Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 7, 2020

Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Show that you have a process to hire, fire, and train others as required. Marketing, sales, support, and service operations.

Entrepreneur 131

Entrepreneur Outsource Development Startup Competition 131

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 18, 2023

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. Don’t stand still. For now, get cooking!

Startup 112

Startup Coach Metrics Marketing 112

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2023

Measure progress through metrics on sales, revenue, and penetration. These start with your brand image, search visibility and process, and extend to the actual sales transaction. Seek customer feedback on ways to improve value and satisfaction. Seek to dominate your market over competitors.

Customer 91

Customer Custom Marketing Startup 91

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. Don’t stand still. For now, get cooking!

Startup 156

Startup Coach Metrics Marketing 156

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 18, 2018

It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Training and coaching. Ownership. Accountability.

Entrepreneur 64

Entrepreneur Coach Metrics Competition 64

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 22, 2021

Your goal must be to make every aspect of a customer interaction a joy to both you and them, starting from the shopping experience, to the sales close, to delivery and service. Use metrics to assess needs and growth economics. Really listen to feedback from the team, and empower them with the ability to make customers happy.

Customer 114

Customer Custom Satisfaction Metrics 114

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 12, 2015

It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the key to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Training and coaching. Ownership. Accountability.

Entrepreneur 101

Entrepreneur Startup Coach Metrics 101

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2016

It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Training and coaching. Ownership. Accountability.

Coach 64

Coach Metrics Competition Ideas 64

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 28, 2019

These things are clearly good for morale, but its not so clear that they translate into a competitive advantage. These authors present 20+ years of research, including case studies and metrics, showing how culture really makes or breaks your business. A positive culture of trust is required to neutralize uncertain feelings.

Competition 76

Competition Coach Case Study Statistics 76

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 24, 2015

Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Show that you have a process to hire, fire, and train others as required. Marketing, sales, support, and service operations.

Outsource Development 99

Outsource Development Startup Competition Ideas 99

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 13, 2015

Waste in a startup is any activity that spends resources, but creates no value or competitive advantage in the eyes of customers. Trying to do too many things with too few resources, usually means the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition. That’s a deadly waste you can’t afford. There is no cushion.

Resource 105

Resource Startup Entrepreneur Training 105

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 28, 2016

Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Show that you have a process to hire, fire, and train others as required. Marketing, sales, support, and service operations.

Ideas 62

Ideas Outsource Development Startup Competition 62

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 31, 2017

What metrics should you use to measure success? Define both hard data and soft (anecdotal) metrics on the new solution, as well as on the productivity of you team. That means you must know the current state of competitors against the same metrics, before you can assess progress or success. Just because Google sales hit $1.5

Metrics 58

Metrics Resource Startup Training 58

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2014

Waste in a startup is any activity that absorbs resources, but creates no value or competitive advantage in the eyes of customers. Trying to do too many things with too few resources, usually means the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition. That’s a deadly waste you can’t afford. There is no cushion.

Entrepreneur 115

Entrepreneur Resource Training Product 115

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 8, 2018

It takes a well-rounded and motivated team to run a competitive business today. You need to communicate quantified and updates goals quarterly, including the metrics to assess progress and success. Here is my prioritized list of best practices that I recommend to get you back on track: Focus on building an engaged and empowered team.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Customer Custom Startup 84

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 8, 2018

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. Don’t stand still. For now, get cooking!

Startup 81

Startup Coach Metrics Marketing 81

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 23, 2012

Training and coaching. From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. Idea management.

Coach 98

Coach Ideas IP Sales 98

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 8, 2018

Waste in a startup is any activity that spends resources, but creates no value or competitive advantage in the eyes of customers. Trying to do too many things with too few resources, usually means the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition. That’s a deadly waste you can’t afford. There is no cushion.

Resource 52

Resource Training Entrepreneur Activity 52

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2016

For example, early social media startup Friendster was so enamored with their early acceptance that they turned down a $30 million offer from Google, then quickly ran into money woes and tough competition. As the business grows, it pays to learn how to use automated financial tools, and review the key financial metrics daily.

Startup 57

Startup Training Entrepreneur Customer 57

Tech Zulu Event

APRIL 23, 2013

The fitness professional network develops business tools that make it easier for fitness professionals to run their businesses and keep their clients engaged between training sessions. We knew there’s a better personal training experience to be had, so we set out to create one. We just found this hole in the fitness industry.

Social Network 92

Social Network Networking Training Summary 92

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2016

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. Don’t stand still. For now, get cooking!

Entrepreneur 93

Entrepreneur Startup Coach Metrics 93

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2014

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Even if you are doing the work yourself, you need to document requirements, features, metrics, and milestones.

Startup 107

Startup Outsource Development Training Outsource 107

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 9, 2011

Training and coaching. From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. Idea management.

Coach 93

Coach Ideas IP Sales 93

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 31, 2013

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Even if you are doing the work yourself, you need to document requirements, features, metrics, and milestones.

Outsource Development 92

Outsource Development Training Outsource Metrics 92

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 16, 2018

Without taking a dime of outside capital, the company has achieved impressive success in a competitive, SaaS market segment, landing companies such as Nike, Intuit, NASA, AutoDesk and PBS. The problem is that stakeholders, like marketing and sales, don’t know what the latest version of the roadmap is.

Venture Capital 115

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Santa Barbara SaaS 115

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

Then you can do a little bit of research and find out that very few companies ever achieve this valuation in a trade sale so you’re clearly gunning for an IPO. while acknowledging that San Fran deals are often higher valuations due to increased competition amongst investors. It’s hard to stop a train.

Startup 336

Startup Pricing Technical Review Marketing 336

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

In the case of MakeSpace we had huge initial successes in New York City as Rahul led the scaling of our drivers, our trucks and our warehouses and we figured out the right price points to beat the local competition. We have been able to build deep customer insights on product, pricing, service, geography, competition, etc.

Startup 286

Startup Technical Review Customer Custom 286

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Even if you are doing the work yourself, you need to document requirements, features, metrics, and milestones.

Startup 102

Startup Outsource Development Writing Training 102

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 30, 2012

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. then you can start writing a recipe.

Startup 96

Startup Writing Metrics Marketing 96

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 1, 2010

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Even if you are doing the work yourself, you need to document requirements, features, metrics, and milestones.

Startup 95

Startup Outsource Development Writing Training 95

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 15, 2010

Training and coaching. From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. Idea management.

Coach 49

Coach Ideas IP Sales 49

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 7, 2011

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. then you can start writing a recipe.

Entrepreneur 91

Entrepreneur Startup Writing Metrics 91

InfoChachkie

MAY 22, 2012

Such follow-up are akin to a train whistle. Each note alerts the investors that your venture is gaining momentum and creating value and they better jump aboard before the train leaves the station. The dynamic of a competitive atmosphere allowed him to sell his cars at their list price while increasing the velocity of the sales process.

Venture Capital 236

Venture Capital Capital Research Customer 236

socalTECH

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

We were over 2x up on this round, and we also had a bunch of individual investors who wanted to put in--people who had invested in our competition a few years ago. But, we're not focused on an exit--we're focused on profitability, which is a key metric for management. We were oversubscribed, and had a stack of term sheets.

Startup 113

Startup CTO Hire Resource Venture Capital 113

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

Long-term value propositions to society, or paradigm shifts in technology, generate interest but don’t close sales in the time frame your startup needs to survive and prosper. Sustainable competitive advantage. In all cases, you need customer support, formal processes and training in place.

Pricing 100

Pricing Technical Review Entrepreneur Startup 100

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. Our first big institutional round was $16.5

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Startup Venture Capital Conference 308