256 Must-Read Content For All Tech Entrepreneurs | Stanley Tang – The Journey of A Young Tech Entrepreneur. Over the past few months, I have been reading a lot of articles and gathering tons of information about tech startups as I set to launch my first one this fall. I’ve saved many of my favorites and, rather than keeping them to myself, I decided to share my bookmarks to the public. The list I’ve compiled below have been filtered and I’ve only selected to publish the best of the best articles and videos. I urge all entrepreneurs who is serious about starting their own tech startup to read those articles as there are tons of golden nuggets to be taken away from them.
This list isn’t meant to be consumed all at once. Instead, you should use this bookmark as a resource list that you can always come back and reference. I’ll be constantly updating this list as I come across new well-worthy articles (if you have any article recommendations, please feel free to submit the links in the comments section below) . * Highly recommended Entrepreneurship General Startup Advice The Idea Product Strategy Legal. What The Hell Does Your Company Do? What We Look for in Founders. Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding.
If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. Photo by DeclanTM This article is #7 in a series about startup marketing. The first 6 (not required before you read this one) are available here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
I’ve gone on and on about the subject of pre-launch marketing on my podcast, made mention of it in my book, went into detail on TechZing, and again on a recent Micropreneur Academy conference call. And after talking about this subject at length, I found myself again evangelizing it last week at the Business of Software conference. This may sound obvious, but given the number of times I’ve been asked about it (and the number of times I’ve seen people do it poorly) it’s apparent it needs further examination.
Objections The two most common objections I’ve heard about pre-launch marketing are that: 6 Tips on Starting a Digital Business from the Founder of Pandora. The Digital Entrepreneur Series is supported by Egnyte. Egnyte Hybrid Cloud File Server delivers critical business infrastructure — online storage, file sharing, collaboration and backup — at LAN speeds. Visit www.egnyte.com to learn more. With more than 65 million listeners, a huge money-making mobile business and plans to make it into your living room and car, Pandora is the web-based streaming music service to beat. It's easy to forget that Pandora was once a troubled startup on the brink of ruin.
Having launched in 2000, the now 10-year-old company has been plagued by expensive track royalties for most of its existence (and still is). Westergren is now singing a much different tune — thanks in no small part to Pandora's wildly popular iPhone application and the company's ability to serve highly targeted advertisements. Raise Money Much Earlier Than You Think Pandora has raised upward of $55 million in investment funding over the course of its 10-year lifespan.
Adapt to Trends. How to Get Bought by Google, Facebook. How to get press from Techcrunch and other highlights e27. Two great sessions on the startup track at Accelerate 2010 featured Dr. Serkan Toto from TechCrunch and Darius Cheung of TenCube. Serkan Toto writes mainly about the Asian startup scene on TechCrunch and Asiajin. He gave a lot of useful tips on how startups should pitch the press/TechCrunch.
We observed many attendees diligently taking notes which hopefully they will put this information to practice! @e27sg – Plan ahead, check embargo policies of the blogs and avoid low hanging fruit i.e the second tier blogs. Toto shared an interesting case study on Insync’s feature on TechCrunch: “They had a story to tell, USP and a great product”. @e27sg – Startups should not confuse bloggers to be their PR agenciesDarius Cheung, founder of Singapore-based mobile security app company tenCube, which was recently acquired by McAfee, shared his thoughts on how to sell your startup.
@e27sg: IDEO’s Richard Kelly: rapid prototyping to start the conversation earlier, not to judge an idea’s worth. 15 Small Business Lessons from Richard Branson : Managing. Startups Or Behemoths: Which Are We Going To Bet On? I knew I would be touching a raw nerve with my last two posts, on patents. But I was really surprised at the divergence of opinion. Entrepreneurs overwhelmingly supported my stance that software patents hamper innovation and need to be abolished, but friends at Microsoft, IBM, and Google were outraged at my recommendation.
