Best practices for startups — a list by topic

Asking questions and listening

• How to have more valuable and rewarding conversations with people
• How to listen when you disagree
• Ask positive questions
• To make meetings more effective, learn to listen
• How to overcome objections and open possibilities
• How to listen without judging — a guide for managers
• When you’re given advice, here’s how to listen with an open mind
• Are you willing to ask hard questions?
• How to come up with the right questions to ask
• How to turn challenges into answerable questions
• Relentless questioning
• Asking questions to build relationships
• Great managers ask great questions
• Don’t ask multiple choice questions
• How to ask great questions
• To sell, ask and listen
• The right question to ask to motivate people
• How to be a better listener
• The power of asking questions: What Warren Buffett asked Bill Gates
• Questions to ask yourself
• To learn more from other people, defer judgment and ask for actionable proposals
• Three questions to ask yourself before getting on a call with someone
• The best advice for how to be a better listener
• Surprisingly, good listeners interrupt
• How to talk so people can listen

Churn and retention

• Why revenue retention is the wrong operating metric to combat churn
• Improving retention helps growth in 4 ways
• How to reduce churn by identifying your “red flag metrics”
• How to reduce churn by winning back cancelled customers
• How to reduce churn — a process
• How low retention of customers and suppliers bankrupted Homejoy
• Why you should incentivize sales people for customer retention
• If you have low retention, don’t scale and keep your costs low
• Increasing customer loyalty with “Memorable Engaging Moments”
• The first ten minutes of a customer’s experience are crucial
• The relationship between frequency of habit and customer retention
• The number 1 growth hack
• The customer success role — a job description
• How you should think about churn
• Why retention is the key to growth
• Sustainable growth vs. growth hacking
• How to reduce churn
• A radical approach to marketing
• Product strategy — retention trumps acquisition
• To reduce churn by more than 2 percentage points, you have to raise product value and usage
• Benchmarks for churn / retention rates

Company culture

• In your startup, the goals and culture must become a mantra
• Startup = blood, sweat and tears
• To build a great culture for your startup, be explicit
• Dick Costolo on company culture
• Moments that clarify what your values really are
• Why you have to actively fight cynicism
• Private companies are the biggest driver of progress, so what’s your vision?
• How to be a great team member (and person)
• Why you should not call your employees “missionaries” or “mercenaries”, or your company “a family”

Compensation and options

• Five principles for how to structure startup compensation
• Commission plans — how to get them right
• Should you pay your employees to quit?
• What’s wrong with stock options

Customer acquisition and marketing

• What is a good customer acquisition payback period?
• Does your company description resonate with potential customers?
• Fact-based persuasion takes time
• Lessons from Trump: the most powerful marketing leaves room for imagination
• If you want to persuade someone with facts, steer clear of identity and ideology
• How paid content site De Correspondent acquires users from Facebook
• How to name your product and create its tag line
• Why messaging and positioning are fundamental to every startup’s success
• Do traditional marketing methods work best for user acquisition?
• Best practices in copywriting for marketing your product
• Jeff Bezos on how much you should spend on potential vs. actual customers
• Don’t think “And we got here with no marketing!” is impressive
• The importance of product positioning, and how to get it right
• Targeting customers for their marketing influence
• A better way to measure the value of marketing?
• Make me better and I’ll buy your product
• Lifetime value can mislead you into excessive spending on marketing
• To build a great brand, do one thing right
• Steve Jobs’ approach to marketing
• Why your startup needs a visual message
• How to supercharge email newsletters

Customer development and feedback

• Seven questions to uncover user goals and needs
• Product development — how NOT to conduct a survey
• Questions to ask your customers to validate product-market fit
• Net promotor score — how to set up the survey
• Three warning signs you’re not solving a meaningful problem for your customers
• How to interview customers to get great product insights
• Product discovery questions to ask potential customers
• How to use net promotor score surveys to improve your product
• Surveying customers to answer Sean Ellis’ “One Question That Matters”
• Customer development is about listening, not pitching
• How to respond to critical customer feedback
• How to use a welcome email to get valuable customer feedback
• Best practices in getting user feedback on your product
• Never ask if someone would buy your product
• Feedback versus vision in product management
• How to learn about your customers
• Improving your product via customer support
• The survey question you should never ask
• When your product change is greeted by a torrent of complaints, what should you do?

