Imagine your future self shows up scifi-style to give you a
presentation on startup lessons learned. Would be incredibly valuable
right? Well I have the next best thing for you.
A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to attend a master class by Fred Destin on the “Startup Lifecycle”. He is on the board of Seedcamp, a
european startup accelerator comparable to YCombinator. Fortunately
his talk was filmed and recently put on the web for everyone to watch.
Seldom have I seen a presentation that was both exciting to watch live
and still so informative to go through later on. Fred’s prezi
is packed with references for further reading.
But enough of the prelude, here are the main take-aways in bullet point style:
Start
- Pick the right co-founder
- Do reverse vesting — It’s founder friendly
- Borrow & steal — minimize cost, more time for product/market fit
Launch
- Be Lean — The Lean Startup, Running Lean, Business Model Canvas
- Focus on providing value to your customer
- Use validated learning, pivots & iterations to achieve product/market-fit ASAP
Build
- You can’t manage what you can’t measure
- Initially focus on activation and retention (funnels, KISSmetrics, …)
- Be data informed, not data driven. Brush up on your statistics skills
- Use your intuition for important decisions (see the big picture),
use analytics to optimize
Chasm
- Aggressive investment before product/market-fit can be dangerous
- To grow you need to cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority
- Read Crossing the Chasm and/or Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore
Scale
- Build a repeatable customer process
- Build a solid infrastructure for billing & deployments
- Fight organizational creep and automate stuff
- Grow the team and company culture