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Understanding a user's willingness to pay is critical. However, you can’t ask them straight up - they’re always going to lowball you. Here’s a set of 25 strategic questions you can ask during customer interviews in order to better understand how much a user might actually pay for your product.
This article is designed to show first-time finance leaders the ropes, lingo, and processes. It’s an incredible resource for any founder who wants to understand financial operations, control, and accounting as their startup scales.
In our last issue, we tagged an article that spoke about the dark side of sales – the negative impact of misaligned incentives. This article covers best practices from experts on how to build a successful sales commission plan.
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Okay so this isn’t exactly about building companies, but it’s still a fascinating insight on the world around us, and what is our role as entrepreneurs other than to interpret things and build solutions to the problems we see?
A partner at a VC firm lays out all the questions they would like to ask founders. A useful sheet if you’re about to kick off your first fundraise.
A collection of lessons from the founders of Pilot, a team that has now founded three successful startups.
That’s a lot of money to spend on software, which is good news for software startups.
An entrepreneur reflects on selling his successful company, realizing it led to a loss of identity and a shift from growth to wealth management. The story highlights the importance of understanding personal values and motivations before making such a pivotal decision.
A handy trick for quickly lowering AI costs.
As Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome”. Incorrect incentives can have second-order effects that might have hugely negative impacts on your startup. This article explores the adverse impact of misaligned incentives and what to look out for.
There’s a lot of debate about whether raising capital or bootstrapping your way to success leads to better outcomes for founders. Perhaps there’s an alternative to chasing the venture dragon and raising multiple rounds – instead, just raise one round to get liftoff and build sustainably from day one.
In the late 2010s, startups were advised to raise substantial venture capital for fixed costs like software and sales, but this paradigm is shifting towards variable costs and asset-light models, driven by the commoditization of software and advancements in generative AI. This transformation is challenging traditional venture capital models, creating new opportunities for business developers and hyperscale cloud providers in a more variable cost-driven software industry.
The role of a product marketer doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the SaaS space. This article unpacks what this strategic role is all about and why you should consider making them the first marketing hire at your startup.
This article covers insights from Doug Adamic (CRO of Brex & previous CRO of Concur) about revenue growth and efficiency at venture-backed companies, as well as a general pulse check on the state of venture-backed startups.
It seems both big and small tech companies are leaning into measuring developer productivity. Here’s a deep dive on 17 tech companies, big and small, and how they measure this performance metric.
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“66% of us are starting the year burnt out” - if true, that’s worrying. Here are some suggestions for you, the founder, on how you can take more things off your plate, enabling you to recharge better.
When everything in the startup media looks golden, it’s easy to forget that success is often the result of an iterative series of failures. Society is quick to point out weird ideas and call them ugly, but we shouldn’t. Each weird idea, regardless of its ultimate success or failure, introduces new thinking into the world. We should embrace experiments and weird ideas, particularly as founders.
Revolut, a leading Fintech company, experienced hyper-growth through word-of-mouth and referral marketing. It constituted 65-70% of its traffic. The company’s overall marketing strategy was centered around its product. It aimed to provide something so good that customers would do the marketing for them. It used targeted referral campaigns to drive user acquisition and feature adoption. The campaigns included unique reward systems, incentives, and gamification.
Twitter’s former CTO and interim CEO Parag Agrawal has launched his own AI startups. They’ve received funding from some big-name VCs like Khosla Ventures.
The author, reflecting on a $130M acquisition, advises founders to actively understand mergers and acquisitions (M&A), build relationships with potential acquirers, and carefully negotiate deals.
Depending on your timeline, waiting for AI to advance may or may not be the right move.
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Non-technical founders are often advised to seek out a technical co-founder. What if it was the other way around and you’re a technical founder? Do you need a co-pilot who understands “business”? YC partners answer the question in this video.
Three pretty tangible things you can do to NOT be the Woe-Is-Me founder. This post breaks down why you don’t want to do that and how to avoid it.
This article likens swimming across a big pool and likens to running a business. It’s an interesting take on this post-AI, no-more-free-money world.
Email nurturing prospects is still one of the most influential tools in your sales and marketing arsenal. However, as your company grows, everyone wants access to sending emails - sales, marketing, product, and growth - all compete for bandwidth. Things get hectic quickly. This article explores how you can simplify things to increase conversion and retention.
A product strategy explains what you will work on and why. Sometimes we over engineer this process or underinvest in planning. Finding the sweet spot between rigor and simplicity is critical. Here’s a comprehensive overview on how to outline your product strategy, simply.
This article presents the eight-step process that brought WP Engine from an idea to a Unicorn. It describes a formula for going from initial product to Product/Market Fit. The progression goes from personal fit to market fit, customer fit, building and shipping the SLC quickly, marketing and sales, retention-driven product development, prioritizing systematically, ruthlessly, and strategically, and managing your psychology. The roadmap isn't failsafe, but it is supported by many years of experience.
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Investors ask for it and founders talk about them as lighthouse metrics. This article argues that both LTV and CAC are too complex of a metric to be useful in decision making and often the processes used to determine them are flawed. It explores some alternatives you can use instead.
Customer Success (CS) teams have taken a big hit during the tech layoffs throughout 2023. Combined with new tooling, and a hard year for CSAT scores, CS is changing. Increasingly, we’re seeing tech companies push CS closer to sales and attach specific revenue targets to their operations.
Startups that don't grow significantly within two years of dedicated effort, fail to secure full-time commitment or seed funding, or reach $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) after four years, should consider these as milestones to reassess their viability. These time frames provide a reasonable period to evaluate if the venture warrants continuation or if it's time to move on.
How do you position yourself more effectively for acquisition? Have your potential acquirers as customers and build a relationship that goes beyond that of a standard vendor.
Productive engineers are fabled. What about sales reps? This post explores how efficiencies from AI tools might change the game for AEs and how we compensate them.
ServiceTitan, at $500m ARR, has reportedly filed for an IPO in the first half of 2024.
Section 174 of the US tax law made it so all costs related to R&D cannot be expensed, increasing the costs of hiring of software engineers.