Exits

• When to sell your company — Jason Lemkin
• When to sell your company — Ben Horowitz
• Bad reasons to sell your startup
• Amazon and the “insurance policy” acquisition
• If you sell your company, use an investment banker
• When to sell your company — Ev Williams
• Are most acquisitions a failure?

Firing

• Four principles for how to fire someone correctly
• Don’t fire people on a Friday
• If you fired a senior executive, identify from this list what went wrong
• Exit interviews
• Should you enforce a non-compete clause for an employee you fired?
• Five bad excuses to avoid firing poor performers, and why you should “expose the pain”
• Would you fire this person?
• Keeping someone in a job not suited to them is worse than firing them

Focus vs. distractions

• The key to success? Do less.
• Can digital products leave space for silence?
• How to stop your phone from distracting you and wasting your life
• Is group chat a constant distraction for your employees?
• Do the most important stuff first thing in the morning
• Can you achieve great things if you’re a regular Facebook or Twitter user?
• The best work question to ask yourself every morning
• How truly great entrepreneurs manage their time
• If you want to get more done, stop doing these things
• Saying “no” to good ideas
• Time management: An extreme approach to email
• How to clear time for deep thinking
• Creating time for reflection

Founders and CEOs

• The benefits and risks of founding a startup to satisfy a personal need
• Why startup founders should learn to code
• Why entrepreneurs should always be working on an idea, even if it’s not yet working
• Startup founders need to be learn-it-alls
• The most important quality of a successful startup founder or CEO
• Startup founder psychology: Between euphoria and terror
• Startup founder? You should be meeting with other founders
• How long should startup founders commit for?
• How committed are you as a founder? A simple litmus test
• Can you reduce the startup CEO role to a single key talent?
• Which is better, single founder or co-founders?
• Necessary qualities in founders – Marc Suster’s shortlist
• Every successful entrepreneur has this quality
• 3 mechanisms to become a better CEO
• Three key traits in a great CEO — and any leader
• The 5 psychological traits of successful startup founders
• The psychology of startup founders
• Passionate founders and product-market fit
• Why you’re not at a disadvantage if you’re a first time entrepreneur
• The danger of sole founder startups
• “All in” — founders only?
• Finally, someone understands: What it’s like to be a CEO
• How much does prior experience matter for CEOs and senior managers?
• The most important thing to remember as a founder / CEO
• The three phases of the life of a startup and thus a founder / CEO’s job

Free, freemium and premium

• Getting the free right in freemium
• The contrarian view: With freemium, it’s easier to start with the paid product
• With freemium, you know you’re solving a customer’s problem
• Free, paid and freemium in consumer internet
• The 3 strategies of freemium companies
• Freemium as an alternative to advertising
• The benefits of freemium
• Freemium works if 4 conditions are met
• Does freemium work for b2b?
• The challenge of monetizing free products
• The biggest risk of freemium
• The 3 conditions of a great freemium business

Fundraising and pitching to VCs

• Why you should bootstrap your startup before raising money
• Why startups should raise money after finding product-market fit
• Most VCs are momentum investors
• Why you shouldn’t raise too much money in your early funding rounds
• There are only two ways to raise money for a startup
• Raising money is like any other selling — first, qualify your leads
• Decoding VC-speak — a short guide for companies raising money
• What to do when an associate from a VC fund reaches out to you
• Ask potential investors for advice, not money
• When no need for capital = negative growth signal
• Startup fundraising: Finding true believers vs. convincing skeptics
• Why your VCs want you to raise a large round
• Raising capital as an offensive strategy
• What one early stage VC looks for when he meets companies
• A startup pitch should answer these 3 “why”s
• The real difference between funding rounds
• Pitching to VCs: market size
• A better way to demo your product
• Pitching to investors: What truly excites you?
• The core of a VC pitch
• The mechanics of building a pitch for VCs
• Do great VCs need operating experience?
• What to look for when choosing a VC: smart isn’t enough
• The true cost of fundraising
• Raising money — advice from the founder of AngelList
• Reid Hoffman on how to pitch your company to investors
• How do you know if an investor will add value?

