#startups
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.
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.
Well, text-based user interfaces are back in vogue thanks to ChatGPT, and to many users and builders, this is disappointing. Why would we want to throw away our long history of graphical user interfaces for inferior, difficult-to-use, text-based interfaces?
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.