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Focus on your own shit
My eyes crack open. 7am. Roll over. Grab my phone. Start scrolling… Wake up, check Product Hunt. Shit: someone just launched software really similar to my product (and we’re still in beta). Browse...
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Why early-stage startups should focus on their super-fans (and not casual users)
Advice to startup founders: Don't try to make everyone happy. You want to focus on the 1 percent most engaged users of your product and make them ecstatic.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Couldn't agree...
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The no-BS guide to understanding Saas churn
There are many ways to calculate churn & each tells a different story about your startup. Ask yourself these 3 questions about how you calculate churn.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Thourough...
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What entrepreneurs should do before writing a single line of code
"Why would you invest energy and resources into the development of a product, instead of doing research and coming up with a solid plan and strategy for going to market?"Guillaume Decugis's...
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A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It's a Process
An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out, or a way to get the product out the door a little earlier. In fact, the MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all. And it’s not...
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Why and how startups should leverage content marketing
Content Marketing for Startups by Susan Su. What is content marketing? Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of mediGuillaume Decugis's insight:Is content marketing...
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Is the Tech Bubble Popping? Ping Pong Offers an Answer
Falling ping-pong table sales give a peek into the economics of Silicon Valley, where the right to play table tennis on the job is sacrosanctGuillaume Decugis's insight:Big data correlations at work...
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Cross border startups finally have a dedicated acceleration program: the...
Discover The Refiners - Cross border accelerator in San Francisco for foreign startups to thrive in the Silicon ValleyGuillaume Decugis's insight:It's so hard and time-consuming to understand...
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You can't A/B test your way to product/market fit
At small-scale, intuition and research trumps statistical analysis.Guillaume Decugis's insight:A/B tests are statistically significant only with large numbers. You can play with Optimizely's tools...
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Why I turned down $500K, Pissed off my investors, and Shut down my startup
I just did what no startup founder is ever supposed to do. I gave up. It wasn’t even one of those glorious “fail fast and fail forward” learning experiences. After seven months of hard work and...
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What It’s Like to do YC Demo Day as a VC then as an Entrepreneur
Last year I participated in YC Demo Day as a VC. This year I’m participating as part of “the batch”.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Where you also learn that asking the right questions as a VC is not that...
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Why VCs Should First be Startup CEOs
Venture Capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year. Guillaume Decugis's...
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SaaS Pricing benchmarks by OpenView Labs
After surveying more than 1,000 software executives about their SaaS pricing habits, we've uncovered some alarming gaps. View the results here.Guillaume Decugis's insight:OpenView Labs' Kyle Poyar...
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Growth hacking is bullshit
Growth is the lifeblood of startups. Growth is what differentiates Snapchat from hipster coffee shops. It’s the difference between revenue-less Instagram and The New York Times. It’s why...
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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
We use them to try to “get to know” people. It doesn’t work.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Recruiting is hard. And if you had any doubt about this, science has now proven it: by combining random...
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Here’s how likely your startup is to get acquired at any stage
Let’s say you randomly selected 1,000 seed-stage startups based in the United States. How many of those would go on to raise a Series A?Guillaume Decugis's insight:Interesting stats from TechCrunch....
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The Only Metric That Matters
One question I get asked a lot by founders and product managers I meet is “Are my metrics good enough?” This might refer to good enough to raise money, or good enough to keep working on a feature...
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The end of Silicon Valley's monopoly on talent
"Today, it’s quite common to meet startups who house their product and engineering centers in Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, Beijing, Waterloo, Paris, or London. Some companies are even relocating their...
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Can you really be a lean startup if you're an AI company?
It once would have seemed like a crazy barrier to get large amounts of data, but startups are finding all sorts of creative ways to do it.Guillaume Decugis's insight:The hype on AI is real says...
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Why startups shouldn't do launches
Here's a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? My answer is almost always the same: don'tGuillaume Decugis's insight:As we're developing a new...
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Ready to scale? Not if you haven't gone through these 3 steps first
The Startup Genome analysis, which investigated 650 Internet startups, found that “premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform poorly and lose the battle early on”.Guillaume...
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Why non-Bay Area startups struggle to find investors here
Raising money is hard. And it’s even harder if you’re an entrepreneur from outside the Bay Area. Entrepreneurs from outside of Silicon Valley often struggle to raise money here. There’s issues with...
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So you think you know your business model?
A mentor master class I've been doing for The Refiners, the cross-boarder acceleration program for foreign founders in Silicon Valley. Business models are hard to define for entrepreneurs because as a...
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The 10 Things I’d Tell My Younger CEO Self to Do Better Next Time
The 10 Things I’d Tell My Younger CEO Self to Do Better Next Time. What are the Top 10 things I’d tell myself to do better, if I could go back in time?Guillaume Decugis's insight:SaaStr's Jason Lemkin...
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Ten Year's Worth of Learnings About Pricing
Tomasz Tunguz is a venture capitalist at Redpoint and writes about startups, fund raising, SaaS companies, and best practices for founders.Guillaume Decugis's insight:A good high level recap by Tom...
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This is what a healthy freemium business model looks like
Tomasz Tunguz is a venture capitalist at Redpoint and writes about startups, fund raising, SaaS companies, and best practices for founders.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Tom Tunguz analyzed the S1 filing...
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Why brand marketing is mostly useless for startups
Brand marketing is mostly useless for consumer startups. Startups build a great brand by being successful, finding product market fit and scaling traction, etc. But it’s not a real lever. Let’s not mix...
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Why you should focus on user intent - and not just A/B test results
When a +10% isn’t really a +10% OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that’s +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right?...
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Struggle porn - why working hard is not a good metric to measure...
I say @GaryVee because I don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk personally. He could be delightful and entirely unlike his online persona. But his Internet character is doing harm to would-be...
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From Product-Market Fit to Product-Market-Price Fit
The startup community obsesses over finding product-market fit. But, now it's time to find product-market-price fit. Kyle Poyar explains why.Guillaume Decugis's insight:Pricing as a key element of...
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