As I’m writing, it’s the day after Apple’s Special Event. The Steve Jobs Theater has a public event under its belt. We’re past figuring out how to pronounce iPhone X, and we’re done caring what happened to iPhone 9. Even the Face ID demo fail is already yesterday’s news.
If you watched the live stream of Apple’s Keynote as a normal part of your job like I did, you need to know that customer centricity is under attack.
I have a few suggestions how to respond:
I have to say I’ve always enjoyed Apple’s Keynote events. I’d bet you agree. There’s a fun element of the big reveal. Were our predictions right? Were the leaks accurate?
And the events suit our sense of humor too. There’s a fine line between the reality of Apple on st...
Not long ago, promotions went to employees with the most technical expertise. Companies bent over backward to gain specialized industry knowledge, so it made sense to promote based on its merit. But the times, as they say, are a-changin’. At a certain point in history, technical ingenuity began to take a back seat to interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence (EQ). In fact, a recent study by Harris Poll found that 77 percent of employers believe these “soft skills” are as important as talents directly related to specific job functions.
I witnessed this shift while working with one female executive who rose through the ranks to a senior position based on her technical prowess. Those skills opened numerous doors on her path to leadershi...
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...
Going digital is now as simple as bringing out our phone to book a ride home. As early as five years ago before Grab hit the market, this was a fantasy for most people. Our world has been changed by digital solutions and the logical question would be to ask: What’s next?
To answer this question, we refer to Cognizant’s survey of over 2000 C-level professionals in Asia to tap on their collective wisdom. Such knowledge will be beneficial to both investors, consumers and even business executives would want to stay on top of things.
The top of the list would be artificial intelligence and this has found commercial applications in autonomous drivings such as the testing of nuTonomy in Singapore. The possibility of...
It’s one of the classic phrases of the startup universe. We’ve all heard it a million times. It’s so ubiquitous, it inspired a Cards Against Humanity card:
“I have a great idea for a startup.”
If you’re anything like the Startups team, chances are you’ve caught yourself saying this more than a few times. If you’re really like the Startups team, you find yourself saying it a few times a day.
But what exactly is a “great idea?” How do you know when that idea you scribbled down on a cocktail napkin or a post-it note has the makings of a full-blown business? Is it really just a matter of “you know it when you see it”? Or is there more to it than that – something structured and systematic, a template of sorts that you can follow, time and time a...
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...
Welcome to Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series — The Pitch:
Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise
Phase Two - Investor Selection
Phase Three - The Pitch
Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 2 - Market Size
Part 3 - Revenue Model
Part 4 - Operating Model
Part 5 - Customer Definition
Part 6 - Customer Acquisition
Part 7 - Funding
Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets
Part 9 - Traction
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Any startup interested in raising money will need a pitch presentation to share with potential investors, and successful startups all have one thing in common (most likely) a solid business idea backed by a convincing presentation deck.
In this article, we will talk about the 10 sections of a pitch and what they include.
Let’s dive in...
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....
“Success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents 1 percent of your work, which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.”
It’s time to talk about something nobody likes to talk about. It’s time to talk about failure.
Failure is one of the most fundamental components of the startup experience – and one of the least talked about. There’s this weird thing that happens when people talk about failure: voices get hushed, people start looking around them, worried that someone might overhear.
Talking about failure is taboo #1 in the startup community – but that’s not doing us any favors. Because here’s the thing: startups fail all the time. And not only do they fail – failing at th...
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...