Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 18, 2020

In addition to being the startup entrepreneur, there are other key roles where Boomers can be a force in driving successful startups, in concert with leaders from Gen-X and Gen-Y: Early-stage angel investors. Member of the Advisory Board. Manage customer service. Marketing and sales to Gen-Y customers.

Advisory Board 312

Advisory Board Startup Dividend Angel Investor 312

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

Most early stage startups tend to do well in this area because entrepreneurs generally launch their startups believing they have a great product idea. A well-developed product architecture helps a startup to achieve rapid market/product fit by successfully appealing to customers (users). Team Architecture.

Framework 118

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 118

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 1, 2014

In addition to being the startup entrepreneur, there are other key roles where Boomers can be a force in driving successful startups, in concert with leaders from Gen-X and Gen-Y: Early-stage Angel investors. Member of the Advisory Board. Manage customer service. Marketing and sales to Gen-Y customers.

Entrepreneur 266

Entrepreneur Advisory Board Dividend Angel Investor 266

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

Most early stage startups tend to do well in this area because entrepreneurs generally launch their startups believing they have a great product idea. A well-developed product architecture helps a startup to achieve rapid market/product fit by successfully appealing to customers (users). Team Architecture.

Framework 104

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 104

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

Partly out of the fact that in 1 week I depart for England to speak at LeWeb, attend our DataSift board meeting and generally make myself available to the DataSift team to meet their customers, partners and employees. I would say the norm for many early-stage companies is somewhere between 6-10 in-person meetings per year.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

Build qualified advisory board. If you can convince a couple of domain experts, or a couple of experienced executives to join your board and be your advocate, that’s traction. For a business, you must define the absolute minimum features you need to satisfy the customer problem, and test it in the market.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Entrepreneur Sweat Equity CTO Hire 281

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards. Why wouldn’t you?

Advisory Board 40

Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

For startup founders, it’s never too early to start thinking about putting together a target market advisory board. The target market advisory board should consist of 2–4 industry veterans who have connections to C-level execs and VPs in your target market. Never discount the power of a warm intro.

Advisory Board 48

Advisory Board Sweat Equity Marketing Vertical 48

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 3, 2012

There are unknowns at every turn, leading product development, attracting customers, managing cash, and dealing with human resources and office politics. Add an advisory board or experienced mentor to reality-check your financial projections, timeframes, and milestones before you publish them.

Advisory Board 240

Advisory Board Forecast Early Stage Product Development 240

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 31, 2012

Build qualified advisory board. If you can convince a couple of domain experts, or a couple of experienced executives to join your board and be your advocate, that’s traction. For a business, you must define the absolute minimum features you need to satisfy the customer problem, and test it in the market.

Intellectual Property 260

Intellectual Property Sweat Equity CTO Hire Fractional CTO 260

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to “just get it done” in the early stages of a startup. Does customer communication need to change ?

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 20, 2011

There are unknowns at every turn, leading product development, attracting customers, managing cash, and dealing with human resources and office politics. Add an advisory board or experienced mentor to reality-check your financial projections, timeframes, and milestones before you publish them.

Advisory Board 232

Advisory Board Startup Forecast Early Stage 232

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 17, 2011

Build qualified advisory board. If you can convince a couple of domain experts, or a couple of experienced executives to join your board and be your advocate, that’s traction. For a business, you must define the absolute minimum features you need to satisfy the customer problem, and test it in the market.

Intellectual Property 253

Intellectual Property Sweat Equity CTO Hire Fractional CTO 253

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 22, 2010

Build qualified advisory board. If you can convince a couple of domain experts, or a couple of experienced executives to join your board and be your advocate, that’s traction. For a business, you must define the absolute minimum features you need to satisfy the customer problem, and test it in the market.

Intellectual Property 222

Intellectual Property Sweat Equity CTO Hire Fractional CTO 222

Small Business Force

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

You have some actual customers, driving real revenue and maybe even have an employee or two. And now here you are, all alone, trying to figure out how to take that concept, those few customers, that couple of employees and create a sustaining, scalable business. When customers and employees are depending on the decisions you make.

Early Stage 32

Early Stage Advisory Board Technical Review Web Development 32

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

We are purpose-built to not only invest pre-product but also to help accelerate your path to product-market fit with our decades of entrepreneurial and investing experience along with our active CXO advisory board. Either you’re a mega fund or an early stage fund, being caught in the middle is a place you don’t want to be.

Stealth 79

Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 12, 2010

There are unknowns at every turn, leading product development, attracting customers, managing cash, and dealing with human resources and office politics. Add an advisory board or experienced mentor to reality-check your financial projections, timeframes, and milestones before you publish them.

Advisory Board 125

Advisory Board Startup Forecast Early Stage 125

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 10, 2016

At the same time, enterprises today can leverage the cloud to make faster, more efficient software changes; use social media to connect with customers; deploy predictive analytics to determine what their customers will want and connect and control devices via a central point with the Internet of Things (IoT).

