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8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

But the thing I am most proud of about Rob is that he has taken a company with a uniquely talented founder & CTO – Nick Halstead – and managed to build a very tight working relationship with Nick where we drive world-class product development without having the usual founder / CEO conflicts.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.

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What I’ve learned from seeing 20k company pitches

Hippoland

This is one of my favorite startup presentations of all time by Mike Cassidy on going fast. Demonstrate that you can pull the trigger on things quickly — whether it be getting customers, hiring / firing employees, or product development. And convey this in your pitch.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Software Company

Up and Running

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting. The business model.

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How to Do Market Research

Up and Running

Instead, we built a product first (that’s expensive!) and then started hunting around for the right target market (that’s usually the cheap part of product development). Do you have a plan for differentiating yourself from your competition? We neglected to do our market research. First, what’s market research?

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

The more work youve sunk into a product or vision, the harder it is to let it go. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Excellent analysis of "evolution vs. re-volution" and differentiation of team roles. I'm glad there's a 'name' for this part of the process Eric. Great post Eric.