Boris Mann's Link Blog

So if both have no customers, why on earth would a company with an offering necessarily be more valuable than one without? There is absolutely no inherent value in effort put toward something nobody will buy. The value comes with market knowledge that informs the development of the offering, which in turn, increases the chances of market success.

Should Only Startups with Products Get Funded? | Rocket Watcher: Product Marketing for Startups

In other words: you don’t know anything about whether you have a successful until someone is paying you for something. For me, not having an idea is still a negative signal. I think there is a role for labs / studio concepts where a great team gets thrown together, but that is different from these “no idea” fundings.

startups

iOS app success is a “lottery”: 60% (or more) of developers don’t break even | Ars Technica →

I don’t know why this is a surprise. Apps are a business. Most businesses fail soon after starting. Googling a bit finds me this About.com article with some business failure stats that says really small businesses show only 55% survived after three years.

How VCs, Accelerators, and Coworking Spaces Put Communities in Buildings vs. Buildings in Communities →

So if you’re checking off all the ingredients you need to build your own startup ecosystem, just count how many people you have whose fulltime profession it is to support the ecosystem through their normal course of business—not just a side gig or an economic project. Get enough of those and you’ll have your community.

That’s the last paragraph of this post. Unfortunately, we have very few (down to zero?) people in Vancouver whose fulltime job it is to support the community. Everything else rings very true as well, such as “[Government] grants are nice, but they don’t come with the expertise of investors who have worked with tons of startups before”.

If the classic shape of a seed has been thrown out of the window, so be it. If entrepreneurs come in seeking cash on the explicit understanding that they are putting together a diverse syndicate to help them run a series of experiments called “a company” with no notion of probability of success, that’s cool by me too. If crowd-funding platforms help them access top flight investors at speed, all the better.

A singularity hits venture capital – Fred Destin – The Kernel

In other words, yes, the current model of VC is still in the process of being disrupted, so various “VC is broken” is not a surprise. Transparency and markets change all things.

Why Churn is so critical to success in SaaS | For Entrepreneurs →

A good read and primer on churn and negative churn and impacts on revenue. Take away: focus on upselling and cross-selling as well as keeping your customers happy to reduce the effects of people cancelling (churn).

SaaS
churn

I’ve been interested in writing an ebook for a while. The first time I tried I didn’t finish because I couldn’t stay motivated. This time around I was able to stay motivated because I put up a fake sales page to test the idea before I even started writing. This is the same technique that Tim Ferriss talks about in the 4HWW. The validation this provided was what I needed to see it through.

4 Months of ebook Sales

I’m fascinated by self-publishing AKA boot-strapped ebooks, so in general I’m collecting stories like this. Each market is different, of course, but much like Kickstarter, it feels like people are willing to pay for stuff that other people make.

Understanding and utilizing the underlying data of your business is no longer a strategy, it is a requirement. I wrote years ago that social was not a business in and of itself — it was an enabler of all online business. In the same way, Big Data is not a business in and of itself — it is an enabler of all business, online and offline.

Big Data 2.0 — Data as a Platform - VentureBlog

We are still selling data tooling for the most part, rather than tools that let people act on the data.

big data

The technology industry is a lot like major league baseball circa 2000: it shares widely held, but fundamentally incorrect, ideas about valuation. Vendors and buyers alike, for example, behave as if software were a competitive advantage, when this is only rarely the case. As GitHub’s Tom Preston-Werner writes, there are pieces of software that represent “core business value,” and these are assets worth seeking and protecting. But those are, in general, a fraction of an organization’s overall software investments. Most software simply does not represent a competitive advantage.

Software is the New On Base Percentage – tecosystems

Teams, processes, culture. Who cares how much software you’ve built, how do you keep shipping it, maintaining it, and selling it to customers?

There are no “right” answers to any of these questions. Hugely successful businesses have been built at all points on the spectrum, and — since companies are fundamentally a reflection of their founders’ values — the most important question is “what feels right to you?”

But founders also need to be aware that their answers to these (and other) questions have huge significance to prospective investors. I know I have a “right” answer to each of these, some of which I”ll outline below. That doesn’t mean that I’ll never invest in a company that chooses the “wrong” path, but it’s a significant hurdle for me to overcome in making a decision to invest.

Crash Dev: Unwritten Rules

Chris DeVore goes over various typical starting-a-company questions, as well as what he considers to be the right answer for companies he invests in at Founders Co-Op.

Knowing what your answers are to these questions - or at least, how you go about discussing them with other people - is crucially important.

Lightning | Boris Smus →

Boris Smus’ Python based static site generator, if you like Python better than Ruby.