#startups

Most startups under-invest in their product documentation — when you’re busy with reactive customer support, it’s hard to justify proactive work like documentation. However, quality user documentation can dramatically reduce support team workloads and free up product development and customer acquisition resources.

While it’s common for product managers and engineers to look for underlying problems when they receive a feature request, teams rarely apply the same scrutiny to internal operational suggestions. This week, we explore how ideas for new processes can harm a startup.

Airbnb, Figma, and a few other high-profile tech companies have abolished the product manager role within their organisations. What can startups learn from this controversial move?

The best strategies and ways of working for early-stage companies can lead to chaos and quality problems for mature companies. Similarly, early-stage companies that adopt mature ways of working can move too slowly and burn through runway, when they should be finding product-market fit.

As you build a startup, selecting the right problems to solve and coming up with effective solutions is crucial. The principles of divergence and convergence can help leaders to understand and improve the problem-solving process.

The negative impact of cognitive overload on productivity is well-established in research, but startup leaders rarely factor this into their strategy and operations. This week, we explore strategies to reduce cognitive load and improve startup productivity.

McKinsey claims that companies with great developer velocity achieve four to five times faster revenue growth, better operating margins, brand perception, talent management, and shareholder returns. This week, we explore the ways startup leaders can accelerate developer velocity.

The best startups are committed to outcomes. In an idea meritocracy, all people raise ideas, regardless of their position. Ideas are rigorously evaluated, quantified, and debated.

When growth takes off, a startup could be on its fifth salesperson, fourth marketing manager, third customer success manager, and second product manager. This week, we explore how goals can set up startup employees for success.

Cognitive overload plagues startups. People frequently bombard you with problems, ideas, questions, complaints, and requests. One tactic that works for individuals and teams is to centralise requests and ideas into queues, which you later prioritise, schedule, and complete.

Bottom-up SaaS is a sales strategy that targets individual users or teams within an organisation rather than the organisation as a whole. Given large organisations tend to buy slowly, especially when buying critical components of their digital architecture, this can accelerate growth for B2B SaaS startups.

First-mover advantage argues that businesses first to enter a market have an advantage over latecomers. This common-sense idea discourages prospective founders, giving them the impression that they are too late to tackle a problem they’ve identified because someone else got there first. While first-mover advantage exists and has helped some projects establish a lead, there are many counter-examples where very late market entrants have won. In fact, the benefit of being late into a market often outweighs the costs.

Differentiation is required to build a great startup. This means you need to do things differently. But you can’t reinvent everything as you go: founders need to recognise where it makes sense to be contrarian, and where it makes sense to adopt common practices. This week, we explore the value of contrarian approaches in startup building, and the way the introduction of AI copilots impact this principle

In B2B SaaS, it has become the norm to charge extra for single sign-on. This week, we explore the argument for why SaaS companies should resist the urge to gate this feature.

It is difficult for startup leaders to deliver major projects without neglecting their business-as-usual responsibilities. An operations team can solve this problem for startups by helping leaders with projects. This week, we talk about the best ways to set an operations discipline up for success.

Some software engineers are worried about AI taking their jobs. Some SaaS founders are excited for cheaper R&D costs, while others are fearful of the new market entrants this will empower. Today, we explore the potential impact of developer copilots, no-code, and app-generating LLMs.

A small, skilled, and effective operations team presents a startup with the opportunity to allow team leaders to focus on their business-as-usual responsibilities without the need to forgo business-changing improvements to how the business runs.

Great delegation is about handing ownership over to your team. Autonomy and accountability are the two sides of the ownership coin. Effective delegation requires a balance of these two forces. When startup leaders fail, it’s often the result of an imbalance between their autonomy and their accountability.

Teams can tackle increasingly ambitious initiatives if they learn to challenge risky assumptions with proofs-of-concept, research, and other forms of experimentation.

Sometimes, delegation leads to poorer results, and founders regret giving up certain areas of control. Other times, founders retain too much control over duties their team should own. While nobody can get this right every time, startup leaders can improve outcomes if they are strategic about delegation.

Engineers are the most important recruits for early-stage software startups, but many startups fumble their first engineering hires because they don’t understand what type of engineer they need. Even a great engineer can fail at a company they’re not suited to. Fortunately, there are a few broad principles that startup leaders can employ.

To build a startup, you need to build a great team. Recruiting can be tough for early-stage startups, though. This week, we explore how a strong employer brand can give startups a recruiting advantage.

Startups can be flippant with cybersecurity, but even small companies are targets for attack. Worse, many startups never outgrow their poor security habits. This week, we explore a few ways startups can improve their security posture.

For something that startups pay little attention to, pricing greatly impacts business outcomes like growth, revenue, profitability, and viability. But, some second-order consequences are just as important. This week, we explore how great pricing models can make it easy to prioritise initiatives within your startup.

Every startup needs a repeatable and sustainable sales model. This week, we explore the various strategies that work for SaaS products.