BC STARTUPS
Saved by @zmbnski

1/ The first 18 months of starting a company is often life or death. I must've made 5 different companies that each failed within 9 mo. 😭 Each time the company failed I figured out what I could do better. Eventually startup #6 got to $40K/mo by month 18. Here’s what I learned...

 2/ Stay focused! Ignore things that are a waste of time: meetups & conferences, meetings with no clear agenda, fundraising if you're not fundraising, reading lots of tech media articles, etc. Every week should feel like significant progress in the first year.
3/ Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky. Many of the things we do at the company still are a result of those early hires' legacy. Have fun as a tight knit team. It will change & evolve as you get bigger so enjoy this moment.
4/ Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years! You probably won't be an overnight success either.
5/ In the beginning, do customer support yourself. You will learn a lot about why your product sucks. I did 5,000+ support tickets when it was the two of us. Delight customers & fix things fast while you learn. It will help you build an amazing intuition about your customers.
6/ If your competitor made something your customers love: remove your ego & build it. But, make sure you understand why. Don't blindly copy things either. Learn why first. This was invaluable for me & helped us win critical battles over the years. Nobody cares who built it first.
7/ Positioning matters. Spend time figuring out how to explain your product. If it's easy to do, figure out how to explain why it's different as simply as possible. If not, keep experimenting. We bombed this in the first year. It can often be the diff between success & failure.
8/ Your mantra should be: "Be scrappy." Save money. Don't waste. Ignore status. Focus on building. Make people think you're bigger than you are. Do things the larger company won't do because they move slow. You don't need ping pong tables to win, you need grit & resourcefulness.
9/ Pick roles as co-founders to divide & conquer. You both can't be in charge of all engineering, product, design, & business decisions. This often blows up companies! Debate vigorously but make a call. Opt to test ideas vs throw them away though--especially if it's cheap to do.
10/ Truth is, you're going to be using your gut a lot because you lack data. To compensate: talk to customers, meet people who will play a devil's advocate, & understand the tech from 1st principles. Meet people live tho. It will make a meaningful difference in what you'll learn.
11/ Research the history of your market. It will help you identify old & long-standing assumptions, challenging obstacles you too will face, and critical features it took old players a decade to realize to build. I failed to do this until we were 6 years in & it hurt us.
12/ If you have bad customer retention, you're probably not ready to scale the company. Fix that first, then focus on growth. The #1 reason I've seen 100s of companies fail is by becoming addicted to a clever distribution strategy before their product was good. It's a trap!
13/ If this is your 1st time, consider something like @ycombinator. Having a crew of ppl to commiserate w/ in the early days can help you overcome existential moments. During the '09 recession, we all struggled to raise money. Going through it together made us more resilient. 💪
14/ Stay laser focused on solving a narrow set of problems. I failed to do this around the 18 mo mark & got behind because shiny new things excited me. It hurt us & we lost customers. We spent the next 2 years focused on 3-4 major things & significantly surpassed our competitors.
15/ Finally, realize that this is one of the most exciting phases: building the company from scratch. Figuring out what works & what doesn't. Building things that haven't existed. You're starting to cement your company culture too. Have fun, excerise, & take a pic of the team 📸.
If you haven't read it already, here are lessons I learned when becoming "CEO" for the first time: https://t.co/m77U25VDbg

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Corey Haines \U0001f4a1
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A couple months ago, I got an email out of the blue from someone I had never met or heard about.

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👇 Quick lesson on how to successfully pitch partnerships and co-marketing opportunities

How did he get in contact with me?

He sent a cold email, but not just any email. It was clearly personal, relevant, and conversational.

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Not only was it well written, but I could also easily judge if he'd be a good fit based on the article he wrote and linked to.

It's SUPER well-written and proved that he knew what he was talking about.

Lesson: Make your "ask" as easy as possible to consider.

There were three things that made the webinar a big success:

1. Tyler sent the webinar to his email list and did a lot of promotion.

2. He prepared ahead of time and put a lot of work into the deck, even incorporating some Baremetrics assets and references.

3. He had fun

Super appreciate all the work @TylerHakes put into today's "SEO for SaaS"

If you missed it, here's the recording:
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Ben Tossell
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I don’t buy into “you should have a cofounder”

I think investors are just hedging their bets on the team

Actively finding a cofounder seems odd and forced to tick a box ✅

If you (potentially) have one, great!

💰Pay amazing folks (contract/FTE/PTE)

One pro is to share the burden with someone who cares as much about the business as you do.

