When you’re working on an early-stage startup, figuring out what your business goals should be — like what you should be achieving and at what stage — is difficult. It’s not like school, where there are clear steps that lead to the next level. Or even like traditional businesses, which have clear business goal templates. No — early-stage startup founders often struggle with the nebulous nature of their business goals.
Lucky for you, there are experts in this who have great advice about what should be achieved — and when — for early stage startups.
Here are seven business goal posts you should be aiming for as you grow your early-stage startup.
In my tech career, I had the opportunity to experience hackathons from many different angles: as a participant, an organizer, a sponsor; a process advisor and technology provider; in plenty of cases as a winner or leader of winning teams; with both startup and corporate contexts.
I’ve experienced the challenges in leading talented teams under the time pressure of a hackathon; the stress levels of pitching ideas to leadership teams. Here is my advice to those ambitious hackathon participants:
No matter the type (corporate or public one) a hackathon is always a great opportunity to showcase your talent and skills: yes, hackathons are also about team spirit, collaboration and fun but the primary motivation of the typical participant is to win...
When times are good at our startups, we think it will never change; when times are bad, we think it will never change.
Yet the only constant with startups is change.
The challenge for many Founders is that this is likely the first time we've had good or bad times, so we have yet to see a full cycle. That makes it difficult to know whether this is a short-term blip or a long-term trend. As such, we tend to grossly overcompensate by spending too much in good times and running for the hills in bad times.
We all have this fantasy that our startups constantly grow "up and to the right!" on our beautiful charts. The reality is way different. The best way to think about our startup journey is a constant cycle of "feast o...
Building a weekend side project or an MVP to validate your startup is not as hard as you think. Whether you’ve never written a line of code in your life or your GitHub profile link is in your Twitter bio, there are existing tools that you can use to build your initial product in a day and sometimes even a few hours! I’ll share some of these with you that make up my MVP toolkit.
First, let’s focus on what I think is one of the most important considerations and that is validation. Your whole goal when building an MVP is to either validate so you can continue down the path you are assuming is correct (with added conviction), make changes with new learnings (pivot idea, product, and or approach), or realize that what you assumed is not worth y...
You know that feeling you get when you just know your idea is going to be the next big thing? Well none of us had that feeling when we first started working on DashMetrics as a side-project. I’d love to rewrite history and tell you we knew our project was going to take off from the start, but this began like any other passion project. We had this hard problem of trying to make data visualization easier for the average person to understand without a dashboard looking like some hi-tech stock trading program with crazy looking candlestick charts, or a DevOps monitor displaying two-tone colored website traffic in real-time. No, we were going tackle the gnarly task of making metrics look sexy. It felt like our calling.
People rarely remember exa...
When is our ego an asset and when is it our greatest enemy?
The startup world is loaded with big egos, and if we're being honest, it kind of needs to be. We operate in one of the most insecure environments there is, where everyone is creating something out of nothing and hoping that next week they can simply make payroll. Without a little overconfidence, that's not an easy path to follow.
But that same overconfidence, when it's just pure ego, can also be our downfall. There's a point where we're no longer just confident, we're actually starting to lose our self-awareness altogether, and that's a dangerous spot. Many Founders don't even see it happening.
Early in our startups, we're forced to make a lot of big...
Earlier this year, we managed to outrank our largest competitor for one of the most competitive keywords in Google Search: presentation software. We did that with a team of 3 people, a page built in Squarespace and with 1% of their funding.
Through a 9-month period between 2015 and 2016, we invested about $70,000 in our content marketing campaigns. It was a long-term investment that has paid itself time and time again. As of today, our organic rankings in Google bring around $70,000 worth of subscriptions *every month*.
SEO is a weird science. Google has been increasingly secretive about what drives their algorithm, which has caused a lot of speculation and inaccurate content.
There’s also a lot of outdated content online....
When I first heard about DogVacay, it struck me as one of those “Airbnb of X” or “Uber of X” derivatives that swept through startup-dom over the last few years. I liked the founders, and I got the problem. There are millions of dogs and most owners leave them at some point. Current solutions to finding care for them is expensive, risky, and unsatisfying. But I wondered if this was one of those pitches that begins with a “This is a fill-in-the-blank billion dollar market…” but it’s a market so fragmented, so hyper-local, so hard to scale that there is a reason it’s so large and no one owns a meaningful percent of it.
Add to that, most of the venture-funded pet-related companies I’ve been pitched over the years, have wound up being financial...
Most startups launch with $0 in funding, but no one ever really explains how the hell they do it. We keep saying, "They bootstrapped it," as if that explains anything other than "They didn't take on investors." What the heck does that even mean? What it is intended to mean is that we find creative ways to compensate people and buy things that don't involve using cash in the bank.
We can't possibly cover every use case of how startups find resources for $0, but let's take a look at the most popular categories that people run around looking for money for and see how we make it work.
Figuring out how to compensate people is where we're often stuck first. Most of us are familiar with paying folks with equity, but that's not th...
The financials slide in our pitch deck takes our own financial projections and consolidates them into our most key metrics that potential investors care about.
Most pitch deck financial projections wind up being incredibly hard for potential investors to understand, so we're going to provide you with a killer financial projections slide template that's easy to use and will impress investors.
We always build our financial projections slides in our pitch deck backward from what questions investors have.
That way, the financials slide is only covering exactly what a potential investor wants to see — and no more!
Our "pro formas" are really just a ...