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Choosing What to Say No to as You Grow
Most founders begin a startup with a strong instinct to say yes to almost everything, partly because the early months reward generosity and openness and partly because saying yes feels like the kind of behavior that successful founders are supposed to exhibit. Magnific.com The instinct is reasonable in the first year, when the company is small enough that opportunities are rare, and almost any new conversation, partnership, or feature request is worth at least examining. The
When to Stop Doing Everything Yourself
Most founders begin a startup by doing every job that needs doing, writing the code, talking to the customers, designing the landing page, answering the support emails, and remembering which invoices are still unpaid, and in the first year that habit is genuinely a strength, because you learn the business by being inside every part of it. In the second year, the same habit quietly becomes the thing that limits the company, because the work expands, the hours run out, the pace
How to Create a Customer Loyalty Program that Boosts Retention and Referrals
In today’s highly competitive landscape, focusing on customer loyalty should be every business’s priority. Loyal customers contribute...
Choosing What to Say No to as You Grow
Most founders begin a startup with a strong instinct to say yes to almost everything, partly because the early months reward generosity and openness and partly because saying yes feels like the kind of behavior that successful founders are supposed to exhibit. Magnific.com The instinct is reasonable in the first year, when the company is small enough that opportunities are rare, and almost any new conversation, partnership, or feature request is worth at least examining. The
5 min read
Pricing Your First Version When You Have No Idea What to Charge
Pricing is one of the parts of an early startup that founders avoid for the longest, partly because the question feels uncomfortable to think about and partly because the available advice is so contradictory that it is easier to not decide than to risk being wrong. Some sources tell you to charge nothing in the early days, some tell you to charge from the first user, some tell you to follow your competitors, and some tell you to ignore competitors entirely. Magnific.com The r
5 min read
Finding Your First Ten Users When You Have No Network
Photo credit One of the harder truths of starting something while still in school is that you usually do not have the network most launch advice assumes. The articles tell you to email a warm list of contacts, to introduce yourself to your investor base, or to use the audience you have built over years of writing online, and although those are real strategies for founders further along, they describe a launch that is not yours yet. For a student founder, or any founder withou
5 min read
Why Follow Your Passion Is Poor Startup Advice
Few pieces of advice are repeated as confidently or as uncritically as the suggestion to follow your passion when starting a company, and although the phrase is meant kindly and is sometimes useful, it tends to lead student founders into companies that do not survive their first eighteen months for reasons that the advice itself helped create. The problem is not that passion is bad for a startup, since passion does meaningful work over the long arc of building a company, but
5 min read
What Minimum Really Means in Minimum Viable Product
Almost every student founder I have met has spent too long on their first version, showing up with three months of work, a polished interface, and a long list of features, only to ask why no one is using it, and the honest answer is usually that they built a product before they had a question, which means the version they shipped was not minimum at all but only an early one. The phrase minimum viable product has lost most of its meaning over time, because founders use it to d
5 min read
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