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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. 160 posts.
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Female Founders Conference 2015 applications are open
We’re delighted to announce the second Y CombinatorFemale Founders Conference [http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/], on Saturday, February 21 in San Francisco. Once again, we’ll bring current and future founders together to share their stories, give advice, and make connections. At YC, we have the honor of…
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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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Transcriptic for YC biotech startups
Reducing cost and cycle time as much as possible is one of the highest-leverage things anyone can do to help startups. A few years ago, we rolled out deals with Amazon, Heroku, Microsoft, and Rackspace to make web hosting available for free to the startups we fund. As we expand into new areas, we’ll put similar…
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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 I Walked Away From a $12M Acquisition Offer 18 Months After Our Launch
Groove is now Helply!
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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 Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
The first in a blog series called “Startup Fuck-ups” on turning bad experiences into good practices.
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From Fusion to Octopart and Back
Stay up to date with all the latest news and information through our blogs, guides, podcasts, articles, interviews and much more.
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Buffer raises $3.5M
We’re excited to make this the most transparent fundraise done to date. This post is an overview of why we're raising $3.5m in funding.
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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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Startup School 2014 Recap and Videos
If you missed Startup School 2014, the videos are now on YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5OyY5JWSQrl_gESiEUJxe1m]. Notes from the 10th anniversary of Startup School: Ron Conway, SVAngel [http://youtu.be/qvHhhIfu7Lo?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5OyY5JWSQrl_gESiEUJxe1m] Are entrepreneurs made or born?…