank
JANUARY 21, 2015
'Just before the holidays I had coffee with Anne, an ex MBA student running a fairly large product group at a search engine company, now out trying to raise money for her own startup. She had an interesting insight: existing content/media companies were having the same problem as hardware companies that rarely made the leap to new platforms. And she had a model for a new media company for mobile and wearables.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 20, 2015
VC funding. Our perspectives on the topic wax and wane with market cycles. We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor over funding until we get huge payouts and ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we start the cycle all over again none the wiser.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
DECEMBER 8, 2015
Does it feel like everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet not accomplishing as much as everyone would like? Maybe this is why. Suppose a web server is running at 50% of its full capacity. Browser traffic doesn’t arrive in regular, smooth amounts; it comes in spurts and occasionally large spikes. Because the server is under-utilized, when a spike arrives there are spare resource to deal with the increase.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs experiencing pushback to the concept of minimum viable product. Their teams may disagree about what a product should look like, who the customer is, and which distributors to work with, but one thing they can all agree upon is: “We build high-quality products in this company. We wouldn’t even know how to go about building something ‘minimally viable.
Agile VC
JUNE 17, 2015
I’ve observed what may be an emerging trend, at least in some startups, that I find somewhat unsettling. It has an impact at an individual level, a company level, and an ecosystem level. This is not an easy topic to discuss without coming off like a jerk or a crusty old dude, so I wanted to share two quick stories about my own career below. But I think it’s important to discuss, particularly given today’s heady environment for startups.
Hearpreneur
SEPTEMBER 11, 2015
BLOGS. PODCASTS. VIDEOS. DIGITAL MARKETING. SEARCH. HACK. + GO PLUS. FREE TRIAL. LOG IN / REGISTER. MEMBERS ONLY. MASTERMIND. CONTACT. Menu. PLUS. Inspiration. Storytelling. Entrepreneur. Profiles. Biographies. Leaders. Video. MORE. START. MASTERMIND. FAQ. NEWSLETTER. HACKS. ABOUT. SITES. GUEST POSTS. CONTACT. VISIBILITY AUDIT. Search for. Sidebar. Random Article.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 6, 2015
You have an A/B testing tool, a well-researched hypothesis and a winning test with 95% confidence. The next step is to declare the winner and push it live, right? Not so fast. There are factors threatening the validity of your test, without you even realizing it. If they go unrecognized, you risk making decisions based on bad data. [Tweet It!]. What Are Validity Threats?
Duct Tape Marketing
APRIL 28, 2015
5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. If you do business mostly in your town, your marketing efforts must be hyper focused. You’re only targeting a very select group of people so, when those people go out there looking for a business in their community, you want to show up, right?
Brandanew
SEPTEMBER 17, 2015
Digital marketing has gone under some major makeovers over the last few years. From something that was associated only with eCommerce platforms to becoming an increasingly important medium for creating a brand name across industries. But as a digital marketer, how do you keep up with these ever changing trends? Here are some marketing predictions for your brand success in 2016.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 23, 2015
'by Anthony Johnson, founder and CEO of American Injury Attorney Group. Nobody likes the sound of an abrupt morning alarm dragging you from a blissful slumber and shoving you unmercifully into a new day. This type of rude awakening virtually guarantees that any side of the bed you wake up on will be the wrong one. Even if you love what you do, the temptation to hit the snooze button can be difficult to resist, especially when you didn’t get a healthy amount of sleep.
View from Seed
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process? How should an entrepreneur approach the full set of meetings and emails during a fundraise? The purpose of all VC meetings is to get another meeting.
Steve Blank
JUNE 26, 2015
I’ve been working with large companies and the U.S. government to help them innovate faster– not just kind of fast, but 10x the number of initiatives in 1/5 the time. A 50x speedup kind of fast. Here’s how. —– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 22, 2015
'Five-and-a-half years ago I first met Chamillionaire at a tech conference in LA. I saw him on stage at the event talking about how he used social media to engage audiences. This was 2009 and his understanding of audience engagement was far beyond anything I was hearing from most people at that time. I reached out after the event to learn more. We started hanging out a bit and discussing technology and entrepreneurship.
The Startup Toolkit
FEBRUARY 3, 2015
'In my first company, I tried to act extroverted, because I thought that’s what good leaders did. It was exhausting and counter-productive. I’ve found a more comfortable way of working and wanted to share a few thoughts and resources that have been helpful to me. SALES. The back-thumping, rapport-building, steak-and-strippers salesman is just one of several styles, and it’s not even the most effective.
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