Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Sales cycles matter though. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Sales cycles matter though. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. More on that in a moment. They are close to breakeven.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

But you don't have any lords and masters to answer to and the pay out goes entirely to the founders and management team. The big enterprise software companies almost all bootstrapped their way to profitability before they got their first external investors (typically via an IPO). Photo by LotusHead. So VCs will need to invest.

Software 127

Software Startup Architecture Bootstrapping 127