Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 13, 2012

Every plan must start with the problem you are solving, not a description of your company and product. This is not the place for a detailed product specification, but an explanation of how and why it works, including a customer-centric quantification of the benefits. Explain the business model. Solution and benefits.

Business Plan 283

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 283

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. 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. July 15, 2009 11:18 PM markmontgomery said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2011

As a member of the local Angel group selection committee, I’ve seen a lot of startup presentations to investors, and I’ve never seen one that was too short - maybe short on content, but not short on pages! Solution product & technology. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs.

Elevator Pitch 234

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 234

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 19, 2010

As a member of the local angel group Selection Committee, I’ve seen a lot of startup presentations to investors, and I’ve never seen one that was too short - maybe short on content, but not short on pages! Every startup needs both a business plan and an investor presentation, completed before you formally approach any investors.

Elevator Pitch 235

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 235

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 13, 2016

As a startup advisor and investor, I recommend a pitch deck with about 10 slides backed up with a written business plan of approximately 20 pages, both containing quantified answers to the following key questions. What is the business problem you are solving? How does your business model make money?

Sweat Equity 120

Sweat Equity Advisory Board Liquidity Event Startup 120

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 13, 2011

Every plan must start with the problem you are solving, not a description of your company and product. This is not the place for a detailed product specification, but an explanation of how and why it works, including a customer-centric quantification of the benefits. Explain the business model. Solution and benefits.

Business Plan 290

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 290

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Gust

AUGUST 19, 2012

As a member of the local Angel group selection committee, I’ve seen a lot of startup presentations to investors, and I’ve never seen one that was too short – maybe short on content, but not short on pages! Solution product & technology. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs.

Elevator Pitch 146

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 146

Gust

AUGUST 5, 2012

Every plan must start with the problem you are solving, not a description of your company and product. This is not the place for a detailed product specification, but an explanation of how and why it works, including a customer-centric quantification of the benefits. Explain the business model. Solution and benefits.

Business Plan 182

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 182

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 22, 2010

Every plan must start with the problem you are solving, not a description of your company and product. This is not the place for a detailed product specification, but an explanation of how and why it works, including a customer-centric quantification of the benefits. Explain the business model. Solution and benefits.

Business Plan 186

Business Plan Exit Strategy Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 186

Agile VC

AUGUST 1, 2012

The best example of this was Facebook’s disclosure during their IPO process back in May that “mobile” usage was increasing significantly but FB’s monetization of mobile users lagged considerably. Gaming is still the largest category, where you see multiple mobile game companies with $100M+ revenue (e.g.

Mobile 160

Mobile Advertising Bandwidth Web 160

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

In an over-funding environment companies are encouraged to eschew revenues in a land grab to acquire eyeballs, clicks, page views or whatever other vanity metrics give VCs the false comfort that they’re sitting on a gold mine. IPO markets had burned an entire cycle of retail stock investors and many institutional investors to boot.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. But with so many investors still licking their wounds from the dot-com bust, many focused on proven business models, such as advertising or e-commerce. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Investors see a lot of pitches.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action. Second, their story illustrates a key Lean Startup idea: proving the business in micro-scale. Alas, even brilliant marketing adorned with a giant picture of me cant fix the wrong product.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

But once the company has honed in on a strong value proposition and found initial product-market fit, what is the best approach to scaling it? With over $1 billion in revenue, 2000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, Akamai has become a role model for scalable start-ups. After all, scaling is hard.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Up and Running

MAY 1, 2014

Business plans should be short and concise. The reasoning for that is twofold: 1) you want your business plan to be read (and no one is going to read a 100-page business plan), and 2) your business plan should be accessible, something you continue to use and refine over time. Products and Services.

Business Plan 163

Business Plan Forecast Balance Sheet Distribution 163

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. No business model, either. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. And Google? all about luck.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Up and Running

APRIL 28, 2015

Your business model has to truly be similar to the company you are referencing. If you aren’t solving some problem in the world, you are going to have a long uphill climb with your business. Finally, you get to dive into describing your product or service. Slide 5: Revenue model. Slide 2: The problem.

Forecast 60

Forecast Hockey Stick Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 60

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Constructing a working business model is a form of ecosystem design.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Professor VC

JUNE 20, 2011

I took a look back at our original financial model we presented to VCs in 2004. The business model (OEM through broadband and home security companies for mass distribution) if not specific product functionality has remained largely the same. offering to invest $75K if we could find another $250K by September 30, 2005.

San Jose 28

San Jose Angel Investor Term Sheet Venture Capital 28

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, uselinks to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages withunintrusive keyword-based ads. Microsofts originalplan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things.Their current business model didnt occur to them until IBM droppedit in their lap five years later.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

Like SaaS products themselves, we now intend for these laws to be periodically refined through major releases to reflect the changing landscape of the SaaS world. Save Asia for post-IPO Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter - Have only one version of the code in production. I particularly agree on points #2 and #4.

Software Review 48

Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

infochachkie.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Lousy Products Might Break Your Bones – But A Name Will Seldom Hurt You John Greathouse – Posted in: Entrepreneur , Strategic Planning. When selecting your company and product names, consider the following: Uniquely Familiar. Correspondingly, your products’ names contribute to, but do not dictate, their success.

Naming 40

Naming Technical Review Product Product Name 40

online.wsj.com

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

Consumer Products. Paper & Forest Products. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghoshs research. Less than 1% are currently in IPO registration.

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

While customers will be willing to try your product, they think two steps ahead. What do you think of Facebook’s privacy model? Juno IPO’d while Joel was there, and it was the first “broken&# IPO of the dot-com era. The role of Product Managers at Technology Companies. 15 minutes.

Software Review 285

Software Review Software St. Louis API 285