Getting a job

• Don’t follow your passion
• Better than a resume
• The best career advice you can give in two minutes
• This advice on how to get a job tells managers exactly what to look for when hiring
• The two factors which determine how successful and happy you will be at work

Goals and metrics

• Metrics that measure consumption vs metrics that measure the satisfaction of real needs
• Why you should think about your goals each day on the way to work
• The first goal for a startup isn’t growth
• Is this the right goal for seed-stage startups?
• A simple metric to measure the quality of your user growth
• Why Skift rejected monthly uniques as its key metric, and you should too
• Is your startup a zombie? These metrics and behaviors will tell you
• Is revenue a good metric for early stage startups?
• Key metrics for startups by industry — a quick guide
• Don’t make this mistake with metrics
• How to manage someone who is missing their goals
• Do stretch goals incentivize cheating and short-termism?
• The difference between a great company and a lousy company
• Set stretch goals
• The problem with collaboration, and why goals should have single “owners”
• Don’t set goals based on what you think you can achieve
• If you’re going to measure pageviews, be specific
• The key metric for your startup must satisfy these 4 criteria
• Don’t celebrate or publicize vanity metrics
• Being metrics-driven leads to brutal intellectual honesty
• Every metrics-driven manager needs to watch out for this risk
• Growth rate in revenue or active users is the paramount startup metric
• The two most important, neglected sales metrics
• What’s your “simple scoreboard”?
• Managers and metrics
• Benchmarks for key metrics
• How to distinguish vanity metrics from real metrics
• Why you shouldn’t optimize for social sharing
• How to specify challenges and goals correctly
• How to choose the one metric that matters
• Setting clear goals = empowerment
• How to avoid the narrative fallacy
• Mark Pincus’ management advice – make everyone the CEO of something
• The best startup metric: Conversion rate?
• The best startup metric: Share of habit?
• Why cash flow, not profits, determines shareholder returns
• Lessons from Jeff Bezos: Set “audacious and inspirational” goals
• Ensuring you’re sufficiently ambitious
• How LinkedIn manages people using objectives and key results
• The key to success in any enterprise
• What happens when you talk about too many goals

Hiring

• How to avoid unconscious bias when hiring
• Don’t hire based on past experience
• What to look for when hiring someone to work remotely
• What to look for in a great employee
• What to look for when hiring sales people
• The limits of trying to test people when you’re hiring
• How to hire senior executives for your startup
• How to hire someone to handle outsourcing for your startup
• Mark Zuckerberg’s hiring rule
• The first hire after your core team: a great office manager
• The 3 things Google looks for when hiring
• Trial periods and deferring premium pay
• Advice for graduating college students
• Should you hire consultants?
• What makes people successful?
• The best way to find out how good a candidate really is
• Should you hire superstars?
• The ideal personality type for product managers
• Five hiring tips for managers
• How to hire – drill a well before you need a drink
• Hiring millennials – what to avoid
• How to hire the right people for your leadership team

Job interviews

• How smart is this candidate?
• Four qualities to look for when interviewing a product manager
• How to identify an A-player in an interview
• How to interview a VP SaaS Sales — questions to ask
• How to interview sales people
• The best question to ask in a job interview: Sonya Meloff and Jamie Scarborough
• The best question to ask in a job interview: Peter Thiel
• How to test job candidates for “learning agility”
• The best questions to ask in a job interview: Mark Josephson
• 5 testable qualities that determine a candidate’s potential
• The best question to ask in a job interview: via a CEO coach
• How to run a job interview
• How to avoid hiring someone just because you like them
• The best question to ask in a job interview: Lou Adler
• The best question to ask in a job interview: Kevin Morrill
• The best questions to ask in a job interview: Adi Tatarko
• The best questions to ask in a job interview: Spencer Rascoff
• The best question to ask in a job interview: DJ Patil
• The best question to ask in a job interview: Simon Anderson

