For many first-time founders, pulling an idea off the ground might look easy, yet a lot of them fail in their first few attempts.
According to CB Insights, more than 50% of startups fail in their first four years. 42% of them do because of a lack of market need, 29% run out of cash and 14% ignored their customers.
Founders learn about this process gradually, and often the hard way. The counter-intuitive nature of startups makes it difficult for first-time founders to have the right guesses at first.
It is clear that this stage was a legitimate challenge within the startup community — and it needs to be addressed.
Conversations were had and attentions were focused on fleshing out the very best way to assist these fledgeling startups to mark...
The only product that makes sense right now is the one that makes dollars.
We all want to believe that in the formative days of a startup, all we should be building is the exact product vision in our heads. We should be turning a blind eye to anything that doesn't directly contribute toward that vision. Everything else is a distraction... right?
While that does sound wonderful, it's not only rare, it's also somewhat delusional. The reality is most startups (who aren't funded) need to focus on building stuff that makes money, regardless of whether it's directly contributing to the product vision. And guess what? Sometimes that winds up being the best product investment we can make.
Let's start with the obvious — we need to get...
Almost nobody rode the “Web 2.0” wave better than Reid Hoffman. He was the most prolific early investor backing nearly every major hit that would go on to become public except Twitter, and he created the second largest company to come out of the social media wave, LinkedIn.
It all came from one insight: The consumer Internet wasn’t over after the dot com crash. And Hoffman is the only person I’m aware of who never stopped believing it. Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and a lot of the early Web 2.0 investors have all admitted there was at least a time they went bearish… but not Hoffman.
He was planning on taking a vacation after PayPal sold to eBay, when he noticed everyone else had moved on to cleantech and other areas. You spend your life as ...
Warning: This isn't intended to be a political statement. It's intended to explore the entitlement of earnings by Founders, regardless of where in the world they live or what system of government they are in.
Do successful Founders deserve the profit for their invested risk?
For a long time, this question seemed almost rhetorical, but in the past few decades, the entitlement of Founder profit in the world has come under serious scrutiny. As the cultural and economic divide among workers continues to increase, the notion of who "deserves" profit has become incredibly volatile.
Not surprisingly, I'm wildly biased on this topic because I’m so passionate about startups! I believe Founders earn and deserve every penny of the profit they make, a...
Every single time I look up the value of the AOL Time Warner merger it shocks me. And I’ve covered this industry for nearly 20 years. $350 billion. The biggest merger in history, at the time. Steve Case– the man who was the architect of it, who stepped aside from his CEO job in order to make the deal happen– is not surprisingly a man who got used to be considered crazy.
It took AOL seven years of evangelism and partnerships to get to some 200,000 customers and an IPO of some $70 million. When the company started, it was illegal for commercial entities to be hooked up to the Internet, only 3% of the country was online, and Sears was one of the most innovative Internet pioneers. Sears!
The story of the early days of AOL as told to us by Steve...
Craig Newmark is the man behind craigslist —a website that today is among the 40 most visited websites in the world, is found in 70 countries, and can best be compared with Exchange and Mart in the United Kingdom.
Craig started craigslist back in 1995, and today he is reportedly worth more than DKK 3 billion. However, the last impression you get when talking to him is that of an entrepreneur guru. On the contrary, Craig is completely down to earth, something of a nerd (his word), and deeply passionate about using technology to make the world better.
He no longer heads craigslist but has dedicated his life to charitable work via Craig Newmark Philanthropies, which supports and connects nonprofit communities and drives powerful civic engageme...
How do you know if the advice you just got from an investor on your fundraise was any good?
(Spoiler: it's probably terrible advice, and you're about to waste a lot of time following it.)
We review thousands of pitch decks at Startups.com, and as part of that process, we hear countless tales of Founders having gotten "really strong advice" from an investor they talked with about their deal. They get super hung up on changing everything to accommodate this feedback.
My question is always, "Who was the investor, and what were their qualifications to give that advice?"
Whenever I ask, the Founder says "Well... they are an INVESTOR!" as if claiming that title is tantamount to irrefutable knowledge. Look, I invest in the stock market, but that d...
To say that Rand Fishkin is the ‘Godfather’ of the SEO industry may not be technically true, but it kind of feels that way.
He’s been a thought-leader in the digital marketing and search space since as long as I’ve been in the game (12+ years for me which is an eternity in anything digital these days), so if there were a Mount Rushmore of SEO (or digital marketing), he’d probably be on it.
He’s been showing people like me how to slay the dragon that is Google for years, and lots of folks owe their ability to have careers in the digital marketing space directly to his efforts.
Not only that, but he also Co-Founded a pretty well-known SaaS company called Moz along the way (with his Mom I might add), and built it into one of the best and most ...
How can we tell the difference between quitting and just "letting go" of our startup?
The outcome is the same, but how we feel about each path dramatically changes how we approach it. When we think about "quitting," we feel like a big loser. "Quitting is weak!" we may tell our alpha brains. We associate quitting with giving up, and that feels like a deeper, more humiliating version of failure.
Conversely, letting go feels kinda zen by comparison. It sounds like we've thoughtfully weighed our options and made a mature, worthy decision to move forward on a healthier path.
But are we just kidding ourselves because we're really giving up, or should we be proud of ourselves because we've made a sound decision?
Whenever I contempl...
The startup world is in a "Silent Recession" that no one is talking about, and it's a real problem.
Most of the Founders I speak to in private say the same thing — their business isn't going well. It's a combination of a weird economy, a Nuclear Winter in startup funding, and sky-high interest rates. Economists can tell us that the stock market is at an all-time high, unemployment is down, and inflation means people are spending too quickly. Yet if you talk to enough Founders honestly, they will tell a very different story.
If you're at a point where you're trying to understand why things aren't quite going as well as they should, let me shed some light on things my friends. We're in a Silent Recession among startups, where secretly they ar...