Writer’s block was invented in the early 1800s. Before then, writing was a labour and a craft. The more time you spent, the more skilled you became. You could then to produce better pieces, faster. Writer’s block arrived once quality was attributed to inspiration. If you were building a house, you wouldn’t concern yourself with [...]
Category : Founders
26 Oct
Trollope on shipping
26 Oct
The one shot world – a case for career entrepreneurship and casual experimentation
Imagine if you only got one shot: throughout your entire life, you could only watch one film, paint one picture, date one partner, choose one home, and tell one joke. And the pressure of that decision: the self doubt, the endless re-starts. The risk for creatives! How could you create something unique if you only [...]
25 Oct
It’s the CEO’s job to email the first 1000 signups
Until you’ve passed a thousand signups, the CEO should be personally emailing every new user. I’m going to cover: Practicalities How to mess it up Common objections Goals, perks & benefits The signup thank you note It’s not a big message. Mine look like this: Hey Jackie, Thanks for taking the time to check out [...]
20 Oct
The coffeeshop fallacy
11 Oct
High value non-technical founders do exist
I want a business co-founder to do three things: deliver customers, extend runway, and be the mom. Customers – While most startups aren’t able to sell product before launching, you can certainly build strong relationships with key players. You can have them excitedly contributing ideas to your feature lists. You can have them ready to [...]
22 Sep
Should every founder learn to program
Learning deep, technical programming takes a while. That stuff isn’t worth learning unless you find it particularly interesting. Building an entire project usually takes some amount of non-trivial work, so I’m also going to say don’t learn programming to build one project. Spend your time validating the idea and using that evidence to convince yourself, [...]
19 Sep
The elevator pitch of failure
I needed about 18 months after the end of my first company to learn how to effectively pitch our failure: “We were betting on the social advertising ecosystem trending toward openness, which it didn’t. On the enterprise side, Buzz and Beacon set bad legal precedents which spooked the big brands, slashed our price point, and [...]
13 Sep
The pathos problem
When you’re testing the waters with a new idea, you really need to present yourself as emotionally robust. You can’t validate a business if you seem pathetic, which I’m using in the sense of “having a capacity to move one to compassionate pity.” You tick this box if one person’s feedback will significantly affect your [...]
07 Sep
I met a real live visionary!
Yesterday, at seedcamp, I was privy to something extremely impressive. While mentoring a founder of vox.io, it quickly became apparent that he was miles ahead of me as a founder in every regard. That’s not the impressive bit though. Lots of people do that! What blew me away was the way he presented his product [...]
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27 Oct