Food For Founders #19
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How To Build An Email List From Scratch (4 Simple Steps)
Design is one of the four most important factors to establish trust with your visitors (the other three being transparency, comprehensiveness, and up-to-date content)…
The longer people are on your site, the more time they have to consume your content and learn that your content is amazing, increasing the chance they’ll opt-in to your list.
From Starting to Selling – A 3.5 Year Reflection
The best middle ground between these two options is to make an effort to prove your revenue model works early on and that is scalable as you grow your user base, even if you don’t have enough customers to turn a profit.
If I was given the opportunity to start Birch again, I would have allocated 75% of my time to solving distribution, even before having a product in market, and the remaining 25% on product.
With any product, the goal is to find product-market fit, and the best way to do that is by getting your product into the hands of real, cold users. From there, I highly recommend following this framework for a quantitative approach to product-market fit.
Affective forecasting: Why you keep giving “future you” too much work
One of the biggest errors all of us make when scheduling our time is what psychologists call affective forecasting—underestimating just how much our emotional and physical states will affect our future decisions and ability to do the things we want to do.
The real reasons why a VC passed on your startup
Problematic cap tables may have format issues (like being out of date, not reflecting recent funding rounds or equity grants, broken models, or mispriced option grants), ownership issues (like angels who got way too much of the company for a small amount of money, not having employees on a vesting schedule, advisors who think they have equity but aren’t on the cap table, or confusing agreements like warrants or verbal promises that don’t show up in the document), or both.
There is not one right way to come off as special; the extroverted salesperson CEO often comes to mind, but the introverted technical genius who breaks down complicated architecture into simple quips fills that role too. “I’m just not that into you” is perhaps the most difficult-to-articulate reason to pass on a startup, but one of the most common.
Venture-backed companies should be scalable, meaning that they can multiply revenue with minimal incremental cost as they grow.