It’s in a founder’s natural disposition to want to convince people of their point of view. And while engaging substantively with those who disagree is often an excellent way to both stress test your assumptions and increase your ability to tell your story, figuring out when to stop and disengage is critical for your productivity and sanity. Especially during fundraising.
Earlier this summer an engaging and forward-thinking founder told me a story from her in-process seed fundraise. Operating in a technology market that most would consider nascent, she had encountered a variety of responses to her pitch. Spoiler alert, more than enough were positive and she soon closed an oversubscribed round, but of course she also encountered rejection. We talked a bit about what she’d learned from those conversations and then the founder confided her most useless investor meeting to me.
“We sat down to discuss my company and he basically said, ‘I don’t think your market is going to exist. Convince me.'” Her response? “I told him I didn’t want to work that hard, and wrapped up the meeting.”
Not long ago, I was trying to watch a video on YouTube. I got the expected “5-second till skipping” countdown and had my mouse hovering over the skip link, but the video was interesting. I laughed, so I figured I’d give it another few seconds to see what the product was all about. I ended up watc... ...Read more
According to the New York Times, when Page looks at a potential company to acquire, he wants to know if the product is, like a toothbrush, “something you will use once or twice a day.” Page clearly understands habits. As I wrote in my book, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,” frequent... ...Read more
Contrary to MVPs, where the goal is to get something barely usable out the door and into the market for initial feedback, an MLP takes the opposite approach, treating, among other things, the first-time experience of a new user very seriously. This is the first time they’ll see your product, the... ...Read more
What are the Top 10 things I’d tell myself to do better, if I could go back in time? My top list: Slow down big decisions — when you aren’t sure. You have to move fast and break things, but if the pit in your stomach says “maybe don’t do that” — slow that decision down. My biggest mistakes ha... ...Read more
How to build a billion dollar digital marketplace – examples from Uber, eBay, Craigslist, and more Marketplaces are easily underestimated When marketplaces get big, they can get really big. Some of the biggest tech successes ever – eBay, Airbnb, Alibaba, Uber – are marketplaces worth ... ...Read more
From lack of product-market fit to disharmony on the team, we break down the top 20 reasons for startup failure by analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems. WHERE IS THIS DATA COMING FROM? Start your free trial today Email Email SIGN UP After we compiled our list of startup failure post-m... ...Read more
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