Validating Your Startup Idea Before Building Your Product. Coming up with startup ideas can be hard, but validating them is even harder, and more important to your startup than you might realize. Because regardless of how world-changing your idea is, if you build a product before validating the idea it’s based on, there’s a good chance your product will fail. The Founder Institute can help you validate your startup idea. Click here to apply to a program near you! Luckily, this guide will show you how to make sure you have a strong business idea - well before you spend time and money building your minimum viable product. Ensure Your Startup Idea Does Only One Thing - and Does It Well Some of the biggest companies in the world - like Google, Apple, and Amazon - provide a multitude of products and services.
The lesson here is that if you have an idea for a startup offering, don’t get caught up in the excitement of launching the numerous versions, features, and other areas you want to expand to. Questions to Ask What is my product? Follow these tips: Google Docs - create and edit documents online, for free. One account. All of Google. Sign in to continue to Docs Find my account Forgot password? Sign in with a different account Create account One Google Account for everything Google. Jeff Bezos explains the perfect way to make risky business decisions. This Is How You Get People to Trust Your Product. Most new tech companies simply would not work without consumer trust. People wouldn’t get into an Uber, list their home on Airbnb, or even buy shoes on Zappos if they didn’t trust those companies to deliver a high quality, secure service. UrbanSitter sets the bar even higher: It connects families with babysitters on the Internet. There are few things that require more faith.
“In many ways, we’re tackling the service that requires the most trust in someone’s life,” says UrbanSitter CEO Lynn Perkins. “If companies can replicate what we’ve done in other sectors, they’ll knock it out of the park.” So how did UrbanSitter pull this off? How did they build a product that convinces parents that strangers can safely watch their children? Identify What Your Users Need People have short attention spans. “The best way to do this is to first identify your ideal user,” says Perkins. “As you develop trust, you develop brand equity. Borrow Trust Wherever You Can Don't Make Ratings Your Only Metric. Growth Stacks. 17 Product Managers Who Will Own the Future of NYC Tech — and the 9 Frameworks They’ll Use to Do It. In October, 17 product managers sat around a table at First Round’s New York Office, ready to learn something new. They’d been hand-picked out of 800+ applicants for the First Round Product Program — the first seminar series of its kind for rising star PMs destined to shape the industry for years to come.
Instructors included recent product luminaries ranging from Viacom SVP Product Mike Berkley to Ellevest CPO Alexandria Stried to Kit Founder Camille Hearst. But no one knew what to expect. What happened next was kismet. To provide a window into the program’s content, we want to share these key lessons learned with the broader community — and give you a sneak peek at who these 17 remarkable product people are. The Product Program’s nine sessions were each curated to take on an essential area of product leadership: At First Round, we believe the best companies are most often built by extraordinary product minds. Prioritization becomes critical.
Time-Based Risk Building Blocks First Do... What Every SaaS Business Needs to Know About User Adoption. The human side of transformation - SYPartners. Tom Andrews, President, Organizational ConsultingLaura Kurtz, Ph.D., Behavior Change Strategist “The 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.”
—Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering, Google (via Thank You for Being Late, by Thomas L. Friedman) Spend any time looking at the pace of technological progress and global interconnection, and you can see why this era—which Thomas Friedman calls “the era of accelerations”—is so unsettling. Our latent ability to adapt is being overtaken by the increasing pace of technology-driven change, and it is getting much harder for leaders to draw upon past experiences as models of the future. The outcome is a lack of leadership when we need it most. The answer is not to go around trying to destroy new technology, like the Luddites of old.
At SYPartners, we believe the most successful transformations are human led. Product Manual. At Product Manual we care your privacy. Data collection We use the following tools to collect minimum data: - Google Analytics: usage data - Hotjar: Heat mapping and session recording - Personal Data: Cookies* and email address (when you subscribe to our newsletter or suggest resources) We use the collected data to: - Improve user experience to make your visit as simple as possible - Deliver the right content in which you are interested Cookies Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the site's or service provider's systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. We use cookies to: - Understand and save user's preferences for future visits. - Compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interactions in order to offer better site experiences and tools in the future.
Third Party Disclosure & Links Contact us. Startup Pitch Decks | Attach. Raised $500k | 2011 | buffer.comInvestors: Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot), Hiten Shah, Guy Kawasaki, Peter Bordes, Gady Nemirovsky, Robert Fanini, Thomas Korte, Shan Mehta, Keval Desai, Maneesh Arora, Jay Gould, Andy McLoughlin, Gordon Paddison, Eric Kim, Jay Baer, Gokul Rajaram, Harvey Brofman, Graham Jenkin, Adii Pienaar, Jim LeTourneau, Alberto Benbunan “Overall, we probably attempted to get in contact with somewhere around 200 investors. Of those, we perhaps had meetings with about 50.
In the end, we closed a $450k seed round from 18 investors. Perhaps the most important part of our success in closing that round was that Leo and I would sit down in coffee shops together and encourage each other to keep pushing forward, to send that next email asking for an intro or a meeting.” Joel Gascoigne CEO, Buffer Buffer’s COO Leo Widrich shares his thoughts on the deck here.
SYPartners | Made By SYPartners. ThinkGrowth.org. We Studied 100 Mentor-Mentee Matches — Here’s What Makes Mentorship Work. When First Round launched its Mentorship Program in 2016, we didn’t know what to expect. We’d heard from a number of people in our community that mentorship remained an elusive, missing piece in their careers.
Younger people said it was intimidating and difficult to find a mentor. Their older counterparts said they weren’t sure if their advice truly mattered. But everyone said they believed in mentorship’s transformative power. So we set out to fix it. The task went to Whitnie Low Narcisse, who leads all of First Round’s advisory programs and more. To address informality, she required mentor-mentee pairs to meet every other week for one quarter (leaving the option open for them to continue), totaling 6 meetings. The feedback was effusively positive, with high demand for another round. So, Narcisse asked the best mentors. Obviously, out in the world people don’t have the benefit of being assigned a mentor.
For mentors: Can I clearly be helpful to this potential mentee? For mentees: The 9 Deadliest Startup Sins. The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2017. As we looked through what we published in 2017 to highlight the very best knowledge shared, two things stood out to us. First, we were thrilled to feature a star-studded cast of extraordinary operators — including but not limited to Instagram CTO Mike Krieger, Facebook VP Product Fidji Simo, Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, and Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson. But second, and more importantly: We ended the year featuring nearly 50-50 women and men leaders (46% women to be exact). In an industry where visibility and role models can make an enormous difference, we were happy to do our part — and motivated to do even better next year.
The advice we've collected here is a tapestry of what technology's top minds believe is most important for people to know right now. Now all of this is yours, too. Take it with you, and make 2018 your year. We'll be rooting for you (as we write even more). Her most transferable lesson for building startups and software? 16 Startup Metrics. We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.
Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually happening in the business, or people may use different definitions of the same metric in a way that makes it hard to understand the health of the business. So, while some of this may be obvious to many of you who live and breathe these metrics all day long, we compiled a list of the most common or confusing ones. Where appropriate, we tried to add some notes on why investors focus on those metrics.
Ultimately, though, good metrics aren’t about raising money from VCs — they’re about running the business in a way where founders know how and why certain things are working (or not) … and can address or adjust accordingly. Business and Financial Metrics #1 Bookings vs. Revenue. Saas startup mistakes.