We’ve all seen it. The over-enthusiastic startup founder who hands out equity with the same discretion as a pre-teen using their parent’s credit card to buy front-row Bieber tickets. *sigh* And I totally get it. In the early phases of your startup (especially the idea stage) you might not have the cash on hand to cover the major expenses related
If I handed you a blank check and a portfolio of five software companies and asked you to acquire one of them by the end of the day… how would you feel? Would you panic? Would you know exactly what to look for to pick a winner? Or would you go off a hunch and risk picking a dud? Evaluating
When I started Flowtown, we were treading water in the reddest of oceans. Social sharing and publishing tools were all the rage, and standing out from the crowd was NOT going to be easy. Fortunately, we were able to lean into one key differentiator in our feature set for our product called Timely. It was almost criminally simple — but
Not all leads are created equal. Even if you’ve dialed in your ideal customer profile and built out your distribution channels to only attract the perfect prospect… …you’re still gonna have to implement systems and filters to separate your buyers from your tire kickers. This is especially true in the scaling phase where spending too much time with non-buyers will
Prospect: “Great product. It’s just not a now thing” You: “Okay cool. Totally get it. Thanks for your time.” Boom. That right there is a masterclass on how to blow a SaaS deal, deprive a would-be customer of the value they could’ve received, and being forced to go back to your team with your tail between your legs.
Ever read about those outrageous “rider” demands that touring musicians demand from the concert promoter? … Iggy Pop demands a Bob Hope impersonator. … Mariah Carey insists on gallons of vitamin water to bathe her dogs in. … Van Halen would refuse to take the stage if a brown M&M found its way into the candy jar. Borderline insane right?
I have a little secret. A few years ago when I started coaching growth-minded SaaS founders on how to scale their companies, I created someone named ‘Software Scaling Sam”. Sam was obsessed with growth, had achieved product/market fit, and was ready to take full ownership and responsibility in scaling beyond 10k MRR. If you think that Sam sounds quite a
Want to know the quickest way to kill your company and team morale? It’s super easy. Invest tens of thousands of dollars and man hours in building your software, only to find out after the fact that your market couldn’t care less. Done. Now you can happily go back to whatever world you just left behind. On the flipside, if
I first met Matt Goldman – serial entrepreneur & CEO of Churn Buster – 3 years ago in San Diego just after selling Clarity.fm. I was invited to speak at the local co-working space and Matt saw that I was in town, so he asked me to come on his Rocketship.fm podcast. It was a super fun conversation and I
Six years ago, Renée and I were living in San Francisco. I had just closed a round of funding for Clarity.fm while Renée had just co-founded a new marketing agency of her own. Things were crazy. But they were about to get crazier 😉 Turns out Renée was pregnant with our first son, Max… and it took a whole 3-months
