As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers.  We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.  some came from our customer service, some were to improve performance / scalability from tech ops, some were bug fixes, etc.) Turn Your Organization Inside Out This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice .

When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve.  Many Many start-ups (and even growth firms) lack this discipline and they therefore serve customers off all sizes.   Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need This post is part of my series “ Startup Lessons ” Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation

He felt that we didn’t price correctly and he didn’t want to see customers until he had a grip on it. never believe in hiring B players and then trying to upgrade with more talented people later when the company has more cash, more customers or is performing better.  Tags: Start-up Advice startup technolog Only Hire A+ People Who Punch Above Their Weight Class This is part of my ongoing posts on  Startup Advice . 

It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product.  Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.  This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice .

Is your business’s success going to be based on execution or technology?  Or Back in the dot-com days, competitive advantage was largely based on technology development.  For It’s probably not the technology. Technology remains a competitive advantage in many areas: life science, Or is it something in between? For example, if you wanted to build an e-commerce site in 1996, it was really hard!  Any efficiencies

I’ve worked with 30+ early-stage companies in all sorts of capacities (and spoken to many, many more), so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to classify the various ways that I’ve engaged in different technology roles in startups. Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. He posted on several social networking sites the following message: If you know of a startup company that could benefit from the knowledge, experience, professional

Traction can simply mean showing that you’re making progress with customers, product development, channel partners, initial revenue as a proof point, attracting well-known angel investors, winning industry awards / recognition.  It’s marketing 101 for tech companies in terms of how you market to customers.  Tags: Pitching VCs Start-up This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC” – the outline is here . You’ve pitched several angels and VC’s. 

We had scrambled to get a product to market, built our first website, rapidly hired a technology team, raised our seed round of capital ($1.5 We instructed customers about how eCommerce was going to change their future.  We It kind of reminds me a bit of how “social media experts” are talking to customers today). This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch

The promised to follow up with: calls, using your product, talking to customers or “noodle on things.” You would never go see an important executive at a customer and then sit around and wait for them to realize how great you are. Or maybe you had a major customer win that you’d like to walk them through.  Or This is part of my ongoing series, “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;  Getting a meeting with a prominent angel or VC is difficult enough.  Some

Enjoy. Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Of course, one of the best ideas around this is to have Negative Customer Acquisition Costs . Here are some recent great posts that I’ve come across that generally fall in the intersection of startups and CTOs. Great stuff.