Job To Be Done — a product framework

• A brief summary of Job To Be Done, with 3 takeaways for product managers
• Build your product to explicitly address a “Job To Be Done”
• Focus on the job, not the customer type
• Why startups should forget vitamins and painkillers, and focus on the Job To Be Done
• How to identify and describe your customers’ “Job To Be Done” using a Job Outline
• The four steps to great product design
• Why startups should focus on a Job To Be Done rather than “market need”
• Five questions to ensure product designers focus on the Job To Be Done
• A framework for growth hacking using Job To Be Done
• Why product managers should frame every product task as a Job To Be Done
• How to extract what your customers really want from their misguided feature requests
• How to conduct customer cancellation interviews in the “Job To Be Done” framework
• What happens when you mistake user engagement for customer success
• “Job To Be Done” for seed stage startups

Managing people

• How to manage legal, finance, IT, and HR to enable you to move fast
• Four ways to show you care about your team’s careers
• Managers’ biggest HR mistake, and how to fix it
• Show up on time every day at 8:30am
• Group brainstorming doesn’t lead to creativity; this does
• What’s the right framework for one-on-ones?
• Five tips for men who manage women
• Should team leaders in startups write weekly reports?
• Laszlo Bock’s eight steps to being a good manager
• When the best thing, as a manager, is to stay away
• Why you should push your team to write (and hire people who can write)
• Are purpose and relationships the key to work happiness?
• Practical advice on how to raise motivation
• How managers can communicate more effectively
• The hardest thing about managing people
• Build self-confidence — but not your own
• Is this the way to celebrate wins?
• Why small wins generate motivation
• The right way to do one-on-ones
• Do you have the right people in your team? A litmus test
• How to harness the intelligence of your team
• How one CEO’s management style changed with more experience
• Is this the way to make you and your team more creative?
• The best thing you can do for your team
• A simple litmus test for great managers
• When micromanagement works
• How the “too nice” manager kills your career
• How managers cause employees to fail
• The difference between managers and leaders
• How to ensure that things get done using 3 W’s
• Which is better: a CEO who tolerates mediocrity or one who throws tantrums?
• Avoiding mediocrity by showing “tough love”
• One quality in a manager trumps all others
• When management stifles creativity
• A better way to manage people?
• When ambitious workloads become unproductive
• How do you (and your manager) know if you’re a good collaborator at work?
• Why celebrating wins is so hard, but so important
• The one question you wish your manager would ask you
• Sheryl Sandberg on managing people
• To manage successfully, use this simple rule
• Three tips for managing people

Meetings and introductions

• The best time-saver ever
• How to maximize your chance of getting a meeting or call with someone
• If you have to have group meetings, do them like this
• Startup founders’ most common mistake in meetings — and how to avoid it
• Two benefits of walking meetings
• The antidote to bad meetings
• Why you should demand an agenda for meetings, and how to do it — nicely
• How to stop regular meetings from clogging up your time
• How to request a meeting — Steve Blank
• How to request a meeting — Scott Britton
• How to request a meeting — Aaron White
• How to help people make introductions for you
• The open meeting
• How to end meetings
• Walking meetings
• Celebrating wins starts with staff meetings
• The optimal number of people in a meeting is…
• How to make zoom video meetings spectacularly successful

Mobile

• Mobile vs. desktop usage habits
• Why startups shouldn’t develop iPad apps
• Why mobile-only business models aren’t working
• How to think about mobile
• The surprise about how people use their phones
• Iterating faster in mobile
• Why mobile traction is getting harder, not easier
• The mobile product opportunity and the threat to Facebook
• Push notifications are a double-edged sword
• How NOT to market your app
• The key success metric for mobile apps
• Is this the most important feature of any app?
• What’s wrong with iOS 7?
• If you’re in a mobile business, you’d better be thinking about privacy
• App design: Swiping versus tapping
• The challenge of pitching your app to journalists or VCs
• Why didn’t Facebook users like “read later”?
• MVP or insufficiently viable product?
• The biggest challenge in mobile
• The key to mobile design
• Constraints in mobile design