The big companies’ executives argued that abolishing patents would hurt their ability to innovate and thus hamper the nation’s economic growth. (They believe that companies like theirs create the majority of jobs and innovations, and they claim that without patents they cannot defend their innovations.) I am not convinced that software patents give Google any advantage over Microsoft and Yahoo, or make IBM’s databases any better than Oracle’s. But I do know one thing for sure: it isn’t the big companies that create the jobs or the revolutionary technology innovations: it is startups.
So if we need to pick sides, I vote for the startups. When to Seek Funding. Many entrepreneurs dream of raising capital right out of the gate. The reality is that most must bootstrap their startup long before an angel investor or venture capital firm will give them the time of day. Entrepreneurs typically start with small lines of credit from banks to discover their market, graduate to investment from friends and family to develop their prototype, then move to angel investors to prove the prototype, and finally shift to venture capital funding to scale the business and get profitable.
Here are some tips to consider if you’re looking to get your startup funded: 1. Understand the risk/reward equation. In this economy, revenue is the most compelling argument you can make. 2. 3. Bottom line? Clate Mask Co-Founder and CEO Infusionsoft Gilbert, Ariz. Minimum Viable Network VCMike's Blog. Minimum Viable Product: a guide. One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product.
Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because it's actually quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it. I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. Below you'll find the video of my remarks as well as the full slides embedded below. But I wanted to say a few words first. First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Some caveats right off the bat. Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. Without further ado, the video: Slides are below: The Benefits of Letting Others Recast Your Problem. At the recent Spigit Innovation Summit, MIT professor and leading Enterprise 2.0 thinker Andrew McAfee related the crowdsourcing story of Foldit, about which he also blogged. Foldit is an online game where rank amateurs can try their hand at folding proteins. And they do well! Quick background first. Our cells produce a variety of proteins, the building blocks for our body. After these proteins are initially created, they fold into a predetermined final shape. A particular protein always folds into the same shape.
But scientists are at a loss to explain why. Enter Foldit, an online game created by a team from the University of Washington. The UW scientists ran a test of how the best participants did against the computer programs on ten different proteins. Those alone are fascinating results. Are the scientists themselves the ones playing Foldit? Different Perspectives vs. Don Norman, Design without Designers Is the protein folding question just a “biochemistry problem”? Virtual outsourcing: Mobile work.
The Margin Manifesto: 11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months. Profitability often requires better rules and speed, not more time. (Photo: Jetta Girl) I wrote this “margin manifesto” several months ago and somehow neglected to post it. Your requests for more content on start-up economics and processes reminded me. These are the principles I review whenever facing operational overwhelm or declining/stagnating profits. Hope you find them useful. The financial goal of a start-up should be simple: profit in the least time with the least effort. Based on my interviews with high-performing (using profit-per-employee metrics) CEOs in more than a dozen countries, here are the 11 basic tenets of the “Margin Manifesto”… a return-to-basics call that gives permission to do the uncommon to achieve the uncommon: consistent profitability (or doubling of it) in 3 months or less. 1. 2. 3. 5. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Did you enjoy this post? Books for Startups Steve Blank. See the “Startup Tools” Tab for Tools and Blogs. For Books on Silicon Valley History see here Free Harvard Business Review article here Entrepreneurial Management StackOver the last few years we’ve discovered that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. The skills founders need are not covered by traditional books for MBA’s and large company managers. There are now a few books that specifically address founders needs. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is the first book that allows you to answer “What’s your business model?” Intelligently and with precision. Osterwalders follow-on book Value Proposition Design describes how to get product/market fit right. Eric Ries was the best student I ever had. Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a series essays about what CEO face in the “Build” phase – the transition from searching for a business model into a company.
It’s impossible to implement any of this if you don’t understand Agile Development. Books. 256 Must-Read Content For All Tech Entrepreneurs | Stanley Tang – The Journey of A Young Tech Entrepreneur. Start-up Strategy: To Change the Game, Change the Economics of How It’s Played. (photo: laffy4k) Several weeks ago, I found myself in the passenger seat of a car going nowhere fast. My friend, Peter Sims, who had earlier introduced me to the Stanford D.School, was leading the charge into the unknown, hurtling us (hopefully) towards dinner in exotic Burlingame, where people from SF and Palo Alto compromise to break bread. The “us” included Alan M. Webber, whom I’d never met. Alan was co-founder of Fast Company magazine and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.
