Q&A
I think sharing your expectations, at a minimum, will likely save time. Most VCs have a range they are comfortable investing at, both in an absolute sene (e.g., “$3m is…
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Q&A
Here’s my list in SaaS: Being reluctant to go up-market. Not everyone should go up-market. But if you have a bunch of $5 a month customers, and then a few…
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Blog Posts, Early, Q&A
A few things that surprise you especially as a founder: Things are sort of … slooow. Yes, lots is always seemingly going on at a start-up. But the reality is,…
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Q&A
I like the “Other Ways To Earn Credit” in Notion App I like how it incents me to try a few other key functions of the application, with a pretty…
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How do you handle B2B customers who want a refund on an annual subscription because they didn’t realize that their credit card would get charged again a year later? You…
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Q&A
I wouldn’t think about your marketing spend post Series B solely as a % of revenue. Although you probably should start there: First, you can probably spend up to 50%…
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Q&A
Creating urgency is an art. Most founders are great “middlers”. They are great at explaining not just what the product does, but what it can do to solve your problems….
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Q&A
Testimonials are nice, but most prospects these days have already seen the generic ones on your website and in your collateral. What work in sales is very similar companies using,…
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Q&A
Just meet. Meet all your competitors. You never know where it will go. It may help you head off a stupid conflict later. You might combine the companies. Who knows….
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Q&A
Be a bit wary about raw conversion of free-to-paid as an absolute metric. Driving it up will certain increase revenues in the short term. But perhaps not in the long…
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Q&A
If it is a professional investor — it is fine. They write it off and move on. Unless there was some sort of fraud or something, true professional investors will…
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Q&A
My biggest mistake, the second time, was setting insane Year 1 projections. I had such a great set of co-founders, I projected we’d hit $2m ARR in our first year….
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Blog Posts, Fundraising, Q&A
Cold emails to investors have their detractors. There are so, so many start-ups these days. Everyone with a checkbook is looking for signals which of the 1000s to invest in. …
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Q&A
Being unwilling to fail. Personally, I never thought I was good enough to be a founder. I never thought I could do it myself. I was pretty happy to be…
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Q&A
Not really. There aren’t that many things of true scale, that are strategic, that Salesforce could buy at this stage. Tableau was at >$900m in recurring revenue … growing 41%…
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