Steve Blank
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are world-class inventions that changed the nature of funding for startups. But don’t use such platforms prematurely. If you’re trying to crowdfund your initial idea, that almost guarantees you are working on the wrong thing.
New entrepreneurs misunderstand what Kickstarter is for. They think it’s a way to do customer discovery, to test their product’s appeal. In fact, going on Kickstarter freezes customer โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Steve Blank | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Entrepreneurship
Craig Wortmann
Just because somebody is willing to take something rudimentary from you for free is not proof you have a customer. But when someone commits financiallyโeven at a major discountโthat person is serious. And he or she is going to evaluate your product or service much more critically. That’s the kind of feedback you need.
You can also try to get upfront sales, though that’s a โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Craig Wortmann | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales
Phillip H. Kim
It’s rare that all founding partners are equally committed. How much time each will invest, what opportunity costs each will accept, and the level of ambition each has may differ. That’s especially true if one founder had the original idea and brought on the others, or if one founder devotes himself to the business full time while his co-founders hang onto their day jobs. You โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Phillip H. Kim | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Entrepreneurship
Philip Krim
Early-stage investors get excited about hearing your story, and how you’re going to change the world and why, as opposed to your saying, “Tactically, here are the next six steps we’re going to do, and this gets us to launch.” That tactical conversationโyou need to have a keen grasp of it, but it’s not what sells the dream. It’s important to build your 12- or โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Philip Krim | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital
Randy Komisar
You will do market research, but that comes later. Before trying to figure out how big your market is, you need to know that people have accepted and will continue to accept the gist of your value proposition. Otherwise, you’ll be piling assumption on top of assumption.
Content: Quotation | Author: Randy Komisar | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Market Research, Marketing / Sales
Tony Robbins
The biggest illusionย people share with me is “I started a business so I can have moreย free time.” That’s like saying you had a child so you could have more free time. That is dumb, right? It’s another reason people fail. My view is that if your business is your mission, if it’s truly something you love and live for, it’s an extension of you, it’s โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Tony Robbins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Career / Employment, Entrepreneurship, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips
Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework
In my work as an angel investor and advisor, I often find myself dishing out the same advice: Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions.
Many entrepreneurs may do this โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Sunita Mohanty | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Market Research, Marketing / Sales, Project Management
Vivek Mehra
Start-ups often take a while to get their execution right, primarily because of founder overoptimism. On the one hand, optimism is necessary to create a company. But on the other hand, that same optimism gets them into trouble by getting in the way of good judgment. Achieving the proper balance between optimism and execution takes one to two business-building cycles. You also need to balance โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Vivek Mehra | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Entrepreneurship
Bob Moore
Resilient founders donโt ask โWhich competitor are we scared of?โ Instead, it’s โWhat fully-formed company would be an existential threat to us, whether it exists or not? And if it doesnโt exist, why arenโt we building it?โ
Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy
Bob Moore
I don’t worry about competition, I worry about my own vision being wrong, which creates an opportunity for competition to succeed. If anything, I think we spent too much energy thinking about the noise everyone else was making and not enough thinking about our own place in the real market.
Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy
Do Algorithms Make Better โ and Fairer โ Investments Than Angel Investors?
Can an algorithm outperform the average angel investor? And if it can, does that also mean it will make less biased investments? Researchers put these questions to the test: They built an investing algorithm and put it head to head with 255 angel investors in a simulation, asking it to select the most promising investment opportunities among 623 deals from one of the largest European โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Charlotta Siren, Dietmar Grichnik, Ivo Blohm, Joakim Wincent, Malin Malmstrom, Torben Antretter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Finance, Venture Capital
Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane โ A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
One of the most common startup failure modes is investing in too many channels at once, and as a result not investing in any one channel enough. As an example, betting big on both SEO and virality feels like a really good idea (โWeโll grow twice as fast!โ), but in practice it rarely works. And itโs often not clear that either of these routes are โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Dan Hockenmaier, Lenny Rachitsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales
Advice is More Important โ and Overwhelming โ Than Ever. Here’s How Founders Can Cut Through the Noise
Founders shouldnโt feel that they have to go it alone. An abundance of support and high-quality advice can make all the difference in times like these, which means getting the most out of your existing network of advisors and investors has never been more important.
Advice is by no means a silver bullet. And as weโve previously noted, weโre steadfast believers that the best advice often โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship
The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital
Two years ago, our team at First Round, led by Partner Bill Trenchard and VP Platform Brett Berson, began to quietly build out a program to help our founders navigate the choppy waters of follow-on fundraising. Long had we observed founders caught off guard by what was needed to raise their Series A after having a relatively easy time at the seed stage.
Realizing how โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Bill Trenchard, Brett Berson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital
Brett Berson
When a founder says in a plainspoken manner, โWhen we close, weโre going to beโฆโ you know that they already see the money in the bank. Thereโs no extra emphasis as they make the statement, but itโs clear itโs not in question. When talking about the future of your company orient around โwhenโ and not โif.โ
Content: Quotation | Author: Brett Berson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital
Anne Dwane
Consider comedians. Comedians donโt live in a different world [than] everyone else; they just see the humor in it. Likewise, entrepreneurs see opportunity where the majority sees mature, intractable markets. Entrepreneurial epiphanies come from a beginners mind, not a jaded one.
Content: Quotation | Author: Anne Dwane | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation
The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail
From lack of product-market fit to disharmony on the team, we break down the top 20 reasons for startup failure by analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems.
Content: Article | Source: CB Insights | Subject: Entrepreneurship
9 Habits of World Class Startups
Startups that grow into transformative companies do two things: (1) they nail the basics and (2) they cultivate the right habits (core operating principles).
The first is mandatory. If you donโt get the basics right, in all probability your company wonโt succeed. A list of things we consider basics:
- Fundraising (donโt run out of capital)
- Ship (donโt just talk about it, ship it)
- Customer focus (live
โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: James Currier | Source: NFX | Subjects: Best Practices, Entrepreneurship, Management
TMT: The Unit for Success
How the right mix of experience and innovation generates a great start-up top management team.
Content: Article | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Entrepreneurship
How to Craft Your Product Team at Every Stage, From Pre-Product/Market Fit to Hypergrowth
Nikhyl Singhal advises folks at every end of the startup spectrum, from scrappy early-stage founders to heads of product at some of the biggest unicorns. Founders and product leaders at companies big and small bring him their toughest questions: When should founders hand over the product controls? What should you look for in a PM? How do you structure the team? How do you balance โฆ [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Nikhyl Singhal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management