Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 27, 2015

All investors want to see real evidence that the dogs will eat the dogfood before they give any credibility to your hockey-stick projection curves. Maximum agility for required pivots. Startups need the agility to test various business models and positioning messages.

Hockey Stick 120

Hockey Stick Startup Stealth Agile 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Not only did their sales curve look like a textbook case of a VC-friendly hockey stick, but their Lessons Learned funding presentation was an eye-opener.). They used Customer and Agile development to search for a scalable and repeatable business model to become a large company. Take No Prisoners.

Hockey Stick 299

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 299

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

What matters is proving the viability of the company’s business model, what investors call “traction.&# Of course this is not at all true of many profitable small businesses, but they are not what I mean by startups.) People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Do not talk about disruptive business models; the ones who disrupt don’t talk about it. They are too busy disrupting. Optimization is by nature agile: CRO yields new data for the team to prove that whatever the organization did was good or bad. It’s a wave—the agile Tsunami. You can’t see it.)

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114