What is at stake, some may ask. Everything, we negotiate every day, knowingly or not. Be it about the added sugar in your coffee, whether you can borrow a buck from your friends, or if someone can lend you a pen. When it comes to business, you negotiate contracts, term sheets, employment agreements.
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Back in 2018 I was presenting to the Chief Marketing Officer of Fujitsu on my human centered design innovation process. It worked great for digital products and MVPs but somehow it wasn’t landing. At about the halfway point of the presentation, the CMO asked a straightforward question. “How do I create the next iPhone?” I had no idea. What happened next was a series of questions that I believe led me to unearth at least a portion of Apple’s product innovation guidelines. If I’m right let me know, if I’m wrong, also let me know.
It all started with this:
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We dove into the annals of the interwebs and decided that these eleven companies as the most spectacular startup failures of all time. We profiled based on the money raised, the total level of hype, and the impact of the fall from grace. So which startups failed most spectacularly? Let’s dive in.
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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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