In their best-selling book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares write about the importance of traction:

Traction is the best way to improve your chances of startup success. Traction is a sign that something is working. If you charge for your product, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it’s a growing user base. Traction is powerful. Technical, market, and team risks are easier to address with traction. Fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, and acquisitions all become much easier. In other words, traction trumps everything.

Traction is often the great…

Startup pitch meetings are pretty predictable. You walk into a venture fund’s conference room or Zoom room (if they’re progressive), pitch the partners, offer to answer their questions, maybe ask them a bland question or two, and then leave the meeting to await a response.

Here’s the thing: asking a VC a couple of easy questions at the end of a pitch doesn’t get you any closer to receiving a term sheet. In fact, the biggest mistake you can make at the end of a pitch meeting is not asking VC’s the following question:

So, is this the type of…

Picture this scenario: your startup launches and you get covered in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Business Insider. A tidal wave of traffic floods your website……and nothing happens. Several people sign up for a free trial of your product but not a single one converts into a paying customer. You and your team are devastated. Your investors are disappointed. You’ve gone straight from launch to the Trough of Sorrow without even a quick detour through the Wearing Off of Novelty.

This story should illustrate an important point about customer development and feedback. If you don’t talk to your customers about your product…

When pitching to VCs, one of the most frequent errors founders make is incorrectly presenting their total addressable market, or TAM for short. Perhaps because this number is hypothetical and dependent on so many different factors, some founders do not give it the time it deserves.

But, the TAM slide is an excellent opportunity to both convince investors of the potential market for your product and also to prove that you are capable of providing an analytical and systematic way of reasoning through the problem. …

Under lean startup methodology, founders attempt to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible to create some order out of the chaos involved in starting a company. Failures are inevitable; but, great founders know how to fail quickly and cheaply, rather than trying to take on boatloads of venture capital funding to solve a problem with an approach that doesn’t scale or, even worse, to solve a problem that does not exist or is not that painful.

When working with startups, Dreamit Managing Partner Steve Barsh uses the analogy of a mountain climber. What is the most basic critical assumption…

Recently, the idea of “acquisitions for marketing” has fascinated me. What does this mean? It refers to situations where companies acquire other businesses or assets as a way to grow their primary product(s) or improve their marketing.

Huge companies use acquisitions for marketing all of the time. Examples of this practice in large corporations include:

• Walmart’s $3B acquisition of Jet.com, which helps it make significant inroads in ecommerce.
• Amazon’s acquisitions of Zappos, Quidsi, and Whole Foods, which allowed it to add product categories like shoes, baby care, home goods, and food to its portfolio. Or, Amazon’s acquisitions of IMDb, Box…

Philadelphia has always been a key city for our country’s economy and culture. It was the first major industrial city in the United States, boasting key ports and manufacturing facilities. The city evolved over time into what it is today: a financial anchor city of the Delaware Valley with strong financial, academic, tech, and healthcare industries.

Philadelphia has world-class academic community , which keeps the city young and filled with entrepreneurs. The Brookings Institution just recently named Philly one of the world’s ‘Knowledge Capitals.’ …

The Dreamit team is proud to announce the latest cohorts for our health and edtech accelerator programs. For the next 14 weeks, our team will pressure test these companies, drive actionable collaboration with corporates through our customer immersion programs, and build and execute a fundraising strategy during our investor roadshow. Out of hundreds of applications, these 18 startups were ultimately chosen based on factors such as quality of founding team, traction, market size, and innovation in product.