What Founders Need Beyond the Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas is one of the best tools for building a growth company, but it's a planning framework, not a business operating system. Founders need to know what it does well, where it stops, and how to fill in the gaps, to build the complete management toolkit they actually need.
Struggling with Growth? You Can't Create Demand—You Need to Find It
If your emails, ads, or other sales and marketing activities are falling flat, it might be that you’re trying to generate demand where none exists. In this post, I break down what’s at the root of PMF and growth by reviewing the basics: uncovering real problems felt by people actively trying to make progress.
Journey of a Founder: Series A Is a Reckoning—Operator Imperatives for Getting to Series B
The Journey of a Founder series continues. You’ve raised a Series A. You’ve got early traction and capital to grow. But now the real work begins. What does it feel like to lead a company through this phase, and what actually helps you reach Series B? In this founder/operator roundtable, we explore what happens after the early wins, from hiring and trust-building to evolving your founder role and avoiding the ops pitfalls that can sink momentum. This is the messy middle, what I sometimes call “the reckoning.”
Event 2—Part 1: Hosted by John Gauch and Jimmy Malik.
Key Strategies for Business Growth: 10 Steps to Expand and Thrive
This month I discuss effective strategies for business growth, with special emphasis on startups. I cover topics from market penetration to digital transformation. The content will help CEOs and founders develop their own plans to expand and thrive.
What I Need to Know to Make Investor Referrals
These are the six things I need to know to make investor referrals for CEOs and founding team members when we haven’t worked together before. Answering these six questions is also a valuable shorthand for quickly vetting any new business idea.
Estimating Product Market Opportunity
I often scratch my head trying to understand the market opportunity described in many startup investor presentations. I’m not saying it’s easy to measure by any means, and in this post I lay out an alternative way to to think about and calculate this popular figure.