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If you can't find 10 people who say they'll buy it...
Have a great idea? Prove it by finding ten customers ready to hand over cash. Everything else is avoiding the truth.
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Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
It's not a question of if someone copies your business idea, it's when.
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You’re Just the Founder
At times VC’s forget who their business is built on. Nice Car Last week in a car showroom of all places I ran into a VC who I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had sat on the board of my last company an…
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A vote for me is a vote for dipshit businesses everywhere
Vote for my SxSW panel! VCs are increasingly unnecessary to get companies started, and I haven't heard cogent arguments for why a founder should elect to go with them for an early round. Until that changes, they'll continue to be useful for growth-stage but less and less useful for early-stage companies.
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I’m a Female Y Combinator Founder and You Can Be Too
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified…
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How I launched a profitable minimally viable product in 3 hours
Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post in June of 2010 became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:
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My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup
I'm the first employee of BackType , a Summer '08 YC company. My joining the company increased the...
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My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation
All you need to know on Ruby on Rails. Know what you should go for & why. Read up to understand RoR in 2021.
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Too Young to Know It Can’t be Done
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation. Pearl S. Buck Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successf…
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No, that is not a competitive advantage
Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman's 10-day forecast. Here's the top, invalid competitive advantages startup founders like to claim.
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Job Titles That Can Sink Your Startup
I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time …
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You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities
It took losing something important to understand the difference between a commodity and an opportunity. Along the way I also learned yet another way entrepreneurs see the world differently from the…
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Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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If you build it, they won't come, unless...
A/B tests and accumulating Twitter followers is not a marketing strategy, just as "we'll use salt and cheese" isn't a recipe.
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How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
I am a big fan this whole “minimum viable product” philosophy. I’ve probably adapted it to my own interpretation, but basically I look at it as bootstrapping on crack, get your pr…
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Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink
"Which one of you is going to be doing the fundraising?" queried a calm and collected Tom Robinson while in a loud venue one Saturday evening at a Startup School after-party. Tom had good reason to be relaxed that evening. His startup, 280 North, had been acquired by Motorola for 20 Million a few mo