We're so damn distracted by "growth" that we rarely ask ourselves what it is about growth that even matters.
You know who cares about growth? Our investors. The media. Our sewing circles of other Founders.
You know who cares about quality? Our team. Our customers. Our partners. You know, the people that we should be solely focused on.
There's a time and a place to focus on growth, but all too often our focus on growth comes directly at the expense of our focus on quality. And that's a dangerous place to be.
We need to have a discussion around making our startups better, not just bigger.
A couple of years ago, Basecamp Founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said something that always stuck with me when ...
Time and time again, I run into mid-continent entrepreneurs who think sales should be a personal experience. Out in Silicon Valley, I have found that a lot of startups stick to self-service platforms rather than human salespeople.
So who’s right? Well, it depends on what’s for sale and who’s buying.
Both approaches can work, but the key factor isn’t where your startup sits on the map. Instead, to choose the right sales strategy, take two things into account: customer acquisition cost and annual contract value.
Let’s start with CAC, or Customer Aquisition Cost, which describes the cost of acquiring a single customer. To calculate CAC, divide the cost of acquiring customers by the number of customers acquired. For...
While it isn’t a new phenomenon, many of us might be familiar with the behavior but not have a term connected to it, that is, until now. You may have heard the term "quiet quitting" recently as the latest workplace trend, many thanks to influencers on TikTok, but it has been around long before social media ever existed. Generally, there are multiple definitions floating around as to what quiet quitting is, and what it means for the workplace.
Upon first hearing the term, many might mistake quiet quitting as slacking off at work, but that is not entirely true. Some people define it as not taking on more work and setting boundaries with employers to avoid burnout, while others say it’s simply not...
The year I turned 37, my heart stopped. Not figuratively, I mean it actually stopped beating.
We were in the early days of launching Startups.com, and I was at lunch with our team. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but something just didn't feel right, so I told the team I was going to head home and lay down. As I was driving home, I called my wife and told her "I'm heading home, something feels off..."
And as I said those words, my heart stopped — while driving. My world went black.
For anyone that has had their heart stop, you can't ignore it because, well, you're sorta dead. In my case, I came to quickly, recovered the car, and drove the next few minutes home. As soon as I got home I phoned my co-workers (who were 5 minutes away) and...
They say nothing worth having comes easy – and that definitely holds up when it comes to acquiring customers for your startup.
Customer acquisition doesn’t just happen. Customers don’t just fall into your lap, ready to hand over their money. A customer’s business isn’t something that is owed to you – it’s an honor that has to be earned.
In a lot of ways, says growth marketer and Ghost Influence Founder Brian Swichkow, customer acquisition is a lot like going on a date. “The internet is the bar. Your website is your house. Your email list is your bedroom. Customer acquisition is, well… you know,” he says.
Cue the Marvin Gaye song.
So what does it take to, ahem, close the deal with respect to acquiring customers? Brian joins us to explore jus...
Startup equity is one of those things that it's fair to say every startup founder without an MBA struggles with, and even those with a high degree of financial modeling education won't have been through this before. Most people don't have to think about this stuff until it's really important. But if you're starting to freak out about who gets what slice of your startup pie, take a deep breath, calm down, and get ready for Startup Equity 101 (your official startup equity guide).
Equity. Stocks. Shares. Vesting. Fair market value. The minute you dive into figuring out startup equity compensation, you're slammed from every side with a bunch of words that you might have heard in the past and you might be able to fake knowledge of at a dinner par...
There are weapons, and there are weapons made with plutonium. Well, there is competitive intelligence, and there is the competitive intelligence made by Knowlium.
Knowlium is the maker of the competitive intelligence software called Reveal – a product that “accelerates your digital strategy with real-time competitive insight.”
Which is to state matters very very simply. You must have a look for yourself to appreciate the comprehensiveness and sophistication with which Reveal processes data. If you want simple scores to understand your market position com...
As entrepreneurs, time is our most valuable asset. Every moment spent on a time sink is a distraction from the strides that we could and should be making with our core businesses.
But here’s the thing. Early-stage entrepreneurs are also notoriously cheap. Often revenue-strapped, we’re pumping as much money as we humanly can into the products and services that we’ve committed ourselves to developing.
At any given time, we walk a line between two things: spending money and doing more ourselves. As many of us will tell you, this is not an easy line to walk. I once burned through $20K on a vendor that I shouldn’t have hired. I also spent 15 hours a week on administrative tasks when I should have been working with an administrative assistant.
O...
Welcome to Phase Three of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.
Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes
Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works
Phase Three - Part 1 - How to Split Equity
Part 2 - Splitting Equity Today
Part 3 - Splitting Equity in the Future
Part 4 - Calculating Startup Equity Splits + FAQ (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Phase Four - Equity Management
Let's continue!
At this point, we have all we need to calculate our equity splits. It’s showtime, baby! All of the different agreements we’ve made from this point on are just a formula to calculate an outcome. Ideally...
Being a founder is hard — and we should be grateful for that.
We don’t feel grateful all the time. At least not when we’re lying awake at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, staring at the ceiling wondering how we have created so much debt in such a short period of time and then looking over at our spouse who is probably pretending to sleep — pondering the same question.
But, I believe it is the sleepless nights, the awkward conversations at family dinners, the long days without measurable progress and the other thousand things that most people wouldn’t tolerate that makes the solutions we build valuable — and the pursuit worthwhile. We relish the challenge as much as the outcome.
As the holidays quickly approach, perhaps you’re like me and find yours...