2015

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Is This Ex-Googler’s Pre-Product Approach the Fast Track to Product-Market Fit?

View from Seed

'If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Startups launched around seemingly mundane, insular problems glow about their abilities to change the world.

Product 263
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Organizational Debt is like Technical debt – but worse

Steve Blank

Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. These shortcuts add up and become what is called technical debt. And the size of the problem increases with the success of the company.

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Why Successful People Focus on the Bottom End of the Funnel

Both Sides of the Table

Business leaders have many tasks to accomplish and prioritizing stuff can be hard. Yesterday I wrote about the need to “ do fewer things, more often ” in which I described that frenzied world we live in and why the shiny objects and distractions stop us from living up to our true potential. Today I’d like to give that advice in more tangible terms and with a framework to think about your tasks – the funnel.

LP 329
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Scaling by “delegation” isn’t good enough

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'Founding a company is a selfish act. It will consume every waking moment for the next 1-10 years. It’s an act of defiance and irreverence towards competitors and the status quo. That matches well with the life of a 20-something — fueled by the energy of youth, too young to be jaded, with no financial or social dependents. Not all selfish acts are bad ones!

Warrant 258
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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4 tips to make any team agile

The Next Web

The goal of agile programming is to provide early and continuous delivery of valuable software. But it’s not so easy to implement methodologies that can deliver on the agile promise, and the blame typically lands on people: they’re just not the tech elite. Agile is an iterative software development methodology, as opposed to the more linear traditional methods.

Agile 131
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Five case studies you'll see at the Lean Startup Conference 2015

Startup Lessons Learned

The following is a guest post by Kirsten Cluthe and Ritika Puri from The Lean Startup Conference team Wondering what’s new in the Lean Startup community? With hundred of thousands of global practitioners, the supply of ideas and best practices is endless. What’s more challenging is finding the right information that will influence positive change within your organization.

Lean 131

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30 Entrepreneurs Explain What They Love About Being An Entrepreneur

Hearpreneur

Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.

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The Lost, Ancient Guide to Better Copywriting

ConversionXL

In Ancient Greece, public speaking was the main channel for political debate and decision-making, legal decision-making, and even philosophical discussion. As it became more and more important to society, so did rhetoric, which is the art of persuasive speaking and writing. Ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero studied and practiced rhetoric… essentially boiling it down to a do-it-yourself guide.

Greece 105
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The Seeds Have Changed: An Epilogue to The New Venture Landscape

K9 Ventures

Note: This is a long post and it’s based on reflecting on a couple of years of observations in the venture industry. It’s a work-in-progress and I expect to update and refine the content in this post a bit, especially in the next week as I prepare for a talk I’m giving at the Premoney conference in SF next week. It is published here in relatively raw form.

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Goodbye Alex

David Cohen

Alex King recently passed away after a two year battle with cancer. Alex was not one of my closest friends, but his passing hit me very hard. I was riding in a car from the airport yesterday when I got the news from his wife, and I just started crying. I got to know Alex because he was a mentor in Boulder in the early years of Techstars. He totally leaned into mentoring startups and never for a moment asked what was in it for him.

Denver 105
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What Is Venture Debt and How Should Startups Use It?

View from Seed

There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. What is it, and how should founders think about it? As a startup grows, venture debt becomes a viable option to continue that growth.

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Why Build, Measure, Learn – isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work

Steve Blank

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Unfortunately the Build, Measure, Learn diagram is the cause of that confusion. At first glance it seems like a fire-ready-aim process. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups.

Lean 262
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Network effects on social platforms: why the quality of user matters

Version One Ventures

Back in July, we wrote about network effects in marketplaces and social platforms and how they are critical to defensibility. In the post, we talked about the difference between direct and indirect network effects, and how they may or may not relate to virality. Since then, we have been further developing our investment thesis on social platforms and want to add more nuance to the discussion.

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ReturnShip Program

OnlyOnce

'ReturnShip Program. Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.). Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments.

