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The Product is the Byproduct
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Why Startups Die
Startups die due to a variety of causes. Over the course of the last three years, I've watched many of my friends pour their hearts and souls into companies that, for one reason or another, just fizzled out of existence. In 2007, Paul Graham gave a variety of causes for…
Startup = Growth
September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups…
The only two ways to build a $100m business
With tens of thousands of new start-ups being created every year, the potential of a company to truly scale and become a large, stand-alone business is more crucial than ever before. A great product is always the foundation but a clear distribution strategy becomes essential to cut through the noise. So most…
Grove.io shutting down
UPDATE:Grove was not shut down and instead was acquired by Revolution Systems. We're profitable and in no danger of being ...
Black Swan Farming
September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…
Startup Culture
It's with a culture where people can thrive and tackle problems they find interesting. It's not with offering standing desks and beefy computers; every Silicon Valley startup offers that.
37signals invests in The Starter League
Today we’d like to announce that we’ve bought a stake in The Starter League. This is the only investment that 37signals has ever made in another company. What is The Starter League? The Starter League (formerly known as Code Academy) is a small school in Chicago that teaches Rai…
Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die
I’m posting a series of articles on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make a dent in the universe. Hoping they’ll give you a point of v…
“Me-too” products are fine
This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. You can find his blog at blog.jitbit.com and meet him at the Business of Software 2012 this October. —————————————————————————————————————————————– Does this sound…
Why you should continue working on your bad idea
"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!" - Randy Pausch
Tacocopter Basics
The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…
Introducing human.io
My small startup, Tasty Labs, has recently launched human.io . Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If…
Bootstrapped Wingify moves to a bigger office and hits 1600+ customers
Read the Wingify blog to get the most updated tips & industry best practices on CRO, customer engagement, & user experience.