How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users. Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. So, you have a startup idea. It’s going to be big. You can see it now. Millions of people using your service. The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users.
If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle. You need a different plan; a plan that doesn’t assume millions of happy users. You need a first 1,000 users plan. Unfortunately, looking at how successful startups are currently executing (Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare) doesn’t help because their growth plans are based on the fact that they already have millions of users.
You have to look at their history. Focus on a Niche. On your way to millions of users, don’t forget you have to get 1,000 happy users first. Developing new startup ideas cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog. If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it. Be the opposite of secretive. Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones.
Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later). Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea. Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn. Every conversation will contain some signal and some noise. 1) Employees at relevant big companies. 2) VCs. 3) Potential customers. 4) Entrepreneurs. Even though I have no intention of starting a new company for a long time (if ever), I still keep my idea spreadsheet and update it periodically. From Nothing To Something. How To Get There. This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business.
The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments. I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working for the Man. This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business.
One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. Finally, get good mentors. Update: YouTube - Mint CEO Aaron Patzer On Startups. Are Business Plans Still Necessary? This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0 craze. There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 wares. Ajax was the new buzzword and many companies went overboard. People mistook extra doses of Ajax for a successful product. Unfortunately this was reinforced by the many conferences that rushed to espouse the benefits of Web 2.0 and the subsequent acquisition sprees of companies like Google, Yahoo!
, Cisco and others went out to fill out their Web 2.0 portfolios. The last 12 months has seen the rise of many new trends. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. In all of these new product and cost-focused new trends, a big problem has emerged that all of these movements have not addressed.