My presentations

• The most fatal mistake to avoid as a startup
• The benefits and risks of founding a startup to satisfy a personal need

Offices

• The two key elements in WeWork’s better office environment
• The strongest reason why you should locate your office to minimize business travel
• The pros and cons of locating your startup outside Silicon Valley
• Should you give people “ownership” of their work environment?
• How your office influences your employees’ decisions
• Startup office design: Time to reconsider cubicles?
• Office design: two tips to get seating right
• Don’t allow remote work at the “figure it out” stage
• How to create a healthy office
• Minimize internal co-ordination costs
• Get a nice office
• How to create an office your employees love
• The problem with open offices

Partnerships and bus dev

• Why giving exclusivity can win sales, and how to craft an exclusivity deal
• Why startups should reject most partnership opportunities
• How to make bus dev meetings with large companies successful and avoid time-wasters

Performance reviews

• Getting performance reviews right starts with clarity about the goals
• How would you feel if you were asked to write a self-evaluation like this?

Platforms and marketplaces

• In the early stages of a marketplace, should you focus more on supply or demand?
• Three pieces of advice if you’re building a community, platform or marketplace
• How marketplaces can build a competitive moat
• Six strategies for marketplaces to raise engagement
• Marketplace mistakes
• The three factors that make platforms successful
• Platforms must enable evolution, not just creation

PR

• How to get the most out of attending a conference
• Don’t overestimate the importance of launch and fundraising announcements
• Questions to answer before you talk to a journalist
• The case for PR
• Being “hot”
• How to pitch your story to a journalist
• Courting controversy to get PR
• Should you hire a PR firm? A tech journalist’s perspective
• Should you blog (or tweet)?
• How to articulate your vision in a compelling way
• Should you make a big PR push when launching a product?
• Non-scalable PR
• WhatsApp’s approach to marketing and PR
• Can you be successful without PR?
• Personal brand, company brand and PR
• PR meets strategy — the Jeff Bezos approach
• Should you care if you don’t get any media coverage?

Pricing

• Three approaches to pricing
• How to price your product based on quality versus the competition
• Pricing your product? Don’t be afraid to ask for a *lot* of money
• Five psychological tips to optimize your pricing page
• The pricing valley of death
• When a potential customer tells you it’s too expensive
• How to set the price for your product

Product-market fit

• What to expect after your product goes live
• Is your product a “must-have” according to this definition?
• Documenting your product-market fit hypotheses
• Why more funding won’t help you find product-market fit
• Six simple questions to test product-market fit and competitive advantage (from Y Combinator’s application form)
• Four myths about product-market fit
• Four simple questions to help you get product-market fit
• Obvious, but forgotten: the best way to lower customer acquisition costs
• Why it matters who your early customers are
• It’s easier to fix marketing than engagement (aka product-market fit)
• Product-market fit and fundraising
• Don’t scale before you have product-market fit
• Product-market fit requires a market, a business model and customer engagement
• Customer reactions tell you when there’s product-market fit
• Product-market fit can be hard to spot
• What problem are you solving?
• How to identify your product’s “must have” experience
• How you know when you’ve hit product-market fit
• The most important factor in startup success
• The only way to build a massive business
• Big idea? Expect a dark period, and don’t pivot out of it
• Is your product liked or loved? Here’s how to tell
• When a product fails — strategic or tactical?
• First steps for founders to find product-market fit

Product insights and trends

• Can digital products leave space for silence?
• Two types of product quality; are they both necessary?
• How tech products misframe our choices, and product managers should do better
• Why product managers should optimize design for older users
• Better alternatives to “Learn more” links
• The 4 characteristics of the most addictive products
• If your product relies on user data, there are two keys to winning
• Sign-up page best practices
• Should you follow the latest web trend of big photo headers on article pages?
• Why you shouldn’t use infinite scroll on your website
• Web design: Fat footers and obese footers
• What do the best home pages have in common?
• Product brilliance from Amazon — Mayday
• Product brilliance at TripIt
• The march to atomized content and single-function services
• Web design for seniors
• Five simple rules for better design

