Recruiting, Market Strategy, Customer Engagement, Product, Pricing, Scaling, Boards, Crowdfunding, Weekend Review#16 October 27 2013

This weekend’s Roundup #16 from Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 17 article links in this edition.

Recruiting

Albert Wenger has an excellent video on the ABC of Recruiting (Always Be Collecting candidates!), where he lays out how your recruiting methods change as you progress from 0-10, 10-20, 20-50, and 50+ employees. Highly recommended. Rand Fishkin shares lessons learned along the growth way, in Pitfalls of Startup Team Building. One of them: “paying a big referral fee might attract some wrong type of employees”, and “build a recruiting brand beyond your product brand.”

Market Strategy

In Why Big Opportunities Crush Small Companies, Dharmesh Shah offers a warning: “One of the most frequent mistakes that entrepreneurs make is to automatically think that a large potential market is better”, and reiterates that “self-funded entrepreneurs should pursue smaller, addressable markets.” Jeff Jordan says “when we consider an e-commerce investment at a16z, we always strive to carefully evaluate the risk of competition from Amazon”. That’s why he wrote So You Want to Compete Against Amazon? highlighting how 

Lean Analytics

Here’s an interview with Alistair Croll, co-author of Lean Analytics: Lean Analytics: The Best Numbers of Non-Tech Companies, where he reviews key concepts from the book.

Sales

Jason Lemkin explains How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic. Two of these non-magical tricks include upgrading the team with proven closers, and ending pipeline as a metric.

Y Combinator Startup School Videos

Most of them have been posted on Y Combinator’s YouTube channel.

Customer Retention

Christoph Janz offers a spreadsheet you can Use for Churn, MRR, and Cohort Analysis, including a step-by-step guide for using it. Setting it up is not something you do everyday, but once it’s done, you’ll be happy.

Customer Engagement

Des Traynor offers a methodology: Simplify, Nudge, or Persuade for getting customers to do something, in How to Educate & Persuade Customers.

Product Management

Are you Thinking About Product Planning? How much planning is required for a startup? Whether it’s for product requirements, market requirements, or business planning, I’m saying “use planning to answer questions, rather than to produce a document”.

Pricing

Alex Turnbull explains The Pricing Model That Increased Our Free Trial Signups by 358% (and Revenue by 25%). The conversion rates were 4X higher with super-simple pricing model vs. the flexible/freemium or pay-as-you-go pricing models.

Mentoring

Anthony Hughes reveals The 5 Best Types of Mentors: the challenger, the cheerleader, the educator, the ideator, and the connector. Not surprisingly, “a truly great mentor often embodies more than one of these personality profiles.”

Infrastructure Scaling

Hailo’s architect Dave Gardner reveals The Secrets behind Tech City’s startup’s global success, for the team of 60-70 developers. They rely on Cassandra as a distributed database, with processing clusters in Europe, the US and Asia.

Scaling Internationally

App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt on starting up in China, scaling, and new funding, is an informative interview on having a global mindset, customers and infrastructure from Day 1.

Boards

Bryan Schreier of Sequoia offer a structure for Preparing a Board Deck. It includes 21 short sections. It’s a quick read. “Treat board-meeting prep as an opportunity to pull yourself out of the day to day and take a look at your company as if you were sitting on the moon viewing the earth.”

New World of Crowdfunding

Joe Wallin advises startups and founders to become familiar with the reporting exemptions, when granting stock options, and that includes Rule 506 of Regulation D (part of the JOBS Act) implications, in Securities Law 101.

Venture Capital

Hunter Walk says it’s better to Be a Partnership, Not a Collection of Partners, and offers a list of ways that founders can use to notice the difference.

That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter,  add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily.

William Mougayar
Founder & Chief Curator
Startup Management