Founder Weekly (Issue 334 - April 25 2018)

Founder Weekly - Issue 334Â Â

April 25, 2018

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 334 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

In this long, but great post, Vinod Khosla shares his ​current view of​ ​what he wants to work on the next 20 years.

Mike Carson is the founder of Park.io, a million dollar SaaS business. He is currently doing over $150,000 in monthly revenue. And he is a one person company. He has no employees and continues to run the business by himself. It's a great an interview with a ton of valuable insights and lessons.

How we dug 21.co out of an $80 million hole, turned it into Earn.com, built it into a fast-growing business with millions in revenue, and sold it to Coinbase.

Corey Pein took his half-baked startup idea to America’s hottest billionaire factory – and found a wasteland of techie hustlers and con men.

How to grow your side hustle passion into a full-time business. 

Transformative innovation explores new horizons and potentially disruptive business models, and requires an entrepreneur at its helm.

No one is original anymore, not even you.

Marco Zappacosta shares his four-step process for identifying and vetting his leadership team. From job descriptions to interview questions to references, Zappacosta shares his approach to changing up executive searches to generate a stronger signal for better leaders. Any startup will benefit from his thoughtful choices and techniques on evaluating senior executives.

Books

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Kabbage have provided over $4 billion of funding to more than 100,000 small businesses in the US, and are now worth over $1.3 billion. Here is how they did it.

This definitive guide will take you through exactly how to ask for reviews, when to ask, how to automate the process so it can grow as you scale, and most importantly where you should be pushing your reviewers to leave their reviews. It will also take you through what you should do with all of your positive reviews once generated and how to handle the negative ones (which will pop up from time to time).

The best software doesn't sell itself. It pays to strengthen the relationships that you have with product marketing in your organization as they can supercharge your team.

Startups can't afford to miss a SEO trick when it comes to launching a new site, says Contributor Pratik Dholakiya. Here's a checklist to help keep you on track.

Money and Finance

I first met Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly, seven years ago, when I was a young VC at Maveron. In the ensuing years, I saw Jake evolve from an enthusiastic first-time CEO to the mature, poised leader who led General Assembly to a successful acquisition by Adecco Group. General Assembly was a true crash course for me on every element of venture investing — from founder dynamics to business model to fundraising and exits. As there were so many times we said, “if only we knew….,” I want to share my top-nine learnings during our 6.5-year journey with Jake and team at GA.

A post on startup stock option plans. It explains best practices in designing them, how to allocate the options and how to communicate to employees with a sample offer presentation.

Startups of the Week

The first under-desk elliptical that lets you workout while you work. Track your progress via the iOS & Android app. 

Guestfriend is a personalized chatbot for your restaurant that instantly answers your guests’ questions on your website, Facebook, and via text. It builds itself in seconds and never needs to be updated.

Curated trips for the modern traveler. You book the flights, we do the rest. Book your next adventure.

Tips, Tools and Services

The About Us page is an often hastily done part of a website. But when it's done right it can be a destination for visitors to learn about your brand and become convinced enough to buy from you. Here's how to write an About Us page of your own, plus some examples and a template to get your started.

Asking for feedback can actually hurt your business because more often than not it’s predicated on opinions and not actual facts. To get valuable input from users, study insights instead.

Removing one’s point of view from the research process.

In this guide, we go into detail to explain each Google Analytics insight and how you can implement it right away on your website to skyrocket your search visibility. Let’s get right to it.

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