Customer 100

Customer Advisory Board Asia Internet 100

Small Business Force

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

You have some actual customers, driving real revenue and maybe even have an employee or two. And now here you are, all alone, trying to figure out how to take that concept, those few customers, that couple of employees and create a sustaining, scalable business. When customers and employees are depending on the decisions you make.

Early Stage 20

Early Stage Advisory Board Technical Review Employee 20

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

BeyondVC

JANUARY 6, 2018

We built out our CXO advisory board and further cemented our Fortune 500 relationships to help our portfolio cos scale from “founder-market” fit to product market fit in an accelerated timeframe ( meet our advisors ). The talent base is improving, the customers are here, and the west coast VCs are paying attention.

Cloud 60

Cloud Cofounder Portfolio Advisory Board 60

Hunter Walker

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

That said, there are three types of advisors that I don’t see as commonly utilized by early stage startups — at least the ones we’re not advising. The “Customer Council” Advisor. A sales and marketing tactic as much (or even more) than a customer development one, try setting up a Customer Council Advisory Board.

Advisory Board 150

Advisory Board Equity Vesting Startup 150

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 17, 2016

How they think and feel; their sense of community; and their appetite to share their opinions are all creating new paradigms for how any business, regardless of size, connects with its customers. According to our research, millennials ardently avoid calling customer service. Old school customer service rules haven’t changed.

Customer 100

Customer Singapore Advisory Board Asia 100

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 7, 2013

Thankfully, the availability of other unconventional funding options is also increasing, providing capital to entrepreneurs whose businesses may grow to become long-term customers. Such programs help early-stage companies get the capital they need to fuel growth, especially when banks aren’t lending.

Advisory Board 229

Advisory Board Entrepreneur Portland Oregon 229

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

For example, if you’re an early stage company dealing with complex regulation (think Uber in transportation, Oscar in healthcare, LendingClub in finance), we have people who can help. It’s unique to the startup community because of the access it provides to people who are not typically interacting with startups.

New York 114

New York Technical Review Networking Advisory Board 114

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. I got to spend time inside his company while I was using their software to analyze early-stage ventures. And that’s where the problem was. A Pivot a Week.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

The VP of Sales and I flew to Providence to convince Andy van Dam at Brown to join our company, or at a minimum lead our advisory board. Oh, and since it was not code compatible with anything, we were going to have to port all the key scientific applications our customers needed (as soon as we figured out who they were.)

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

What startup stage do they typically invest in? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? What Startup Stage Do they Invest In? Certain VC’s like the new class of Super-Angels and small VC funds specialize in the early stage of a startup where you are searching for a business model. Is Your VC Founder Friendly?

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Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

You are on your own and nobody supports you because it’s hard for them to see what you see and feel the excitement that you feel in the early stages. Even if your startup is a one-man show, you can find an intelligent outside mentor or advisory board member to bounce ideas off. Meet customers online.

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Advisory Board Leadership Early Stage Lean 210

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 29, 2018

The book is also full of very practical early-stage marketing advice so you can break through the noise. Step Three: You need to think big or you will quickly fall into the pattern of being a first-stage entrepreneur (I describe the stages of entrepreneurship in this Lucky7 post ). You are really going to need them.

Cofounder 48

Cofounder Austin Technical Review Advisory Board 48

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 19, 2018

Earlier this year at the FUND Conference in Austin, Texas, over 100 startups presented their early-stage companies in front of hundreds of investors and industry leaders. We proudly choose to be a collaborative organization willing to share our components and discoveries with partners and customers around the world. Our people!

Texas 73

Texas Advisory Board Startup Angel Investor 73

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

So Leon and I have met numerous times, about marketing strategy and the music one is that developed after Chicago became a customer. He’s a conduit to it and first of all he’s a perfect customer for this. And that’s really important for an early stage start-up to be able to move as fast as possible etc.,

Cofounder 199

Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

My advisory board matters – if you mention you’re advisors too much, there’s something wrong with the team. Get out there and ask potential customers. The market is huge, 1% will be my customers – dominate a small market rather thank taking a small piece in a big market. Off course they think it’s great.

Advisory Board 101

Advisory Board NDA Entrepreneur Early Stage 101

David Teten

NOVEMBER 17, 2011

It’s very powerful to have a model that you can email to everyone in the firm, because then everyone sees clearly that you’re communicating the exact same message to the whole team (including outside consultants and the advisory board, if any).

Employee 155

Employee IRR Startup Mexico 155

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Building An Effective Board For Your Startup written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Brad has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. He’s also an author of a number of books including — Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors.

Startup 86

Startup Cofounder Early Stage Founder 86

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

He is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School , and an angel investor hailed as one of New York City’s top 100 early-stage investors. What do you do with an advisory board?” Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111 Filed under: Customer Development.

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Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York 120