451 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

Choosing your next role is one of the most important investments you can make — but, unfortunately, no one hands you a ready-made toolbox for navigating big career decisions. And evaluating opportunities in the startup world — without much publicly-available information and data to grasp onto — can be an even trickier black box.

Even in a compressed job hunt, taking a few minutes to flip … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Start-Up Resources – General

Product creators like to think of what’s possible: They dream about how introducing their product into the market might change the world. This is an appropriate framing — as long as it comes with a bit of humble pie. New products don’t succeed because of the wide breadth of features they provide. Facebook isn’t successful because it allows people to build groups, host events or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gagan Biyani | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

When you’re adding new features, the question shouldn’t be, “Is this potentially useful to someone?” Instead ask, “How does this contribute to our users achieving their goals?” It’s very easy to “value add” your way straight out of product/market fit.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Understanding how a person wants to view themselves is actually incredibly valuable. It tells you a lot about how you can mirror that feeling back to them with your product while still satisfying their actual preferences.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Market/Investment

Understand the why and the how behind user behaviors, identifying which ones actually demonstrate value and which ones are potential leading indicators of a broken experience.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research

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Price resets can create significant wins. But if minor changes in price cause massive fluctuations in output-KPIs, there’s a deeper problem: Your product is not working. 

The solution is to build a more diversified, customized product and pricing model — moving away from one-size-fits-all and towards granularity. By doing this, you won’t only improve your unit economics, but your product itself will become … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dee Sahni | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

There’s typically about eight different steps in the customer jobs flow of someone starting and completing an action. You can really apply that framework to any product that you’re working on and look at the steps that you’re solving today. Look at the steps that you’re currently not solving and think about how you can solve other jobs that are ancillary to your core product. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation

One of the tricks that I learned is that at the beginning of every meeting you have with a potential buyer or someone who might use your product, always let them know the decision they need to make at the end of the meeting. It’s called submarining — you’re breaking up this long, really big decision of whether to potentially make this annual or multi-year … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Founders should recognize the difference between validating product/market fit and discovering product/market fit. If you can deeply understand what your customers are looking for, you can discover product/market fit without actually having to build a product.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

You can’t rely on your customers to figure out what to build. They can really only tell you what outcomes they’re looking to achieve.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Market Research

Widespread “good enough” hiring processes aren’t always mindful of the candidate experience — and most importantly, may not lead you to extend an offer to the best person for the role. The advice that follows from Peoplism is to intentionally examine the pieces of your hiring cycle that are already in place (and perhaps even be able to trim down some steps in your current … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Amber Madison, Liz Kofman-Burns | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Peoplism

If you’re going to be successful as an entrepreneur, the biggest thing is being able to take in conflicting feedback from all these people, many of whom are jaded or have bad habits, and some who are spot on. You have to be able to sit there and distill that information into something valuable.

Content: Quotation | Author: Nat Turner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

If you can’t think out of the box, make the box bigger. Start by relaxing constraints.

Content: Quotation | Author: Howard Morgan | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Innovation

We’ve found is that the most high-impact managers make a regular habit of setting aside moments of reflection, putting in the deliberate time and work it takes to gain a new perspective on their teams, their cross-functional relationships and their own effectiveness from a higher altitude.

It got us thinking — there’s certainly plenty of content on the questions managers should be asking others, whether it’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

Adam Grant agrees that brainwriting is best, pointing to evidence that groups generate fewer and worse ideas while brainstorming than when the very same people are working on their own.

“If you know the group is nervous about ego issues or status hierarchies you should collect the ideas anonymously. It’s about leveraging the power of the group for idea selection, where people are actually better collectively, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Most folks aren’t honest with their feelings because they get unsolicited advice or intrusive questions — you can try to stop that cycle on your team with the culture you create and the micro-actions you take.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jessmina Archbold | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

If you have to ask if you’re in love, you’re probably not in love. The same goes with product/market fit — if you have to ask if you have it, you probably don’t.

Content: Quotation | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In startups, there will be times you need to persist, and times you need to pivot — therein lies the founder’s dilemma. To get conviction on the right path, validate your gut feelings with logic and research.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tara Viswanathan | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

At the end of the day, the only thing that actually matters is the impact our work has on our company, our customers, our colleagues, and our professional development. And the only way to stay on top of that is to hold ourselves accountable to our higher-order goals with as much enthusiasm as we have for the dopamine rush of reaching inbox zero.

The best leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Brie Wolfson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development