Venture Hacks

I watched most of the Startup Lessons Learned Conference from home. Thanks to the magic of justin.tv, I also brushed my teeth, had breakfast, cleaned the bathrooms, and did a couple phone calls at the same time. Here are my two favorite talks from the conference.
Steve Blank: Customer Development 2.0 “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups”
Steve’s [...]

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In Where’s the demo?, I asked, “Unless you’re famous or a big company, why do a closed beta?” There are lots of good reasons why in the comments.
But my favorite comment is from Rob May, founder of Backupify and AngelList power broker:
“In the early days of Backupify (when it was still called Lifestreambackup), not only [...]

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Thanks to KISSmetrics for supporting our interview with Sean Ellis. If you want an intro to KISSmetrics, send me an email. I’ll put you in touch if there’s a fit. Thanks. – Nivi
Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics recently sat down with me to discuss how to optimize funnels with their upcoming analytics tool, KISSmetrics.
You may know [...]

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This guest post is by Ash Maurya, a lean entrepreneur who runs a bootstrapped startup called CloudFire. If you like it, check out Ash’s blog and his tweets @ashmaurya. – Nivi

What you charge for your product is simultaneously one of the most complicated and most important things to get right. Not only does your pricing [...]

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“Where the #@!*% is Part 2?”
That’s what I’ve been hearing since we published Part 1 of our rare interview with Sean Ellis.
Here’s part 2.
In Part 1, Sean discussed what you do before product/market fit: how to get there, how to measure it, and how to survey your users so you can improve fit.
In Part 2, [...]

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David Anderson, VC and supply chain master:
“Billy is perhaps best known for his Oxi Clean commercials, where one softball size ball of detergent, chucked into your washing machine and forgotten, will do 25 loads of laundry. Simple messages, great customer testimonials and products that really worked were Billy’s forte. He rejected perhaps 99% of the [...]

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David Skok, serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners:
“In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is [...]

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The comments to our interview with Sean Ellis turned into an awesome Q&A — this post is a roundup.
(Feel free to keep asking questions here or there and I’ll try to get answers from Sean.)
Is my product a nice-to-have or a must-have?
Jae Chung wonders whether his product is a nice-to-have despite the positive press:
“I spent [...]

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Thanks to KISSmetrics for supporting our interview with Sean Ellis. If you want an intro to KISSmetrics, send me an email. I’ll put you in touch if there’s a fit. Thanks. – Nivi
Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics recently sat down with me to explain how to use their product, survey.io, to measure product/market fit and find [...]

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Sean Ellis recently sat down with us and explained how to bring products to market. You should listen to this interview for ideas on how to get to product/market fit, how to measure fit, and how to survey your users so you can improve fit.
If you don’t know Sean from his blog or tweets, he [...]

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