Product management and product-driven growth

• The most important job of a product leader
• Hire a Director of Research for your product team
• First principles for startup founders (and product managers)
• Why optimization alone can’t create great products or companies
• To improve your product process, try the 25 minute design sprint
• The heart of any growth strategy is core product value
• Why product managers shouldn’t overrate simplicity
• For growth, focus on the marginal user
• How to ensure new product initiatives are user-centric
• Identify your engagement ladder
• How to discover what your users really care about
• Frictionless vs. minimalist product design
• How to reduce friction in your product
• How to identify your ideal customer
• Three simple rules to ensure your product team is goal-driven
• Don’t become fixated on your own product idea
• The best growth teams maximize the velocity of tests
• Why another new feature won’t get people to use your product
• Guidance for product managers: success = simplicity + focus
• Cosmetic changes to your product won’t fix low user engagement and retention
• Addictive product = high content liquidity + high signal-to-noise ratio
• How valuable is your product? Google’s “toothbrush test”
• Building a valuable product — a checklist of questions to answer
• The best products satisfy a frequent user need with minimum friction
• How to group your product features into plans aligned with customer needs
• How to set priorities in product development
• Minimum viable product vs minimum acceptable product
• How to increase active users
• Getting users up the engagement ladder
• How data should improve your product
• Balancing product vision and listening to customers
• How important is signal-to-noise-ratio in your product?
• The 3 conditions that create virality
• Andy Johns on how to build a winning product
• The core of product management
• Profile of a growth hacker
• Identifying the moment a user becomes truly engaged
• Instilling a culture of experimentation from day one
• Three advantages of experimenting a lot
• Sustainable growth hacking
• Two key questions for every manager
• The best product and growth hacking advice ever
• Product advice “I wish I had three years ago”
• For product managers: “The best startup advice I’ve heard”
• How to empower product managers
• How founders can stay involved in product without disempowering product managers
• A framework for product management
• Facebook’s most important advice for product managers
• Jack Dorsey on product management
• How to develop a culture of “yes”
• Keeping focused by saying “no”
• Facebook’s Julie Zhuo on combatting feature creep

Promoting people

• Promote fast
• Two approaches to titles and promotions
• To generate change, explicitly identify and empower change agents

Public speaking and presentations

• Why you shouldn’t begin your conference presentation by talking about yourself
• How to combat Powerpoint fatigue
• How NOT to start a presentation
• How to make your talk or presentation gripping and memorable
• How to answer questions after pitching your product or startup
• By the end of your talk or presentation, you should be talking love
• A talk or presentation is an opportunity to be generous
• For speakers: three tips to avoid tiring your audience
• How to handle public questions you don’t know the answer to
• If you must use Powerpoint…
• How to demo your startup
• A simple rule for pitching your startup or product
• How to overcome fear in public speaking
• How to keep presentations tight
• The key to great presentations

Reference checks

• Here to get independent references for a job candidate
• When checking references, get each of these types
• How to interpret negative feedback from a job candidate’s references
• A simple rule for interpreting references for a job candidate
• Startup founder errors to avoid: not checking job candidates’ references
• Tom Tunguz on reference checks: Questions to ask
• The goal of checking a job candidate’s references
• How to ask the right questions when checking references
• Tom Tunguz on reference checks: How to find out about someone’s weaknesses
• How do to reference checks: Mark Suster
• How do to reference checks: Scott Cook
• Reference checks: Is this the best question to ask?

SaaS and subscription businesses

• If you have any paying customers, don’t quit
• Selling to enterprises via selling to individual employees — the B2C2B model
• For SaaS startups — how to avoid increasing costs inefficiently and prematurely
• How to extend a SaaS business from small to large sales without using outbound calling
• Why capital efficiency is critical for SaaS and subscription businesses
• Why SaaS and subscription businesses often take longer than B2C
• Why you should add team features to a SaaS product for individuals
• What to focus on to build a great subscription business
• Building a moat – barriers to entry for SaaS companies
• The 10 characteristics of a great consumer subscription business

