Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team... On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products... Personally, I’ll take the third position—I’ll assert that market is the most important ... See more

Ingredient 1: The problem is important to people

There need to be a lot of people willing to spend a lot of money to solve the problem. Most startups fail not because the idea isn’t good but because the market for the solution is just too small. If you want to build a venture-scale business, a rule of thumb is that there needs to be a clear path to... See more

When analyzing whether you should sell your company, a good basic rule of thumb is if (a) you are very early on in a very large market and (b) you have a good chance of being number one in that market, then you should remain stand-alone. The reason is that nobody will be able to afford to pay what you are worth, because nobody can give you that muc

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1. Is my market big enough?

Do the math. What would have to be true for your business to reach $100M in revenue in one year? How many people would need to be using it (and/or paying for it), and how much should you need to make per user?