Sometimes (most of the time?) things don’t go as planned. If there’s one constant in life, particularly in the world of startups, it’s change. And last week there was a big change in my life. I’m no longer at VarageSale. I’m now going to take a bit of time (to relax, catch up on things, […]
Rebooting
It’s been almost a year since my last post. Wow. Incredible. I think that’s been the longest gap in my writing since I started this blog a thousand years ago. It’ll take me a little while still, but I will come back. It’s time to reboot this bad boy and see where it takes me. […]
$34,000,000
Last week we (at VarageSale) announced $34,000,000 in fundraising from a group of amazing investors. You can read the news on Business Week and in the Globe and Mail. Two of those investors are Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners. These guys have invested in some of the biggest and best companies in the world: Google, […]
The Importance of Using Your Own Product
Every weekend I buy a few items on VarageSale. It’s not because I need more tchotchkes (although I am buying some awesome things for our new office), it’s because I need to use the product to really understand our members. We collect a ton of quantitative data, but you can’t win on quantitative data alone–you […]
Grabbing Attention and Holding Onto It
Grabbing attention is hard enough. Holding onto it is damn near impossible. In the consumer world (although this applies to B2B software too), attention is the currency that matters. If you can get people’s attention you have a chance of winning. Without it, you can pack up and go home. When talking to entrepreneurs I […]
Put Yourself in a Position to Be Lucky
Last week I spoke at a University of Toronto event to a small group of students. They were mostly business students (so I implored them to learn how to code and be useful–seriously business students, learn to code). As I was going to the event and reviewing my notes, I wrote the following down: Put […]
Prioritize Product Development by the Four Stages of Use
When prioritizing feature development I like to think of a product in four pieces: Ongoing Engagement, Onboarding, First User Experience and Marketing/Growth. These are actually the steps a user goes through during their lifecycle with your product (listed in reverse). Think of your product less in terms of features and more in terms of the […]
Product Debt
If you’ve spent any amount of time around developers you should be familiar with the term technical debt. Technical debt comes from hacking things together quickly and moving on. It accumulates over time. It can come back to bite you in the ass (if you scale to the point where the debt becomes obvious). It’s […]
Experimenting with Product, Price and Market
Every startup has to experiment with product, price and market to find the right combination that allows them to scale and win. But if you find yourself experimenting with all three at the same time, you need to take a step back and evaluate where you’re really at. Last week I wrote about product/market fit […]
Product/Market Fit and Lean Analytics
In the last couple weeks I’ve read a few great blog posts about product/market fit and the confusion that exists around what it really means. I’d say for many early stage startups, product/market fit is thought of as that point in time when you’ve finally built a product that people use and it’s time to […]