Throw out that five-year plan, build something now, and don't take any money
A couple of Getting Realish ideas spotted in Best Life magazine: Greg Gianforte is the author of “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.” In Follow Your Dream, he advises throwing out your five-year plan and focusing on building somethi…
I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO
Ever since SEOmoz took venture capital investment last fall, I've been reading a lot of blogs and sites geared towards the startup world. Even though we've been around for 5 years (and Gillian and I have been doing web marketing for 10), I still think of us very much like a startup - we've grown…
How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year
“Lean startups are built from the ground up for learning about customers.” – Eric Ries I recently sat in on Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups at Berkeley. The slides and audio ar…
Do it yourself first
You should never hire anyone for something you haven’t first struggled to do on your own. It’ll teach you most of what you need to know to actually interview candidates, it’ll allow you to understand the nature of the work better (do I even need to hire or can we outsource?), and …
My YC Interview Experience S09 by James (Listia.com)
I was going to title this blog “Advice For A YC Interview”, but I thought that would be the wrong choice of words for what I want to write. I figured I’d tell the story of h…
Strategies to Take on an Established Competitor
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Ask 37signals: How did you come up with pricing for your products?
Mattijs asks: I am developing an internet product and I am rapidly approaching the point at which I will need to set a pricing scheme for this product. Problem: I have no idea what to shoot for! I have done some research which shows a wide range of similar products with varying pricing schemes. …
What is the minimum viable product?
Eric Ries and I recently sat down to talk about minimum viable products: the product with just the necessary features to get money and feedback from early adopters. The minimum viable product (MVP)…
Trust customers over VCs
Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps …
VentureHacks: How to Pick a Co-founder
Update: Also see our 40-minute interview on this topic. Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors. The ideal founding …
How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death [video]
One of Gail Goodman's legacies to the software industry has been proving you can build a profitable business in the SMB space.
Heroku (YC W08) makes PaaS flexible with Add-ons
Heroku has focused since day one on making the end-to-end application experience as easy as possible. From our git focused workflow to the automated...
Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive
Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal. Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $69
The Option Pool Shuffle
“Follow the money card!” – The Inside Man, Three-Card Shuffle Summary: Don’t let your investors determine the size of the option pool for you. Use a hiring plan to justify a small…