Selling

• In selling, the relationship is the deal
• Why you should use live chat to sell — even if you think you’re not ready for it
• To raise profitability, control tech costs in sales
• Demos can win sales if you do them like this
• Five tips for SaaS sales people
• 13 tips for managing a SaaS sales team
• Live chat for sales and customer service
• Three crucial factors in sales success
• How to sell your product if it’s a “nice to have”, not a “must have”
• Compensate for profit, not revenue
• Smile
• The human touch in nurturing leads
• How to demo your product to a potential customer
• Overcoming the biggest barrier with a first-time buyer
• Avoiding hype in sales
• How to get testimonials
• Understanding your customer’s needs
• To sell, ask and listen
• How to do cold calls
• How to truly understand your customers
• Keep your target market narrow
• What do customers care most about?
• How exactly to write a cold-call email
• You’ve got 5 minutes to call back, or else…
• The 5 questions every customer asks themselves before buying from you
• How to get inside your customer’s head

Strategy

• How money can mess up your startup
• Provide what your users really want
• Build for your best customers
• Why early stage startups should start narrow
• The three most important things for seed stage startups to get right
• Automate and outsource everything
• How startups can continue to innovate over long time periods
• Build value for your users
• Give your startup time and options — burn less
• Reach versus monetization
• Why network effects matter so much
• Three essential actions to survive the coming startup storm
• “We simply can’t cut costs without hurting our growth”
• Get to profitability — here’s how
• There are only two ways to build a $100m business
• Why startups shouldn’t scale prematurely
• Your biggest competitor may not be who you think it is
• How to decide what to prioritize — a simple rule for startup CEOs
• Reverse network effects, and how to combat them
• Why startups should do less
• Don’t be satisfied with sales, seek love
• The three steps to building a great company, and why most startups fail on the first step
• First-mover advantage is over-rated
• How to ensure your company is customer-centric, and the challenge for ad-supported services
• Tom Tunguz’ five keys to building a successful company
• The key factor in startup success, and what to do about it
• One way for startups to gain time
• For disruptive startups: How large is your potential market?
• Clarifying your strategy using a simple template
• Five insights from an ex-VC that are useful for entrepreneurs
• How Amazon resists short-term thinking
• The question that Amazon answers to set its strategy
• Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg: How to beat your competitors
• There is always a move
• The causes of distraction
• The continuum from “figuring-it-out” to “scaling”
• Startup = pro-active risk-taking
• The only startup goal worth your undivided attention
• How to stress test your strategy
• Profitability = control of your own destiny
• Lessons from Dropbox
• Staying focused: a remarkable example from Steve Jobs
• When your product should no longer be your top priority
• Feel under time pressure?
• Evernote vs. Foursquare: Two approaches to privacy
• Polyvore CEO Jess Lee on what makes startups successful
• Startup strategy advice from Mint founder Aaron Patzer
• Lessons learned — advice from one entrepreneur to another
• Fail fast
• Jeff Bezos on strategy
• Why the best products don’t always win, AKA how to build a moat around your business
• Guess which age group matters most?
• Is your company truly disruptive? Try this simple litmus test
• The litmus test of a great business model
• Doing things that don’t scale
• Making other people successful

Thank you’s

• Thank you, Mark Suster @msuster
• Thank you @susanmernit for the best advice for bloggers I ever heard
• Thank you, Tim

The business of content

• Why the Facebook threat to most media businesses will only get worse
• Does this make someone a troll?
• Charging for content will only be successful if this condition is fulfilled
• Who has more power in the media business, celebrities or platforms?
• The content business: Entertainment, or helping users make decisions?
• Facebook vs. Disqus — the scope of online identities
• Should websites shut down comments?
• What’s wrong with video
• Why websites shouldn’t optimize for page views
• An insider’s view of what happens when you optimize for pageviews
• Is this the new age of massive media companies?
• Why it’s a myth that banner ads don’t work
• Why investors do better investigative work than business journalists and sell-side analysts
  
