startup-ceo-a-field-guide-to-scaling-up-your-business-techstars
Practical guide for startup CEOs on scaling leadership, building teams, managing boards, and navigating growth-stage challenges.
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
Stories, like startups, paint a picture of what the future could be. They engage our hearts and minds. They inspire people to act – to give you money, to buy your product, to join your team. Stories have a main character (the customer or user) and a supporting cast (investors, employees, partners, competitors). They have a beginning (the problem), middle (the product), and an end (the solution). — location: 977 ^ref-10234
Keep the whole story in mind: customer, problem, product, solution. — location: 1023 ^ref-3530
tension between listening to customers and innovating for them. — location: 1045 ^ref-47914
Jobs is right: “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Very often, those things are clearly written in between the lines. — location: 1050 ^ref-39412
download my template at www.startuprev.com). On the y‐axis, list all of your ideas. On the x‐axis, list the (weighted) criteria you will use to judge those ideas. These are the criteria we have used at Return Path: Customer pain (30%). Does the market need your idea? Market opportunity (10%). How many people need your idea? Today (Size)? Tomorrow (Growth)? Can we win? (20%). Are there already competitors in your chosen space (Competitive Positioning)? If so, will you beat them (Feasibility)? Strategic fit (10%). Is this a problem you can solve? Do you have the right expertise, networks, and so on? Economics (30%). Can you afford to solve this problem? Score each idea between 1 and 5. (Don’t try to be more specific: this isn’t about calculating specific market sizes or investment opportunities.) Multiply by your weighting criteria. Consider the scores. You might be surprised which one wins. One thing should be clear from the weighting: a huge “market opportunity” isn’t a good enough reason to ignore all of the other factors. You may have a billion‐dollar idea, but if you don’t have a team that can execute on it (“Can We Win?”) or the funding you need (“Economics”), it won’t matter. You don’t have to go with the highest‐scoring idea. But you need to have a good reason for choosing another one. “This could be huge!” isn’t good enough. — location: 1073 ^ref-64786
strategic planning
Tech startups often have a very cool solution that could solve many potential problems for many potential customers. After an obsessive and insular process of product development, none of those potential customers materialize. The solution never finds its problem. — location: 1196 ^ref-6180
Page created automatically from Kindle notes sync