This year has been marked by one of the most unprecedented, and challenging global economic environments of the last one-hundred years. Despite the aforementioned, startup investing continues to rip at a feverish pace, marked by technology, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and enterprise software firms. According to this CrunchBase report, “Overall, total global venture dollars for 2020 …
During COVID-19, the world of business has come to an abrupt halt – nearly every industry, sector, and business type (products and services) have been and will be impacted by the pandemic. If you are on the fence still wondering if now might be a good time to start your new business, I say, “Yes! …
Happy New Year and welcome back to my Startup Tip of the Day. I remember being 20 years old, sitting in front of a blank Excel spreadsheet without a clue in the world as to how I was going to build an accurate forecast for my first startup. Without proven revenues or associated costs, the …
Looking back on 2019, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with and advising many different entrepreneurs. I’ve compiled my list of the top 5 most frequently asked questions asked by founders: 1. Do you think this is a “good” business idea? What’s interesting, is that the most frequently asked question of “Do you think this …
What exactly is corporate culture? Can we see it? Does it emanate from a business plan, an un-written code of ethics, or a placard on the wall? Last night we got to sit in on a fireside chat with Ben Horowitz (VC, Andreessen Horowitz) and John Zimmer (Co-founder, Lyft) to discuss culture, and moreover, the …
Startup Tip of the Day One of the most confusing areas for first time founders is managing the capitalization table, often referred to as the “cap table”. The cap table outlines all equity owners, the percentage of ownership of stock, debt or convertible debt (debt that turns into equity at a given date …
💡If you’re considering starting a company this year, here’s a few lessons that should help you determine what’s the right business to start.
1) Don’t start a company in a space that requires other people to build every element of it for you.
Unless you’re well funded, typically in the early days, you will need to dig in and do the actual building. This is not to say you need to code if you’re not a coder - but it does mean that you need a good understanding of design elements for websites or apps in order to effectively guide your team to build your vision correctly.
2) Don’t raise capital until you have a working product.
This is a really hard concept for founders to get, because starting a business always requires capital, and we hear stories of founders raising huge venture capital, but the key is to see how far along you can possibly get without outside investors. Why? Because they can a) distract you from actually building the product b) guide you to build at a faster pace and do things that aren’t necessarily in your best interest or make you grow before you fully understand your customer.
3) For 30 days, while you are conceptualizing building your business - simply remove the requirement of a business model (to make money).
This is completely counterintuitive to running a business, but in the early days, you must focus entirely on listening to potential customers, satisfying them more than they can imagine (or have been by other products they currently use), and determine the viability of your market demand.
Adding a layer of monetization (making money) complicates the design process and forces you to try and “take” from your customers, where you should focus entirely on “giving”.
Do these 3 simple things, and your startup idea will be off to an incredible start.
After 30 days, focus in on what’s working, what’s not, and why. Double down your efforts on the market that deeply yearns for your solution, and ignore all others (at least initially). Focus focus focus is the name of the game for your first 30-90 days.
Comment below to let me know how you started your first business and how you got it from idea to market! 👇👇👇
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A founder struggling to get market adoption in LATAM asked me this question today. Here’s my 2¢:
Q: We are struggling to get some sectors to see data as a source of value - the LATAM market is still very skeptical in knowing how to find value in their data, we need to educate them about it. How might we solve this?
A: As for gaining traction with LATAM, you might consider researching how earlier technologies formed a “beach-head” in LATAM. Example, earlier software that is now ubiquitous might show you some unique channels that served tech before in LATAM to build trust and win buyers.
As for data, no one cares about data - they care about how you can solve their problem.
If you use data as your mechanism to do that, then you need to better illustrate the pain-points that they face today, and show them that via your software’s analysis of data that they already have (but are failing to understand and synthesize), you can draw key insights that help them increase sales, decrease costs, improve customer experiences, or build a competitive moat.
Tech is useless without application, use cases, and the utility that it delivers by solving pain.
Buyers never buy tech, they buy end-results. Focus on their end results, not yours, and you’ll improve your sales quickly.
#startups #founder #entrepreneurship #nostartupleftbehind #business
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