Thanks to Kate Kendall for inviting me to give a talk at the inaugural IndieConf – a conference for startups doing things ‘the indie way’ (self-interested plug: my post on startups vs SMEs vs indie businesses). It was a great conference with some interesting and vastly more qualified speakers than I. For the purpose of… Continue reading
Much of my time chatting to early stage founders is about how I can help them – often times, it’s not something I can provide direct advice about, but I might know someone who would be helpful. This is a post written for ease of future reference about how I think about intros, and how… Continue reading
I find myself returning frequently to the concept of (tech) small businesses versus startups. A lot of that is because it seems like everyone in the ecosystem – founders, businesses, suppliers, partners, investors and larger stakeholders (government) – seems to forever be confused about the differences. At the same time, we’re seeing a huge rise… Continue reading
One of the most often conflated things in the ‘startup ecosystem’ is the difference between a small business (I often say SME – small to medium enterprise (in the US they would say ‘SMB’)) and a startup. It’s hard to wrap your head around, and while there are some frequent offenders (coughgovernmentcough), I’ve also seen… Continue reading
People love to talk about bootsrapped startups. How they succeeded ‘despite the odds’ by bootstrapping, how they ‘rejected traditional forms of capital’, or simply that they didn’t need any money, so why take on investors? At least 50% of the time, it was totally the wrong decision for them and the business. To start, let’s… Continue reading
I was shocked to see in the 2017 Startup Muster report this chart about the support that people said they needed: So a lot of people (it was a multi-select question if I remember correctly) said that what they needed was media exposure or social media exposure. 99.999% of the time, that’s totally and utterly wrong…. Continue reading
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
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