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Why petrol cars will not exist in 10 years

Start Up Blog

If you haven’t already realised, cars are no longer machines, but rolling computers. This also means that cars will move from being powered by fossil fuel engines to electric motors. It’s already started, and it is going to happen much more quickly than we anticipate. I’d go as far to predict that there will hardly be a petrol car on the road in 10 years.

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Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs - from Guy Kawasaki

Startup Lessons Learned

'We live today in a golden age of writing and resources for entrepreneurs. There are books on most (but not yet all) of the critical topics about startups, and of course a massive amount of information on blogs and Twitter. Elite VCs - from Brad Feld to Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel - write books and tweet constantly (or at least one does). As the ecosystem develops, this information is getting more and more specialized, which is awesome.

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Business Startup Checklist

Up and Running

Starting your own business may sound like an undertaking of epic proportions. The truth is, it’s not. Yes, you’re going to have to work hard, and commit to working on it at all hours of the day, but actually getting set up is simply down to making sure you’ve “checked all the boxes,” which is exactly what this list aims to help you do. I’ve broken the tasks down into manageable categories and included links that will help you complete each stage of getting started.

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50+ Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Name

Hearpreneur

The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.

Naming 104
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Bayesian vs Frequentist A/B Testing – What’s the Difference?

ConversionXL

There’s a philosophical statistics debate in the optimization in the world: Bayesian vs Frequentist. This is not a new debate; Thomas Bayes wrote “ An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances ” in 1763, and it’s been an academic argument ever since. Recently, the issue has become relevant in the CRO world – especially with the announcement that VWO will be using Bayesian decisions (Google Experiments also uses Thompson sampling , which is informed by a Bayesian pers

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48in48 in pictures

Jeff Hilimire

Wow. I’m just finally getting my feet back under me after the inaugural 48in48 event last weekend. When I first conceived of this event over a year ago, I never envisioned it would be so successful. The amount of support and passion that people showed was awe-inspiring, and we did it! We built 48 nonprofit websites in 48 hours! I’ll be sharing more details soon, but I thought I’d start with sharing the weekend via some pictures I took along the way.

Atlanta 61
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College Is (Almost) Obsolete

Diego Basch

A few days ago a neighbor in her eighties offered me a piece of advice regarding my six-month old son: “start a college fund.” For some reason it sounded to me as if she’d told me there’s a great future in plastics. I have no intention of starting a college fund for my son, and this post is an attempt to explain why. When I entered the workforce in the early nineties I had only one tool to increase my chances of getting the job I wanted: my resume.

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Marketing Your Startup: A Billion-Dollar Company’s First Marketer Reflects Back

View from Seed

'Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast. NextView Ventures: Thinking back to before anyone knew HubSpot or the company was headed towards an IPO, where did you even start to market the company?

Marketing 263
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It’s About Women Running Startups

Steve Blank

'Just before the holidays I had coffee with Anne, an ex MBA student running a fairly large product group at a search engine company, now out trying to raise money for her own startup. She had an interesting insight: existing content/media companies were having the same problem as hardware companies that rarely made the leap to new platforms. And she had a model for a new media company for mobile and wearables.

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The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping

Software By Rob

'Between this blog, my podcast , MicroConf and the Micropreneur Academy , I’ve had the privilege of watching hundreds of entrepreneurs launch products over the past decade (even into the thousands, depending on how you count). After a while, I started to notice a pattern emerging among the pool of bootstrappers who were able to successfully replace their income, buy back their time, and quit their jobs.

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5 Ways Writing A Book Will Supercharge Your Online Presence

Duct Tape Marketing

5 Ways Writing A Book Will Supercharge Your Online Presence written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. Let me tell you right off the bat, writing and publishing a book is a lot easier than you think. In September of 2014, when I became a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant, I provided a list of ten reasons why joining the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant network is a no-brainer for digital agencies.

