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How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

Lately I’ve been having to say things I thought I’d never have to remind people, like, “getting to positive gross margin in several territories is a very low bar to claim success” or “profitable excluding marketing costs” is not actually a real thing. But not doing basic research makes no sense.

Startup 150
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Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. We finally settled on a $1.99 Just put in your credit card.

Demand 167
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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

My belief is that these lean startups will achieve dramatically lower development costs, faster time to market, and higher quality products in the years to come. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

It seems many startups these days are under a lot of pressure to outsource their development organization to save costs. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).

CTO 168
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Waves of technology platforms

Startup Lessons Learned

It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. I cant really imagine how much it cost our "grownup" counterparts at other dot-com startups to get their first app up and running. Looking back, that was a special moment.