A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

article thumbnail

Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Founders almost never have a real strategy. Founders explain failures with things like “our two main competitors did [thing] to us” or “customers didn’t understand [our point of view].” The 10,000th biggest company in the world is a very successful company, as is the two-person company where the founders each take home $300k/year.

Restful 202
article thumbnail

Startup identity & the sadness of a successful exit

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

” Almost all startup founders experience a deep and prolonged sadness after selling their company , even when the sale is an outrageous success. The answer is important and fundamental for all startup founders, whether or not they ever intend to sell their company. A startup is the founder’s personal identity.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How should a startup founder value her time?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Almost no startup founder values her time properly. ” To see this, suppose you divided your time between seven companies, all operating on these terms. Consultants know exactly what their time is worth: their hourly rate. As they say, it’s how much “the market will bear.”

Founder 291
article thumbnail

Improving the worst experience

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We founders unwittingly focus on how to make the best customer experiences better , rather than making the worst experiences less worse , and sometimes this is a mistake. For the same reason that I keep recommending Bill. Another thing we can do is literally measure customer “happiness&# and intercede before it goes from bad to 32B.

article thumbnail

Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Okay okay, "Planning == Bad," but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what's worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues. Which of your business operations do you hate?

Startup 315
article thumbnail

Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Every founder frets about competition from a big company, me included. It always goes like this: I'm just a two-person operation with no budget. We scoff at their inability to innovate and for prioritizing shareholders over customers, but still we quiver in fear.

article thumbnail

Not sure?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

No, if they’re not impacting the business, they need to go, and if they can’t operate in the state of constant uncertainty and change which is endemic to startups, they can’t be here. Whenever you’re dithering, usually the correct answer is the difficult one. But your job is to do the difficult thing. But also, this.