- At startup, your idea may "suck"... get started!
- Say "NO" to venture capital
- Target liquidity
- You don’t have to go out there and market (broadcast) to get people interested!
- Real EV of raising venture capital is high (add difficulty in getting one)
- Nobody reads Business plans... rather write a blog!
- All startups should be embarrassed about their product when it goes out into the market... If you are not embarrassed, you have waited too long!!
- Don't depend on advertising to sell your product
- You are not gonna be able to get the "pricing" right anyway... so just pick one
- Starting as early as possible and "charge" as often as possible
- SAAS - You are now the customer
- COCA - Cost of customer acquisition
- = Money spent to get a new customer onboard
- = (Total cost of sales + marketing/Number of new customers) - lifetime value of the customer (LTV)
- Therefore, one of the biggest success factors - lower attrition rate
- CHI - Customer Happiness Index - Probability of customer that he will stay next month
- Above can be correlated with (and hence should be monitored closely)
- Did the customer use the software, usage patterns (e.g. customers who use "a" feature are 4 times more likely to stay than who don’t
- Track usage data - by feature... who recommend it + which customers used it and how many left + who approved it
- Don’t do "partnerships"
- Go to the market even before you have written the first line of code
- Manage Risks - technology risks, market risks
- Try and reduce market risk as early as possible
- "Pay per click" is a morphine drip
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Business of Software Conference 2008 (Part 2)
Excerpts from lecture by Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups.com
Business of Software Conference 2008
Excerpts from lecture by Jason Fried, 37 Signals (the Back Pack guy)
- Maintain "momentum"... do small projects
- Build the "real" thing (UI)... avoid abstraction (unwanted documentation)
- Do what works now! Optimize for now... No decision is permanent
- Avoid words like - Need, Can't, Easy, Everyone, Nobody
- Have Uninterrupted stretch of time for productive work
- Focus on what is NOT going to change - Speed, Simplicity, Clarity, Ease of use, Reliability, Uptime
- Keep questioning... always and all sorts
- Focus on "easy" ones "first"
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Sharing Agile experiences of a Scrummer
Jean Tabaka has recently compiled a list of tips and tricks to scrum better. I thought it is worthwhile to share it. We may know already know most of them, but penning them down into a list makes it interesting! And, alomg the way, it has some great links too.
Here is the article.
Here is the article.
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