Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
How to build a system of information-gathering to get an ROI on time spent
From the Forte Labs Newsletter:
How to read this newsletter:
You'll always find different topics and different content formats (e.g., video, blog posts) in this newsletter. That's intentional.
But for some, that can feel a bit overwhelming.
I want to assure sure: You absolutely
... See more“Working on a startup is like riding a broken bicycle. You have to both ride and fix it at the same time.”
How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer
At a big company, you're trained to get it right and get it out. You can’t risk experimenting on your customer base. When you're at a small company, you don't have any product-market fit, so you have to get it out, then get it right.
How to Scale Yourself Down
The median bootstrapped B2B SaaS company currently spends around 90% of its annual recurring revenue on costs—25% on go-to-market strategy and execution, 24% on research and development, 15% on administrative and miscellaneous expenses, 13% on website hosting and implementation, and 10% on customer retention. Each of these categories of cost is now... See more
Will Manidis • Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups
On the evolving spend of startups
- Level one: Nascent product-market fit. Likely a pre-seed or seed-stage company. The goal in this stage is to find three to five customers with a problem worth solving, engage with them, deliver a solution, and validate that solution. [examples: Vanta, L
Lenny Rachitsky • A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)
You can do what's called the board mission pledge where the people on your board are required as a condition of being on your board to pledge that they'll use their business judgment under Delaware law to support the mission, not just the narrow interest of shareholders. You can build, we call it an LTSPV, which is basically a financing instrument ... See more
Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
“Why didn’t they simply do the perfect thing on the first attempt?”
The short answer is: that’s not how this works. Things are not linear or clean. We can only asymptote towards perfection through trial and error.
The short answer is: that’s not how this works. Things are not linear or clean. We can only asymptote towards perfection through trial and error.