Going looking for a cofounder (whether you’re pressured to or not) seems like a disaster
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Massimo Di Berardino
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@Massimokris
@_shahedk @buzz_chronicles save as startups

@buzz_chronicles @buzz_chronicles save as startups
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Ryan Kaufman
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If you’re a SaaS entrepreneur, you need to study Hubspot

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A thread: 👇👇

1) Hubspot introduced/created the term inbound marketing.

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They are the 2nd fastest SMB SasS company to IPO


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Part of this shift was due to the internet/Google. People now had the power to do their own research to find products that could help solve their problem

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4) Strategy 1: Blog
They share resources/tips/steps to improve your inbound marketing. They drew people to their posts, provided value, and added a unique CTA related to the topic at the end to capture the lead.

The blog resulted in 20% of their organic leads and 3x their leads
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Pat Walls
Pat Walls
@thepatwalls
I'm doing an AMA on @IndieHackers.

Drop some questions in there! Happy to answer anything, esp around building side projects with a full-time job :)

https://t.co/da4Ael9TnE


My high level plans for Starter Story.


On almost quitting

cc: @daviswbaer


@daviswbaer How I find so many businesses to interview


@daviswbaer On balancing different projects
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"I need to get better at marketing."

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"Do customers really want this? Do they care enough about this to switch to a new solution?"

☝️ this is why most of my book, @marketingdevs, is about:

1. Choosing the right market
2. Building something they want

"If your product is remarkable, getting noticed is a lot easier." – @peldi


I was reminded of this concept again this morning while reading @pjrvs' book (Company of One):

"Sales increase when you honestly evaluate what someone needs and then teach them the value of what you're selling."


To succeed, your product has to offer an outcome that is highly desirable to a large group of customers.

The number of sales your product receives is a multiple of these two variables:

1. How big is the target market?
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Chris Herd
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The 2020s will be known as the Remote Work decade

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[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🏦Third Space: Office and Working from Home will be joined by somewhere close by that a number of people will use

Supermarkets or local bank branches should emerge as a convenient ubiquitous location option – if they are smart

⏰Asynchronous Work: Offices are instantaneous gratification distraction factories where synchronous work makes it impossible to get stuff done

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This will lead to deeper, more meaningful relationships which overcome societal issues of loneliness and issolation

🚜Rural Living: World-class people will move to smaller cities, have a lower cost of living & higher quality of life

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Noah Smith
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1/People I know on the Right tend to be obsessed with the idea of "crimethink", taboos, and the (supposedly) oppressive, omnipresent enforcement of liberal cultural norms.

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My new theory: A lot of it is guilt.

2/It's true that in some circles - the media, universities, many big corporations - liberal norms *are* enforced to some degree, and the enforcement has probably gotten stronger in recent years.

But I don't think this explains all of the Right's obsession.

3/The stereotype is that people on the Right tend to be more threat-sensitive. That would help explain the perception that liberal norm-enforcers are lurking everywhere, ready to pounce and anathematize anyone who makes a misstep.

But I don't think that's all of it either.

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But I don't think this is all of it, either.

5/The reason I think it's more than these things is that even *in private*, people on the Right express their "crimethink" ideas very gingerly and hesitantly.

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Patrick McKenzie
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Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
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SK
SK
@sk_diary1
#sculpture #story -

Chandesha-Anugraha Murti - One of the Sculpture in Brihadeshwara Temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram - built by Raja Rajendra Chola I

This Sculpture depicts Bhagwan Shiva along with Devi Paravathi blessing Chandeshwara - one of the 63 Nayanmars.

#Thread


Chandeshwara/Chandikeshwara is regarded as custodian of Shiva Temple's wealth&most of Shiva temples in South India has separate sannathi for him.

His bhakti for Bhagwan Shiva elevated him as one of foremost among Nayanmars.
He gave importance to Shiva Pooja&protection of cows.


There are series of paintings, illustrating the #story of Chandikeshwar in the premises of
Sri Sathiyagireeswarar #Temple at Seinganur,near Kumbakonam,TN

Chandikeshwara's birth name
is Vichara sarman.He was born in the village of Senganur on the banks of River Manni.


His Parent names were Yajnathatan and Pavithrai.
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He was very devout and would always think about Bhagwan Shiva.

One day he saw a cowherd man brutally assaulting a cow,Vichara Sarman could not tolerate this. He spoke to cowherd: ‘Do you not know that the cow is worshipful & divine? All gods & Devas reside in https://t.co/ElLcI5ppsK it is our duty to protect cows &we should not to harm them.
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