As a founder, you should be keeping track of milestones, performance, sales and everything else that’s going on with your company, but you’re busy, being pulled in twenty different ways, you have to fundraise, you’re running all sales and marketing, it’s overwhelming. How can you make sure the company is healthy aside from just your MAUs, DAUs, retention, and sales going up. How can you benchmark your startup’s operating performance?
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Some people say that there are only two things that are certain in life, these are death and taxes. Except that these folks have never run a company which if they did would immediately make them realize that there is, in fact, a third absolute certainty in life — this is the sales spam email. People have tried everything to deal with sales spam emails, and it seems like nothing helps. Up to now, that is. This post is about how I turned these cold sales emails into sales qualified leads for my startup, and best of all, converted them.
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A big problem with young companies is that aside from some very rough financial guidelines it is often very difficult to gauge whether the venture will or can be successful. Luckily when you’re starting up there are frameworks that can help you with this. Today we’re going to look at how to Analyze Company with Bell Mason, use the Framework well, and provide you with the tools to do it effectively.
Many investment houses use multi-metric project valuation and assessment approaches, and at present, there is ample work being done at top business universities in order to augment the early-stage venture valuation process. One such methodology is the Bell- Mason Framework.
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Once you hit product-market fit, one of the most important things to set up is a solid marketing foundation for your startup or small business. In my time as a consultant, I’ve worked with startups where it was a complete breeze – the company provided me with fundamental product and marketing, we would have a comprehensive chat – everyone was on the same base, and we would easily get to work.
Yet other times, we would run into companies who as I like to call it, have a misunderstanding of self, or an identity crisis, if you will.
They don’t know what their mission is, what their long term vision is, they lack their base marketing fundamentals.
Hopefully, this post will help remedy that. Reasons being two-fold.
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“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” reads the inscription at the James Farley Post Office here in NYC, and perhaps it was true in 1912 when the building was erected but a hundred and two years later, the USPS has seen a bit of vision misalignment, or at least they ought to consider chipping away at that whole “swift” thing. Does the USPS need to hire ogistics planning consultants, the TL;DR is yes, but here’s the why.
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While attending a session at Lowenstein LLP for the inauguration of the 2013 First Growth Venture Network, I had the pleasure to speak with and listen to some of NY and the Valley’s top investors. Some of this advice on how to navigate the VC landscape comes from them.
You quit your job, labored months building a product, and found some traction. Then, you looked at your bank account and thought to yourself: “crap, I’ve got two months of runway left, three maybe if I stretch it. What do we do?”
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