Founder-Level Customer Care

January 30, 2014

Today I received a wonderful email from a founder of a new startup in the San Fran bay area building a product to help with recruiting. Initially, this entrepreneur reached out to me with a highly personalized email. He commented on various recruiting-related posts on this blog. It must have taken some real amount of […]

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Business Model Canvas

January 29, 2014

After escaping Snowpocalypse (including a makeshift bed next to our servers for a few hours last night) and making it to New Mexico, I’m wiped out. So tonight’s post will be short. I’ve written before about how the written business plan is dead. What has replaced them is the Business Model Canvas. The canvas includes categories […]

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Hard Things to Delegate

January 28, 2014

Yesterday I wrote about delegation. I’ve been thinking about startup integrators and the importance of enabling others to make more decisions. Some things are harder to delegate than others. Here’s a list of things that I think are hard to delegate: Hiring negotiations Firing decisions Large expense decisions The marketing voice of the business Closing […]

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Holacracy and Delegation

January 27, 2014

When we tell people to do their jobs, we get workers. When we trust people to get the job done, we get leaders. – @simonsinek — Mark Kilens (@MarkKilens) January 6, 2014 It’s becoming increasingly common for startups to adopt principles from holacracy and establish extremely flat structures without the traditional layers of managers found […]

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Door-to-Door Sales Experience Impresses Me

January 26, 2014

A door-to-door salesman landed in vacuum in my home recently. He was so good I’m debating offering him a job to work for my company. Zero experience in technical computing. Actually none of our salespeople had prior experience in technical computing before coming to work in our startup. To me, product subject matter can be […]

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The Hidden Challenges of Outsourcing Software Development

January 25, 2014

Startups often consider outsourcing part of their software development. Reasons for this include: Avoiding the lengthy hiring process to bring an in-house employee onboard Achieving a seemingly cheaper rate by going overseas Aiming for “black box” management, wherein you want to tell the contractors to deliver your product with your specifications on your deadline at […]

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The Startup Integrator

January 24, 2014

When a startup grows to a certain size, the function of executing the business machine begins to separate from the visionary function of the entrepreneur. Another way to say this is that the amount of work required to work “on” the business and the amount of work to lead execution with”in” the business becomes more […]

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Simple Ground Rules for Startups

January 23, 2014

Create something people want. Don’t run out of money doing it. The rest is just noise-ish. — Mick Hagen (@mickhagen) January 24, 2014 When starting a company, there are so many unknowns that it is impossible to be sure about most things. I think it is helpful to have a few ground rules for navigating […]

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Corporate Retreats

January 22, 2014

As an early startup, we did not have budget for fancy corporate retreats. We were also too busy to break away. I regret we didn’t make the time and do inexpensive retreats. Last year we did our first mini overnight retreat and it was awesome. This year I hope to go bigger with the retreat […]

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Success Begets Success

January 21, 2014

On my commute home this evening, I soundgecko-listened to a Mark Suster post about Growth Hacking. In the post he made the statement, “Success begets success.” That resonates strongly with our experience. There have been several times in our history when our sales started to ramp with hockey stick looking trendlines. In those moments, it […]

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