We’re excited to see how communities on Slack are steadily growing day by day. People from different countries and backgrounds discuss a various range of topics in these communities. It is a source of valuable information and contacts we use every day at Standuply while building a Slack bot for remote Agile teams.
We decided to compose a list of Slack communities for your own good. It took us several weeks and after we the list contained more than 400 communities. You’ll see number of members in brackets.
Startups use their elevator pitch to quickly communicate their startup idea and value proposition in one or two sentences.
In our previous idea validation lessons, we focused on the importance of taking your initial idea and defining your problem, particular market, advantages, and customer needs. Now it’s time to refine those learnings into a polished Elevator Pitch and continue our startup idea validation.
The heart of every great Elevator Pitch includes 4 essential components:
As we learned, great business ideas start with a well-defined problem and the ability to identify how painful that problem is. Now, we’ll concentrate on how to effectively articulate it in your elevator pitch.
You’ve zeroed i...
Millennials have set a high bar in terms of tech and entrepreneurship, but Generation Z could be even more ambitious than its predecessor. The newest generation in the workforce grew up surrounded by Snapchat, YouTube, and Musical.ly — and Gen Zers probably had an iPad before they could walk.
A whopping 98 percent of Gen Zers own a smartphone, and this generation expects to get smartphones at a younger age than any other generation. Research indicates that 45 percent of Gen Zers are on their phones “almost constantly,” and about 62 percent of Gen Z and Millennials would rather leave their wallets at home instead of their phones.
But the differences go beyond tech. Young people in 2018 know how to work for what they want, know how the gig ec...
When you’re confident about a business model, you will have absolutely nothing holding you back.
When I call Miguel Madrid at his Austin apartment, he’s glued to his computer, handling exchange requests in the wake of fulfilling the two massively successful pre-order campaigns his company Comfortable Club ran on Kickstarter last year.
“We shipped about 15,000 items in three days,” he tells me.
Comfortable Club is an online apparel brand that delivers ridiculously cozy underwear and loungewear at half the price of retail. The idea seems to be striking a chord: between those two Kickstarter campaigns, Comfortable Club has taken in more than $350,000 in pre-order revenue from over 5,000 backers — now customers.
All of which means things have b...
There's a ton of risk in taking startup advice from "advisors".
It's not that the advisors themselves are bad people — they tend to be very well-intentioned folks. It's that most advice tends to be dispensed out of context, with very little digging on behalf of the advisor, and delivered in a way to assume what they have suggested is the gospel.
It's time to stop simply taking startup advice, and instead start calibrating whether the advice we're getting is even relevant to begin with. Because more often than not, the advice we're getting from our trusted advisors is just flat out wrong.
And what’s worse? We don’t even think to question it.
The likelihood of finding advice that is absolutely aligned with our situatio...
Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:
Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise
Phase Two - Investor Selection
Phase Three - The Pitch
Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch
Part 2 - Market Size
Part 3 - Revenue Model
Part 4 - Operating Model
Part 5 - Customer Definition ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 6 - Customer Acquisition
Part 7 - Funding
Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets
Part 9 - Traction
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Let’s dive in!
A company in the early growth stages should concentrate its efforts on a particular segment of customers whose needs most closely match that of their best current customers and not a broad universe of prospects for expansion.
Customer segmentation works for companies that started yesterday, and mature companies as well. In the...
After you figure out your big idea and before the world is obsessed with your product, you have to find your customers. And in order to find your customers, you have to create customer profiles.
An ideal customer profile — or customer persona — is a way of defining and categorizing your customers so that you can:
That’s the simple explanation. Now, per usual, let’s do a deep dive into the more complicated one.
Ideal customer profiles are important because without one, your startup is going to waste a lot of time trying to attract customers who are, at baseline, just not attracted to your product. They’...
Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another or to catch new Pokémon, and numerous companies were able to cash in on quick marketing wins.
There’s a lesson here, though. It’s most likely been a while since Pokémon GO was part of a recent conversation. Chances are that businesses are also no longer investing a significant portion of their marketing budget into the app’s in-game advertising opportunities. Short-term wins absolutely exist, but instead of spend...
As startups — unless you’re VC-funded — we don’t usually have the big marketing budgets that established companies have. We may not be able to drop thousands on a single ad campaign. But the good news is that we don’t have to. We have strengths we can tap into that can power our marketing and help us land customers.
One of those strengths is our ability to wow customers in ways that the big guys — with their bloated infrastructure and slow-moving cogs — just can’t.
Startups can use customer stories to illustrate how their products and services solve problems and make life wonderful, motivating potential customers to move forward in the buying journey.
Customer stories, or case studies, can be used thro...
On a first foray into crowdfunding, a founder might find that things are more complicated than they thought at first. What are the best practices? What type of crowdfunding should they do? Which of the many, many sites should they go with? It becomes clear very quickly that while they might be experts in their fields, they’re certainly not crowdfunding experts.
There are plenty of perspectives out there on what to do and what not to do; plenty of crowdfunding experts who are offering their advice to new entrepreneurs. (If we’re being honest, there are probably too many.)
The same issue comes up: How do you know who to trust?
So a good plan when tackling a crowdfunding campaign is to ask the experts. From other entrepreneurs who have been t...