Advice & resources
Recommended reading
- How to sell your SaaS product
- Fostering focus as a founder
- Why it's so hard to move down-market
- Should SaaS products offer free trials?
- How SaaS companies can survive recessions
- How to achieve terminal velocity
- Team rituals for continuous improvement
- Build simple, self-improving systems to reduce waste and improve momentum
Strategy for startups
Startups are idea rich and resource poor. This makes strategy and prioritisation crucial to success.
- Tackle hard problems to turn walls into moats
- Is your startup a good idea?
- Why startups should act their age
- Find the best opportunities and solutions with divergent ideation
- Great startups are idea meritocracies
- When's it too late to enter a market?
- The value of a contrarian startup hypothesis
- Stay ambitious with the help of experimentation
- Great pricing models make prioritisation easy
- How to capture value in the AI gold rush
- Grow faster with a vertical SaaS strategy
- Fixing startup problems in the right place
- Getting started with partnerships
- Improve your product by analysing the responsibilities of your users
- How to build for your market, not the next deal
- Focus on momentum to build the factory, not just the product
- Professional services for SaaS companies
- Focused solutions are best; feature requests tend to snowball
- To build or to buy (or partner): a guide for startups
- On finding and measuring product-market fit
- How roadmaps and commitments can hamper continuous improvement
- Great product companies operationalise their investments in development
- Great products are opinionated
- Use debate to achieve consensus in your strategy
- In defence of cutting scope
- When requesting feedback, be explicit about how you will interpret each score
Operations and ways of working
It takes a lot more than just a solid product to build a great startup. The way your business operates can be the difference between startup success and failure.
- Your engineering org chart is your roadmap
- How org design influences problem solving
- Great startup leaders embrace conflict and discomfort
- Why development teams slow down
- Tackling customer churn
- Product documentation 101 for startups
- Always look for the problem
- Great startups challenge industry norms
- Why startups should act their age
- Manage cognitive load to build a productive startup
- Developer velocity drives business growth
- Empower teams with measurable goals
- Reduce stress and get more done by pushing work into queues
- Running an operations function within a startup
- Why your startup needs an operations team
- How accountability enables autonomy
- Building teams is about strategically giving up control
- Cybersecurity for startups
- Team rituals for continuous improvement
- Structuring your SaaS P&L
- Simple capacity planning for startups
- DevOps is more important than product management for startups
- Cut old habits to maintain momentum and urgency
- A simple framework for employee onboarding
- Operationalise product design to empower engineers to move faster
- Build simple, self-improving systems to reduce waste and improve momentum
- Principles for structuring a product development team
- Customer success for startups — how to get started
- Why confidence should be factored into ROI estimates
- Understanding the SaaS model
- Defining initiatives with an outcome mindset
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Sales
Sales is as important to startup success as product development.
- How to choose KPIs for your startup
- Build credibility with case studies and testimonials
- Tighten enterprise sales cycles with bottom-up growth
- How to sell your SaaS product
- Strategies for recurring revenue expansion
- Optimising pricing for revenue expansion
- Should SaaS products offer free trials?
- How sales innovation can drive product-market fit
Product management
These articles are targeted towards product managers and heads of product looking to improve the ways they build products.
- Stay ambitious with the help of experimentation
- Embrace uncertainty through a “just enough” approach to product strategy
- Defining the role of a software engineer
- Product development teams need a customer feedback strategy
- Defining the role of a product manager
- Defining initiatives with an outcome mindset
- Focus on outcomes over outputs
Technology and engineering
Comments and advice on technology, product development, and software engineering.
People and culture
To build a great business you must assemble a strong team.
- Effective startup leaders cultivate soft power
- Empower teams with measurable goals
- How accountability enables autonomy
- Finding the right software engineers for your startup
- Employer brand for startups
- Simple capacity planning for startups
- How to recruit the right skills for your team
- Delegate responsibilities to systems, not tasks to people
- A simple framework for employee onboarding
- Principles for structuring a product development team
- On losing employees to customers and partners
- Defining the role of a software engineer
- Defining the role of a product manager