Spring 2009 is a time period that I hope to never experience again, yet it yielded some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my professional career. Those were the early days in the launch of the iOS platform and social gaming on Facebook. Viximo, the virtual goods and social gaming company I had co-founded, was right in the middle of this craze.
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Achieving The Network Effect: Solving The Chicken or The Egg
One of the most defensible positions for a startup is if you can achieve the network effect. The network effect is so strong that it has kept large companies in business for a long time, despite bad products and numerous competitors. Craigslist is a perfect example. It is only recently that a new wave of startups like AirBNB, TaskRabbit, and RentJuice have started to chip away at the Craigslist stronghold, but it took over 10 years. Achieving the network effect is no easy feat. It comes with a huge hurdle: The chicken or the egg.
5 Quick Tips To Find Scalable Customer Acquisition
Stories about the growth of "hot" startups such as Facebook, Instagram, AirBNB, and others have created a belief that if you build the right product, customer acquisition will be easy. Don't be fooled. These stories are the exception, not the rule, and don't tell the entire story of the immense effort it took to grow their customer bases. Finding scalable acquisition channels is a time consuming and strategic effort.
The One Process Every Startup Should Have
Most young entrepreneurs have an allergic reaction to anything with the word “process” in it. So before you break out in hives and curl up in ball with cold sweats, take a Benadryl and hear me out. There is one area that every startup, no matter what stage you are at, should have a process for...
How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks
In 2007 I was 23 years old, working full time as a product manager at ZoomInfo while moonlighting on a number of entrepreneurial side projects. I had previously started a few companies with angel funding and a couple small exits, but certainly nothing of scale. In a whirlwind of a month, all of that changed based on an inebriated conversation while standing over a keg of beer. As the title of this posts suggests, this random keg conversation transformed into finding an amazing technical co-founder, building a prototype, and raising $5M dollars in VC funding. These major events that typically take months (sometimes years), happened in less than 4 weeks. Here is how...