Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 2, 2018

On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business. With services, scaling the business often implies cloning yourself, since you are the intellectual property and the competitive advantage.

Services 72

Services Startup Training Writing 72

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 4, 2020

Hiring requirements must be anticipated and implemented with the same precision and tracking as manufacturing volumes, sales leads, and customer service. Crisis mode hires too often get done without due consideration for strategic fit, training requirements, and cultural considerations. It won’t happen by default. Marty Zwilling.

Organization 135

Organization Satisfaction Entrepreneur Screening 135

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 27, 2014

On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business. With services, scaling the business often implies cloning yourself, since you are the intellectual property and the competitive advantage.

Services 105

Services Startup Training Writing 105

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc. One of the most obvious places where you see this is in sales & marketing. Ditto the CFO. I was the laggard.

Sales 296

Sales Pricing Startup Customer 296

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 17, 2016

On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business. With services, scaling the business often implies cloning yourself, since you are the intellectual property and the competitive advantage.

Services 61

Services Startup Training Writing 61

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2: As expected at least one person accused me of writing this post because I want to see lower valuations. As an early stage investor you’re often planning around 10x your investment at the time your write your first check so in this case you’d be going into your investment expecting an exit of $800 – $1.2

Startup 336

Startup Pricing Technical Review Marketing 336

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. By going on sales calls you pick up directly the feedback of what customers want and also what they’re telling you about competition.

Startup 308

Startup CTO Coach Technical Review CTO Hire 308

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

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. They’re competitive. Write things down. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

Outsource Development 333

Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review News 333

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2014

Write down the key elements of your business plan very early, and keep it current as things evolve. 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. Develop your business plan.

Startup 107

Startup Outsource Development Training Outsource 107

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. They’re competitive. Write things down. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

Outsource Development 328

Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review News 328

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

Even when your startup is a one-man show, you will soon find that you are “out of control,” unless you start organizing and writing down how and when key things need to get done. Write down the key elements of your business plan very early, and keep it current as things evolve. But having no process does not make you more competitive.

Startup 102

Startup Outsource Development Writing Training 102

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 30, 2012

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. then you can start writing a recipe. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? If your startup is over a year old, and your business isn’t yet ready, you have a problem. time-to-market is critical) Viable financial model. For now, get cooking!

Startup 96

Startup Writing Metrics Marketing 96

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 31, 2013

Write down the key elements of your business plan very early, and keep it current as things evolve. 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. Develop your business plan.

Outsource Development 92

Outsource Development Training Outsource Metrics 92

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 1, 2010

Even when your startup is a one-man show, you will soon find that you are “out of control,” unless you start organizing and writing down how and when key things need to get done. Write down the key elements of your business plan very early, and keep it current as things evolve. But having no process does not make you more competitive.

Startup 95

Startup Outsource Development Writing Training 95

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 8, 2016

Hiring requirements must be anticipated and implemented with the same precision and tracking as manufacturing volumes, sales leads, and customer service. Crisis mode hires too often get done without due consideration for strategic fit, training requirements, and cultural considerations. It won’t happen by default.

Organization 57

Organization Entrepreneur Satisfaction Screening 57

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 7, 2011

In all cases, don’t skip the basic training. then you can start writing a recipe. Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? If your startup is over a year old, and your business isn’t yet ready, you have a problem. time-to-market is critical) Viable financial model. For now, get cooking!

Entrepreneur 91

Entrepreneur Startup Writing Metrics 91

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

I must admit I discuss this very frequently with portfolio companies but hadn’t thought to write about it. Sales is all about knowing the key values of your buyer: What are they trying to achieve in working with you, why do they care about your solution and how will it help them economically?

Outsource Development 150

Outsource Development Startup Customer Custom 150

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 15, 2009

I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. They’re competitive. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

Startup 151

Startup Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review 151

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

InfoChachkie

JULY 14, 2011

Value Prop Twitter Style : “Ringrevenue’s call performance marketing platform enables ad networks, agencies, advertisers & publishers to generate more inbound sales calls.”. For businesses like this, finding new ways to drive more of these high-value inbound sales calls is key. Who do you view as your biggest competition?

Marketing 209

Marketing Advertising Paid Search Startup 209

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 19, 2011

Big thank you to Darius Vasefi , of EyeOnJewels for the write up. o Everything is for sale but it’s the price that moves the timing. o Put a timeframe/money – competition in the picture. Good listener, take in information, • Have pulse on what the market wants (hard to train that) cannot take this from customers only.

Acquisition 304

Acquisition Startup Customer Custom 304

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

This started as a post in which I was going to write out tips to personal branding and became in stead an essay of my own branding journey. But what chapped my hide was that every early assignment at Accenture they divided teams, training and assignments into “technical” and “non technical.” That was the market.

Technical Advisors 385

Technical Advisors Marketing Startup Venture Capital 385

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

I wasn’t going to write about it since he had just covered the topic and echoed my point of view. At the margin you can make yourself better at sales, product design, marketing, leadership, capital raising, etc. In my bones I’m convinced that entrepreneurs are more nature than nurture although I know both are involved.

Startup 289

Startup Statistics Entrepreneur Study 289

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

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Productive Programming - Gabriel Weinberg , August 31, 2010 BIG disclaimer: I'm not formally trained in computer science (aside from two classes at MIT in 2000) and I haven't worked closely with that many programmers or teams (maybe 10 or so). We had to write a CRM to keep track of them all. There is no competition.

Startup 191

Startup Venture Capital Blogging CTO Hire 191

InfoChachkie

JULY 21, 2011

3) I’ve heard some great stories about your weekend sales “boot camps.” We hired people who did not have outside sales experience. And we hired folks who had previous leadership positions and proof points of being competitive. In real-world training scenarios (over two weeks), on the phone selling, we cut 75% of them.

Summary 246

Summary Tips Sales Entrepreneur 246

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 12, 2018

Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. Throughout all of this we saw a tinkerer, a problem solver and a completely obsessed leader who was competitive and wanted to win.

Startup 247

Startup Pricing Product Marketing 247

Berkonomics

AUGUST 30, 2018

They allow me to preview new devices and technologies before release so that I might write about and speak about them in my “Tech Trends” keynotes. It did not hurt that Apple always seemed to trump the competition in design of the product and the product’s user interface too. The moment of truth: Facing the “no decision” competition.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Pricing Design Product 120

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 9, 2012

"Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner." Industry pundits generally spend their time writing about what they see in the rear view mirror.

Tips 277

Tips Startup Entrepreneur Entertainment 277

Berkonomics

AUGUST 18, 2011

They allow me to preview new devices and technologies before release so that I might write about and speak about them in my “Tech Trends” keynotes. They keep me at the leading edge of new development as it is productized, even before mass production.

Artificial Inteligence 214

Artificial Inteligence Pricing Design Product 214