• Are advertisers responsible for pageview chasing by media websites?
• The digital media crisis — a personal perspective
• What happens when a content site stops optimizing for page views?
• Is the next wave of social networking the return to privacy?
• A better alternative to TechMeme?
• What content will people pay meaningful amounts for?
• The problem with content paywalls, and the solution in one vertical
• A fascinating innovation for content companies
• Why pageview-driven websites succumb to herd-thinking
• Chartbeat’s suggestion for how to measure content quality
• Startup strategy: Why you have to demand commitment
• The corrosive impact of pageviews as the target metric for content websites
• James Altucher on the problem with free
• Measurement is the key to success for content businesses; but measurement of what?
• Short form content rules in mobile

Training

• Practical advice on how to train your managers
• How to implement a functional training program
• Four reasons why you should train your team
• How to increase your sales team’s product and industry knowledge
• The best people train themselves

VCs and boards

• VCs make two common errors, the data shows
• Why VCs push startups to scale prematurely
• Investor updates — the minimum viable product version for startup CEOs
• How to write a monthly report for your investors or manager
• Don’t make decisions in board meetings
• Don’t waste your board meetings on updates
• The value of great board members
• The most unrecognized and under-appreciated way VCs help startups
• The strengths and weaknesses of VCs
• VC pitfalls to watch for: chasing fashionable verticals
• VC pitfalls to watch for: trying to fix companies
• Can trust between VCs and founders outweigh conflicts of interest?
• Where investors add most value — one VC’s perspective
• How to build trust with VCs
• Why entrepreneurs should care what VCs think
• For CEOs and VCs: Good pressure or bad pressure?
• Board packet — why we send a letter instead of slides
• Do most VCs add negative value?
• Conflicts of interest between startups and VCs
• What the best VCs and entrepreneurs should expect from each other
• How to get value out of your board between meetings
• Investors, VCs and product advice
• Where VCs and board members add the most value
• How to stop VCs’ best practices becoming damaging cookie-cutter solutions
• How we run board meetings at Seeking Alpha
• VCs aren’t product managers
• Asking your VCs questions

Work skills and lifehacks

• Five key takeaways from Peter Drucker’s “How To Be An Effective Executive”
• Chris Fralic’s 7 rules for making memorable connections
• Don’t let self-criticism become self-flagellation
• How your mood at the start of the day impacts your productivity
• An hour a day for deliberate learning?
• Slashing your Facebook usage may reduce your anxiety about work
• Stop beating yourself up
• When you want a break from work, should you log into Facebook?
• How to improve your mood at work and make other people happier too
• How to avoid being influenced by others’ negativity
• Why venting and complaining are bad for your health and the health of your company
• You can train yourself to think positively
• How to stop being late for meetings
• What happens if you apply marriage advice to work relationships?
• How much of other people’s time do you waste?
• How to deal with anger at work
• A better way to view people
• How to sleep better to raise your productivity
• The minimum requirements for giving effective feedback
• To close a gap fast, focus on the little things
• How to stay calm under immense work pressure — Charlie O’Donnell
• The “incredible beauty” of mistakes
• How to stay calm under immense work pressure — Jason Lemkin
• What makes a great employee — Cameron Purdy
• How to learn from other people’s experience and knowledge
• How to get stuff done
• Think big
• Don’t try to learn from failure
• Why you should take a walk at 3pm
• Limiting decision fatigue
• Is this better than taking notes?
• How to remember people’s names
• Using exhaustive lists to get unstuck
• Embracing constraints
• How to manage your energy
• How to view rejection
• Don’t lie
• How to say “no” gracefully
• Genuine praise
• Explode in frustration or withdraw? How to resist emotional triggers
• How to give feedback – the McKinsey feedback model
• Can you be a great business leader if you’re lazy?
• Ideas spread inside a company due to positive energy; 8 ways to increase it

Work-life balance

• Surprise, surprise — commuting by car makes you heavier
• Skift’s approach to work-life balance
• Does Amazon prove that greatness and work-life balance are incompatible?
• Getting work-life balance right also requires being considerate to others
• Don’t send non-urgent emails outside work hours
• How to stop email from ruining your vacation
• How many hours per week should you work to maximize your impact?
• Paying people to take real vacations
• Is this the key to work-life balance?