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How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup
I launched on a Tuesday and had 3 paying customers by the following Friday. That’s a small win for a young startup — here’s how it happened.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 84 posts.
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How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS
There's a newer and updated post published 3 years later on a similar topic: How Pipedrive reached 50,000 paying customers Short answer: great product, some marketing and a bit of luck. These things got Pipedrive to pass the 10,000 paying customers milestone earlier in the year. The longer answer is below. This is the…
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A cautionary tale about subscription services and how not to shut down a startup
As you think about holiday gifts this season, I’d like to warn you about the subscription service Whimseybox. This is also a cautionary…
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Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?
Self-examination for Seed and Series A startups
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Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
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A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)
[This was originally published on the now-defunct Infogami and was surprisingly hard to find online, so I put it here. I’ve added commentary, with our now internet-decades of hindsight, in brackets. I’ve also summarized the names mentioned (and alluded to) along 7 dimensions: Evocativity, Brevity, Greppability…
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Thoughts on Startup School
Perhaps my expectations were misaligned, but I was astonished at how geek-unfriendly the event was. At conferences like BSDCan , one of the major considerations is the availability of power sockets; at Startup School, not only were the power sockets very limited — we were in a theatre with perhaps a dozen outlets…
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Why I Love Startup School
I realized on the way to Startup School that this was the tenth one I've emceed. We've done one every year since 2005 (plus two this year in NYC and London). It struck me throughout the day how...
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use...
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Burn Baby Burn
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
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Applying to YC
One of the most common misconceptions startups have about applying to Y Combinator is thinking that they are too early or too late. We have funded companies with only an idea; we’ve funded...
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Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
(Background: Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same day ingredient delivery service. Select a recipe on our website, and we deliver everything you need…
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If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
When you look online for advice about entrepreneurship, you will see a lot of "just do it": The best way to get experience... is to start ...