When I was in Boston, I got a really good piece of advice, almost by accident. We were at a dinner held by JP Morgan to watch the recording of an episode of a webseries they do with sports stars talking about money. It was actually slightly more interesting than you might think, but nothing… Continue reading
In the early days of a product, you spend you life trying to keep everything alive. You continuously fight fires, whether technical or business related. Eventually, you get to the point that things are stable, and your plates are all spinning – customers are continuing to register and stay around, you service is keeping an… Continue reading
This last week I’ve been in Boston for the Forbes 30 Under 30 conference. I went to the regional Asia version a few months back, and had a great time so figured I’d head to the ‘global’ edition, which attracts some 3-4,000 people. Below are some of my observations, both from the conference itself and… Continue reading
When you’re building technology, you need to stay close to your customers. You need to understand how those customers experience the problems you’re trying to solve, and how they use your product to solve that problem. You need to be there to hear about what they don’t like about it, so you can fix it…. Continue reading
A challenge in the early days of every business, particularly those selling to other businesses larger than they are, is that nobody likes to be someone’s biggest customer, or take a risky bet. When I started in the consulting field, we were insanely high risk for a client to choose over an incumbent (big agency,… Continue reading
Every now and then I see this weird confusion about why people buy stuff. People buy stuff to solve problems. They buy stuff for a “job to be done”. Startups are no different – people choose to buy (or not buy) their products based on whether they (a) experience the problem the startup aims to solve,… Continue reading
In the early days, startups are all about focus. You need to focus on who your customers are, their problems, your technology problems, your marketing problems, and your hiring problems. Your job as a startup, and particularly a founder, is to build shit people want. It will be very hard, because if it was easy,… Continue reading
One of the most important lessons I ever learned was that people almost always underprice their products and services. I learned the lesson first in services running a consulting company, which was an extremely painful mistake to make. We initially appallingly undercharged, and while it had the effect of letting us pick up some early… Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned in the past, being a founder is a shitty, often thankless job. There is a lot of rhetoric in the press about how great and fun it is to be a founder – captain of your own ship1Self-employment is not nearly as fun as others would make it seem, having been on… Continue reading
One of the sayings I feel I have to tell young founders over and over again is that you should never outsource core competencies. I’m a bit of a weird case. I am a solo founder, but I’m also not fully “tech” nor am I fully “not”. It’s tempting for a person who becomes passionate… Continue reading