I just got back from speaking to 100 NYC high school kids about startups. The good folks at Global Kids asked me to say a few words at the NY Public Library Emoti-con festival, and I was more than happy to oblige and talk about one of my favorite subjects. I decided to give the kids some advice should they …
Our Customer Development Journey, Part 4 (8 thoughts from our MVP beta)
Aprizi has been in open beta for six weeks now. These last six weeks have been an intense blur, a fire hose of information, and going open beta was the best possible thing we could have done. We are making some fairly big near-term changes because of this process. Here are 8 thoughts on the latest phase of our customer …
The Cold Reality of First-Time Funding
Earlier today, I watched Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz debate lean vs fat fundraising approaches (very different from “lean startup” concepts even if often confused). The reality is very very simple: unless you are a celebrity/proven founder, “lean” is your only option. I don’t buy for a second that Horowitz would write a “fat” check to an unproven entrepreneur no …
Git it done (the joy of wearing many hats)
The good folks at Venture Hacks tweeted a piece from the WePay blog about things a non-engineer founder should know. His points tie in nicely with the struggle many business people have in taking their grand idea and shrinking it down to an actionable, minimal first version. I wanted to touch on tasks for a non-coder in the super-early stages …
Coming up with a startup name (i.e. the 6th circle of hell)
Few things are more painful than coming up with a good yet inexpensive name for a business on the Web. Somehow you need to find something that is “cocktail party friendly” (i.e. someone can hear it, spell it, remember it), search engine friendly (i.e. type it in and have a shot at appearing high on list), and yet available / …
Our Customer Development Journey, part 3
Aprizi is about to enter that crucial phase of open beta, so I wanted to pause and write down the latest installment in our customer development journey (part 1 and 2). For anyone new to the blog, Aprizi is building a personalization engine for online shopping — a Pandora for e-commerce, if you will. My thesis is that the intersection …
$160 million in the bank
I was just catching up on the Chirp conference care of GigaOm when I stopped dead at this sentence, “With more than 100,000 applications created on its platform to date, it’s frankly amazing that Twitter hadn’t formalized its road map and addressed competition with developers before … [t]hough with $160 million in the bank you’d think the company could have …
Not Cheap, Not Disposable
I side with Mark Suster on the need to retire the phrase “fail fast”.* I understand both sides, and the differences are hardly surprising since VCs live at the macro level (company fails) and entrepreneurs are immersed at the micro level (assumption fails). But it’s still a dumb phrase because it gets misinterpreted too easily. Take this quote from Umair …
The “Past is Prologue” Objection
One of the most annoying things for an entrepreneur to hear, and one of the hardest things for a venture capitalist to navigate, is the “past is prologue” doubt. By that I mean: “your idea failed before, so why will it work this time around?” Given that most Web 2.0 ideas were conceptualized, attempted, and failed, during Web 1.0, this …
Are you all on the same page? A 20 minute Test.
When you are in the weeds building, testing, and iterating, communication challenges can pop up. First, you want everyone on the same page as to how the “value proposition” has evolved, what needs to be validated next, and why. Second, when your business feels like a moving target, sometimes it can be awfully hard to explain to others in clear …