More specifically related to this post, Alan developed a very interesting habit more than 20 years ago, when he began to carry a supply of 3 x 5 index cards wherever life took him. His new book, Rules of Thumb, is a collection of 52 truths he’s culled from these notes specifically related to winning in business. Here is Rule #24, one of my favorites. RULE #24 – If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played. Except for the Grateful Dead. So What? How do you do it? Are You Making These Business Mistakes? Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy. October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.
If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is better before taking the leap? Of course, the idea you have now won't be the last you have. That doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. Investors are more of a problem. 8 Start Up Tips from co-founder of Rypple. The 7 Habits Of Highly Successful Startups. A Startup Financing Strategy That Works. – Kenneth H. Marks is the founder and managing partner of Raleigh, North Carolina-based High Rock Partners. He is also the lead author of the “Handbook of Financing Growth”. The views expressed are his own. – Statistically no one gets venture capital.
The financing strategy is bootstrapping in stages based on iterative phases of success and only doing what must be done to get to the next phase with minimal capital. Start with the customerEstablish the critical path items for at least the first stage of the company or projectDefine what it takes to validate the market and prove the company’s abilityDevelop a list of where and from whom you can get the resources needed (i.e. who has a reason to care about my company’s success)? Start with the end in mind – that is, the customer and the market need. Next, leveraging the knowledge gained to develop the critical path items required to launch the company, create a working prototype and confirm the business model works. Let’s take an example: The 11 Harsh Realities Of Being An Entrepreneur. Common Mistakes that Every Young Entrepreneur Should Avoid. Skip Advertisement This ad will close in 15 seconds...
Young Entrepreneurs Today's Most Read 9 Proven Ways to Get People to Take You Seriously 4 Intangibles That Drive CEOs What It Takes to Go From Dead Broke to 6 Figures in 6 Months The Mentality of a Successful Career 4 Big Challenges That Startups Face These Siblings Are Cooking Up America's First Meatless Butcher Shop Kim Lachance Shandrow 3 min read News and Articles About Young Entrepreneurs Failure 6 Stories of Super Successes Who Overcame Failure They're perfect examples of why failure should never stop you from following your vision. Jayson DeMers Podcasts Top 25 Business Podcasts for Entrepreneurs Podcasts are as easy to use as old-school radio but as specialized as blogs. Murray Newlands Entrepreneurship Programs Saxbys and Drexel Team Up to Promote Entrepreneurship Saxby's founder Nick Bayer talks about the one-of-a-kind program and why he wishes there was one for himself years ago.
Carly Okyle Presented by Young Entrepreneurs Laura Entis Fear. - This is going to be BIG! - The Value of Getting KnockedAround. Last night, my ZogSports softball team, the Lousy Shirts (so named b/c we won last year and all we got were these…), won our second championship—back to back after winning the Spring/Summer league. In the earlier league, we went 9-0, absolutely crushing most of the teams we played along the way. We were scoring at least 15 runs a game, and had one of the best pitchers in the league to go along with a very tight defense. Then, we ran into some trouble, losing two out of the last three to finish 10-2—still the first seed but going into the playoffs a little less certain about our inevitable destiny. So what happened? We settled down, played impeccable ball in the semis and finals, and beat out two top teams on our way to a championships. I’m not sure we made an error in either of those games. We knew what we had to do—what level we had to play at—executed, and succeeded.
We basically repeated the same pattern in the Fall. WTF is Traction? A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC. As CEO, there is never enough time to gather all... - bijansabet.com. On start-ups. Israeli entrepreneurs: MBAs are for wusses. What I Learned About Entrepreneurship Through 15 Angel Investments. Customer Motivated Entrepreneurship and the Lean Startup | Zvi Band.