IDEAS / POST Resistant prospects. You show them the upside, they nod, and nothing changes. Sigh. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur that touched on this existential founder challenge. His audience, mortgage brokers, help get home buyers the right mortgage. The good ones do a ton of work in the process. Sadly, when […]
Is Your Prospect Behaving Like A Brick Wall? Read More »
IDEAS / POST Here’s how to know which one you’re building before your next growth decision kills it. You hit $1M in revenue because customers didn’t just buy your product. They bought into what you stand for. But here’s the million-dollar question you need to answer while you’re still building competitive advantage: “Are my
Your Founder Magic – Business Moat or Brand Seasoning? Read More »
IDEAS / POST As you grow from $0 to $100k, you’re trying to see what catches your ICP’s eye. From $100k to $500k, you want to scale what worked. But as you move closer to $1M in revenue, continued growth becomes a matter of operationalizing everything. Less trial, more test and tune. At this
From $500k to $1M: Why tactics won’t deliver, but systems will Read More »
IDEAS / POST How to get strangers to trust you when your network is tapped out You’ve sold to everyone in your address book. Now you need creative growth tactics that work on complete strangers. You need to get creative, because, let’s face it, you’re facing a daunting challenge: to get to $500k, you
From $100k to $500k ARR: 4 creative tactics that outwork bigger budgets Read More »
IDEAS / POST Part 1 of a 3-part series on scaling from $0 to $1M, inspired by Gregory Kennedy’s Startup Growth presentation at Tech Week Life is learning. If you’re going to keep moving forward, you need to throw open your arms, and let knowledge hit you in the face like a rain squall.
Startup Growth From $0 to $100k ARR: Simple Is Better Read More »
IDEAS / POST What Paul Graham’s “The Lesson to Unlearn” teaches us about how to create value instead of just performing competence Paul Graham’s essay “The Lesson to Unlearn” is a brilliant diagnosis of how school trains us to win by hacking bad tests, and how that thinking carries into how we build companies,
Are you creating something of value, or just ‘hacking a test’? Read More »
IDEAS / POST Brand trust used to be something you could assume… but as one Web Summit panel made clear, that assumption doesn’t hold anymore. If you haven’t heard of Web Summit, it’s impressive. 20,000 attendees. Startups, investors, and journalists from around the world. Six stages. Back-to-back keynotes, panels, and pitches. An exhibition
IDEAS / POST There should be a special place in hell for spray and pray outreach. At least that’s what I think every time I get a LinkedIn introduction where the person tells me they have a perfect solution for me. It’s the modern day equivalent of Chamber of Commerce networking lunches where, on
Only One Reason To Accept My Connect Read More »
IDEAS / POST Most founders launch for all the right reasons. That’s exactly what makes the founder trap so hard to see. They experience a problem firsthand, build something to solve that problem, and iron out the kinks until it works. With any luck, they score a few early wins, and they start to
The Founder Trap that Kills Momentum Read More »
IDEAS / POST Startup positioning turned out to be the thing two rooms full of investors wanted to hear about. The rooms were at Creative Destruction Lab in Vancouver, and the Banff Venture Forum in Banff. My topic was building brands that drive revenue today, and sustainable, scalable growth into the future. The talks landed
Positioning Over Capital: A Back To The Basics Idea for Startups in a Funding Drought Read More »