Startup Advice
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Startup Advice
I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
Dan Rosetwitter.comWe don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them based on where they are currently, not based on what they could become. The same is true for how we judge people.
Things I'm thinking about
We make purchases with emotion, but justify them with logic.
And that logic gets pieced together over time in what Eugene Schwartz called the Stages of Awareness.
He covered this in his classic book Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966.
He broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:
The Most Aware: They’re motivated to solve the problem... See more
And that logic gets pieced together over time in what Eugene Schwartz called the Stages of Awareness.
He covered this in his classic book Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966.
He broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:
The Most Aware: They’re motivated to solve the problem... See more
Superhuman
To help you make it through the darkness, here’s a series of concrete actions you can take today to try to turn things around:
- Talk to more users (actually do it)
- Change your target audience/ICP
- Change your positioning/messaging/pitch
- Try a “kickstarter” to get the word out
- Find something that is working and pivot fully to that
- Give it a bit more time
- G
Lenny Rachitsky • What to Do if Your Product Isn’t Taking Off
If you're the CEO of a fast-growing startup, the mistake you'll make in the next year that you'll regret most will probably be a hiring mistake. Possibly hiring someone established, which you'll feel you should do now you're getting big, and which VCs will strongly encourage.
Paul Grahamtwitter.comGenerally, teams think about switching costs as the amount of time and money needed to install one solution and remove another. But true switching costs are much more than that: they include the politics, emotions, career ambitions, esoteric business processes, competing priorities, and sheer laziness that all favor the existing solution. Those... See more
Jake Fuentes • Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it
Separate what you can control from what you can’t. It’s a small way to lift some weight off your shoulders. Take 15 minutes to create a list of everything that you’re worried about. Then label each one as a ‘within’ or a ‘beyond’ to see your sources of stress and anxiety laid bare
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
For me, 'big' means having the ability to take a chance on an idea that others may not understand or even see as valuable. My team was excited about the idea of using artificial intelligence to help us develop web content and make it more engaging for users. Others in the company were skeptical, but we took a chance on it."