Founder Weekly (Issue 408 - October 23 2019)

Founder Weekly - Issue 408

October 23, 2019

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 408 of Founder Weekly. We have a packed issue this week. Enjoy it!

General

Doist CEO Amir Salifhefendic explains how asynchronous communication makes teams more productive and how to create a more async culture at your company.

A founder is building a startup product and posting the whole process on YouTube.

Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) has been emerging over the last 36 months as a key strategy across FMCG verticals. Over the 2016-H1 2019 period, almost half of the acquisitions completed by the top 50 FMCG companies involved DTC/ digital assets (177 transactions). If the strategic intent makes sense for obvious reasons (we have now been advocating it for years), not all DTC assets are valuable and future-proof. Actually, most of current DTC assets may not be valuable and future-proof. Here are our (very summarized) views on the DTC landscape and some thoughts about the future of DTC.

The key differentiator between effective and ineffective CEOs is whether they run toward or away from major problems and challenges in the company.

Jiaona “JZ” Zhang digs into why a deep understanding of MLPs benefits founders and product leaders. She breaks down the four principles for how founders and product managers can zero in on exactly the right problem to solve. Then, she walks through how to put MLP into action — all it takes is careful attention to user needs and a little bit of pixie dust.

How To Tell When To Give Up On Your Startup.

Nearly 2 years ago we built a small internal app for our former startup that lately evolved into Beamer, a complete changelog and release notes tool for SaaS who need to keep their users updated about their latest products changes and get their feedback. Today Beamer is used by more than 5000 companies, including many of the top 100 SaaS in the world. In this post I want to share the journey that took us from almost going bankrupt to pivoting and now being halfway to the holy grail of early stage startups, $1 million in annual recurring revenue (with a team of only 5!).

Product-Led Growth Research with Data & Insights from 40+ Leading SaaS Organizations.

In just 4 months and 14 days since we have started charging for our product and about 13 months since our online video editor went live, we have hit an important milestone, we have hit ramen profitability. In this post I am going to go through and describe our journey as to how we got to where we are right now and document the main milestones and lessons we have learnt along the way.

In mid-2017, I hit burnout in a big way and wound up taking a 6-week sabbatical to recover. Here's the story; I hope it will help others in the same spot.

Disruption is when a company either comes in at the low-end of a market or it creates a new market. Contrary to popular usage, disruption does not refer to technology. It is a market orientation that buys time without fierce competition from incumbents.

Marketing, Sales and PR

LinkedIn marketing strategies used by Sally Illingworth to generate 20,000,000 content views and gain 55,000+ followers organically in under 20 months.

Product qualified leads: Discover how to leverage in-product behavior to identify the best customers to sell to with product qualified leads (PQL).

How do you compete in the $600 billion software industry? In the run up to the SaaS Commerce Trends: 2020 Report, we dive into the shared strategic framework from the fastest growing SaaS companies.

Forget typical trivialities like sentence length, grammar, and typos. How to write a good blog post is dependent on the Detail Principle, explained here.

Money and Finance

In this post, Mark Suster shares some of the lessons of the past 10 years since he made his first investment as a VC.

A view of early stage venture financing in 2019. 

YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer on how much money to spend after fundraising.

A lot has been written about mistakes founders make in fundraising. The large mistakes — while hard to avoid — are very easy to notice. In this post, I’d like to shed some light on the smaller, less obvious mistakes I see founders make — the ones easier to fix.

Startups of the Week

The easiest parking management solution. AirGarage does it all - lot enforcement, payment collection, visitor registration, and customer support. 

Medicine should not be one-size-fits-all. We use the latest advances in Bayesian computing, Probabilistic Programming, and Decision Theory to bridge the gap between data, models, and decision makers. Our platform makes predictions and supports decisions for individuals, treatments, subgroups, and target populations.

Using Mutiny's personalization platform, engage your site visitors with a tailored experience made just for them -- so they get what they want, faster!

Tips, Tools and Services

And How to Run Great Product Team Meetings.

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