Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
Burnout cultures exhaust us through the week and force us to recharge during our time off. Healthy cultures provide daily space to refuel. - Adam Grant
There are few companies that have successfully scaled taste better than MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). Well, not exactly a company, as they explained to me when I visited their Brooklyn-based workshop set across the street from a skate park, but an “artist’s collective that happened to raise venture capital.” Or, according to their self-selected... See more
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
- Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are
Fictive Kin • Pmarchive · How much funding is too little? Too much?
I like to say the devils and the details and the devils and how you execute. And so coming back to how do we execute just a little bit differently and some of the learnings there where I think the first time we started growth, we could have been more user-centric and been a lot more hypothesis driven. We were following a lot of best practices that... See more
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Not all best practices fit for all orgs. Right-size and test when trying on your ops!
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
A new business is complicated. It involves weaving together suppliers, partners, customers, processes, technology, leases, employees, logos, capital and more.
Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward.
Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward.
Customer traction is the hard part
The median bootstrapped B2B SaaS company currently spends around 90% of its annual recurring revenue on costs—25% on go-to-market strategy and execution, 24% on research and development, 15% on administrative and miscellaneous expenses, 13% on website hosting and implementation, and 10% on customer retention. Each of these categories of cost is now... See more
Will Manidis • Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups
On the evolving spend of startups
Momentum is Everything
Most founders implicitly realize that in order to get a startup off the ground you need to will it into existence and keep momentum high.
This is good for the startup but it’s also essential for the founder — when momentum is high most founders feel more optimistic about what they’re building, which is obvious to anyone they’re... See more
Most founders implicitly realize that in order to get a startup off the ground you need to will it into existence and keep momentum high.
This is good for the startup but it’s also essential for the founder — when momentum is high most founders feel more optimistic about what they’re building, which is obvious to anyone they’re... See more