I’m pumped to announce I’m starting a new interview show. I’m aiming to interview people who’ve done really cool things in order to expose their knowledge to others. My first interview is with Biz Dev pro Alex Taub. In our interview he reveals: How he “broke into tech” The most important thing he’s done for [...]
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Things Startup Founders Should Understand About Channel Partnerships
Many startup founders are deathly afraid of building their own sales team. They default to channel partnerships to try and get distribution. Sigh. For those unfamiliar with the term, a channel partnership is when a person or organization sells products on behalf of another company. An example of this is how Duda Mobile [...]
Building A Minimum Viable Audience
I’ve soft-launched two startups in the past year…and I’m the only one that knows about it. Many aspiring founders build a minimum viable product without a minimum viable audience. This is bad. In order to truly understand market demand, there needs to be a feedback loop. For consumer web products, that feedback loop is [...]
Good BD At An Early Stage Startup
How do you if know a business development person is “good” at an early stage startup? I think one mark of a great BD person is that they’re able to get that initial deal with a meaningful party. Generally speaking, they’re able to convince someone worthwhile to take a chance on them. If I’m a [...]
BD: Identifying and Partnering with Arms Dealers
In business development or sales, the biggest fish in your prospect pond are often what I like to call “arms dealers.” Arms dealers provide a related product or service to a group of fragmented targets. By selling to or partnering with an arms dealer, you can reach this group of targets in one fell swoop [...]
Unique Cultural Traditions and Why They’re Important
One thing I love hearing about is unique cultural traditions within companies. They provide a window into the actual “company” beyond just the product. This is usually pretty opaque and far more interesting to me. Building a good product is cool, but building a company that people love to work at is way cooler. Ideally [...]
Why I Stopped Learning To Code
Frequently I’ve felt my inability to code has hampered my ability to do many things. I’ve had so many ideas I’d love to test. IF ONLY I COULD CODE. Fueled by frustration, 8 months ago I started teach myself PHP. [...]
The Humble Brag Economy
As Will Dean so insightfully highlighted two evenings ago, the newest luxury goods are experiences. The dominant conditions surrounding society have made it so. Generally we have less free time which assigns a higher value to anything devote our time to. We also have incrementally more channels to document and share our experiences (facebook, twitter, [...]
Thoughts on The Knowledge Economy
Two things that I love are learning and businesses that create surplus from uncaptured value. A space that particularly intrigues me is the Knowledge Economy. So much of the incredible knowledge that people have gained through experience lies dormant. People always want to improve, gather more data points, and find things faster so there is [...]
Be Authentic When Someone Asks How Your Startup is Going
So how is (enter startup name) going? Many people answer this question with some iteration of “good” regardless of where things stand. I’ve talked with founders who I know are flailing, yet they still come up with some anecdote that things are “going well”. I’m not surprised at this behavior; we live in [...]
Subscription Commerce is Not Plug and Play
Just because you can put cool items people want inside of a box does not mean a viable subscription commerce business exists. After the success of Birchbox, so many people are trying to find ways to emulate the coveted subscription commerce model. Why? My guess is because it’s an attractive, easy to understand model. Over [...]
SMB Social Media: Many Are Catching On
A trend I’ve been noticing amongst SMBs I interact with is that they’re increasingly using technology to capture value from one-off interactions where they previously failed. Larger brands have long recognized the power of an email address or social media relationship and have provided consumers with incentives to trade this information. This information is a [...]
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