#startups
People hate process, but process is crucial to scaling a businesses. Today, we explore the difference between good and bad processes, and ways to ensure startups can benefit from standardisation, rather than suffer.
The smiling curve represents the variation in value added across different stages in IT-related product development. Those who innovate with R&D capture a lot of value, those who package and sell capture a lot of value.
Many startup leaders shy away from the most painful problems. Whether it’s too hard to build, too hard to sell, or requires massive scale to achieve viable economics, there are many reasons to put opportunities in the too-hard basket. But tackling difficult problems is how we build differentiation in startups.
Talent is the big cost centre in tech. Increasingly, it’s compute.
Every day, a great strategy fails in a startup because a leader underinvested in trust and relationship building or unnecessarily took autonomy away from individuals or a team. This week, we explore how Joseph Nye’s framework for soft and hard power can help startup leaders to motivate their teams and enact change in their organisation.
Personality traits of startup founders are crucial to a startup’s success, and this study examined their traits in relation to firm outcomes.
Firms may acquire startups mainly to prevent rivals from doing so, even if unprofitable.
Many product managers don’t know how to prioritise technical work against new features. This is because they don’t have a deep enough understanding of the value of certain technical work. This week, we explore the ways to unify these often separate work streams.
We’re entering an exhilarating period of technological development, but most of us haven’t noticed. Grim expectations for the future pervade despite our progress towards solving many of our most worrying problems and overwhelming improvements to quality of life.
As startups grow, leaders must decide how to structure their engineering teams. This week, we explore some principles for how to divide product development efforts across multiple engineering teams.
The government has agreed to proposals that would allow Australians to opt out of targeted advertising, require search engines to “de-index” certain information about them, and draw small businesses into Australia’s privacy scheme. See the highlights for my commentary of each of the proposed rules.
A great take from DHH on Musk and the new Musk biography.
Most startups let their organisational structure organically develop as they scale, but organisational design can surprisingly greatly impact outcomes. This week, we explore how org design influences the way leaders and teams solve problems.
Leaders should create a fulfilling, enjoyable, and ergonomic workplace. But over optimising for comfort could lead to mediocre outcomes for your startup.
Validate product-market-channel fit: Before hiring an agency, brands should ensure their products and business models are suitable for platforms like Meta.
New SaaS benchmarks are in from ChartMogul. Most notable this time is time to $1m ARR and $10m ARR.
Ambitious projects need ambitious goals, but bad KPIs can do more harm than good. This week, we look at some principles for defining measurable goals within a startup.
When I talk to founders, I often hear complaints about the pace of product development. “We used to move so quickly, but now we’ve barely delivered anything all year.” This week, we look at some of the most common causes of reduced software delivery.
40% of Slack’s revenue comes from 0.65% of their customers.
It’s easy to convince potential customers to take a risk on your product if you have irrefutable proof that it will deliver results.
Startups are ideas in action. However, not all ideas are created equal. Let’s explore how startup leaders can use the concepts of feasibility, desirability, and viability to quickly and reliably validate startup, product, and feature ideas.
George runs a Fantasy Start-up Investment League, investing $100K in around 12 start-ups twice a year, and tracking results based on valuations; the aim is to maximise theoretical returns.
Startups often neglect customer retention until churn becomes a severe problem. Successful early-stage startups tend to grow quickly, and growth hides churn. But churn is usually a big problem for startups before they notice it. Churn can seriously hamper growth at all startup stages, and when a startup grows without managing customer retention, it turns into a leaky bucket. Eventually, no matter how much you sell, churn will drag you down.
Conway’s Law posits that the structure of an organisation has a direct impact on the software the organisation produces, irrespective of the individual skills and talents within the organisation. The organisation’s structure dictates how teams interact, report, and create software, influencing its outcome and design.
Data from 1,229 primary priced equity rounds in 2023.