Founder Weekly (Issue 403 - September 18 2019)

Founder Weekly - Issue 403

September 18, 2019

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 403 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Where can you find underserved needs or desires? We’ve developed 10 more specific places where Founders can look for PMF. This is a list that we’ve found very useful in generating ideas as multiple-time Founders ourselves, and today we’re sharing it with the Founder community. The way to use this list is as a sounding board for your startup ideas - to better understand where your idea sits in terms of PMF potential. 

We’ve all heard the reasons startups fail: no market need, ran out of cash, not the right team, competition. But these are largely preventable *if* SaaS companies can identify and pull the right levers in time.

Sally Carson offers the product design lead’s perspective on scaling, providing a roadmap for maturing the function and prepping the team for hypergrowth. She makes the case for building around a cornerstone of user research in order to shift design work farther upstream in the product development process. Finally, she outlines her tested tactics for attracting and retaining hard-to-win design talent, setting them on a track to success when hypergrowth hits.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Looking to generate more leads for your business? Not too sure how? We've got a case study to show you how to do just that!

Money and Finance

4 Success Factors for Early-Stage Venture Investors.

This article analyzes the reasons why the electric airplane is coming to light now, the technologies and hurdles, the size of the market, and the competitive landscape. We’ll also take a guess at when you’ll be flying in your first electric plane.

Many seed investors have the opportunity to participate in the follow-on equity rounds that a company raises.Using AngelList’s large database of seed-round investments, we show that always making those follow-oninvestments has a higher mean (i.e., expected return), while ignoring follow-on rounds and instead makingmore seed-stage investments has a higher median (i.e., typical return).  We also show that a strategy thatselectively filters for when to participate in follow-on rounds based on the seed investment’s increase in valu-ation (“doubling down on winners”) does not demonstrably outperform either extreme, although in all casesthe performance of the strategies is close and appears to mostly be governed by randomness.

Startups of the Week

The debit card for kids that parents manage from their phones with our flexible parental controls.

FarmWise builds adaptive robots to farm every single plant for greater yield, better farmer’s profits and a healthier environment.

Crisp consolidates every byte of data in the food supply chain for precise forecasts to drive better operations.

Tips, Tools and Services

Activities to help you approach challenges from a new perspective.

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