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Why I F **g Hate Unicorns and the Culture They Breed

Both Sides of the Table

Something is rotten in tech startup land. Don’t call me a hater for saying so. It’s not that I’m anti innovation or a disbeliever in disruption or calling it a full-scale bubble or saying every darling startup is going to fail. None of those. Still. Somebody posted too many party fliers. The uninvited crowds have all turned up. The people here don’t respect your parents’ furniture, are throwing beer cans in your back yard and there’s a dude passed out face dow

Detroit 330
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MVPs and Excellence

Startup Lessons Learned

'Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs experiencing pushback to the concept of minimum viable product. Their teams may disagree about what a product should look like, who the customer is, and which distributors to work with, but one thing they can all agree upon is: “We build high-quality products in this company. We wouldn’t even know how to go about building something ‘minimally viable.

Stealth 131
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Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Does it feel like everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet not accomplishing as much as everyone would like? Maybe this is why. Suppose a web server is running at 50% of its full capacity. Browser traffic doesn’t arrive in regular, smooth amounts; it comes in spurts and occasionally large spikes. Because the server is under-utilized, when a spike arrives there are spare resource to deal with the increase.

Web 262
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41 Entrepreneurs Share Their Favorite Business Quotes

Hearpreneur

BLOGS. PODCASTS. VIDEOS. DIGITAL MARKETING. SEARCH. HACK. + GO PLUS. FREE TRIAL. LOG IN / REGISTER. MEMBERS ONLY. MASTERMIND. CONTACT. Menu. PLUS. Inspiration. Storytelling. Entrepreneur. Profiles. Biographies. Leaders. Video. MORE. START. MASTERMIND. FAQ. NEWSLETTER. HACKS. ABOUT. SITES. GUEST POSTS. CONTACT. VISIBILITY AUDIT. Search for. Sidebar. Random Article.

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After the Purchase: Optimizing Customer Retention Through Gamification

ConversionXL

TechValidate’s research found that “30% of companies using gamification improved registration conversion rates by upwards of 50%.” But how can we use it to retain more customers? Why Gamify Customer Retention? Gamification is the “application of game-thinking in non-game contexts.” We borrow the mechanics of traditional games and apply them to uncommon concepts, like customer retention.

Retention 105
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Playing Startup

Agile VC

I’ve observed what may be an emerging trend, at least in some startups, that I find somewhat unsettling. It has an impact at an individual level, a company level, and an ecosystem level. This is not an easy topic to discuss without coming off like a jerk or a crusty old dude, so I wanted to share two quick stories about my own career below. But I think it’s important to discuss, particularly given today’s heady environment for startups.

Startup 219
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7 Digital Marketing Trends For Your Brand Success in 2016

Brandanew

Digital marketing has gone under some major makeovers over the last few years. From something that was associated only with eCommerce platforms to becoming an increasingly important medium for creating a brand name across industries. But as a digital marketer, how do you keep up with these ever changing trends? Here are some marketing predictions for your brand success in 2016.

Marketing 218
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The VC Meeting Map: What to Expect After a Successful First Pitch

View from Seed

Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process? How should an entrepreneur approach the full set of meetings and emails during a fundraise? The purpose of all VC meetings is to get another meeting.

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Lean Innovation Management – Making Corporate Innovation Work

Steve Blank

I’ve been working with large companies and the U.S. government to help them innovate faster– not just kind of fast, but 10x the number of initiatives in 1/5 the time. A 50x speedup kind of fast. Here’s how. —– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute.

Lean 262
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Don’t Let Your Alarm Clock Stifle Your Productivity

YoungUpstarts

'by Anthony Johnson, founder and CEO of American Injury Attorney Group. Nobody likes the sound of an abrupt morning alarm dragging you from a blissful slumber and shoving you unmercifully into a new day. This type of rude awakening virtually guarantees that any side of the bed you wake up on will be the wrong one. Even if you love what you do, the temptation to hit the snooze button can be difficult to resist, especially when you didn’t get a healthy amount of sleep.

Product 217
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5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search

Duct Tape Marketing

5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. If you do business mostly in your town, your marketing efforts must be hyper focused. You’re only targeting a very select group of people so, when those people go out there looking for a business in their community, you want to show up, right?

Search 60