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
I’m often reminded of Tim Kastelle’s post We Don’t Need More Mousetraps!. It’s a great post on the trap of building policy for innovation ecosystems and the importance of building things people want. The post talks about a fictional country that only makes mousetraps called Mousetrapia. Thanks to their superior education system, Mousetrapians are the absolute… Continue reading
I found myself writing to a great young founder the other day with a perspective. They’d had some tough times recently, having to reduce the size of the team and getting feelings that traction and product/market fit were more difficult than initially anticipated. This is a bit of a copy/pasta and paraphrase of the advice… Continue reading
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how the Australian (in particular) investment market is segmented. This is mostly in response to talking to people who are thinking about raising money, and wanting a better way of easily communicating my perspective and philosophy as it develops. In the last few years, Australian venture… Continue reading
Today’s gripe comes from everyone’s favourite buzzword du jour, growth hacking. As defined by the wizards at Wikipedia: Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure Now, you might think, that sounds quite a lot like marketing? A good marketer uses… Continue reading
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison Innovation is a remarkably trendy and popular topic of late, but don’t let that deceive you. Companies have always needed to be responsive to their environment, regardless of whether that means process optimisation, new products, or new customers. The ones who were… Continue reading