Essential advice for tech startups

How to improve your odds of success.

1. Team

Founding team must be able to bring a startup from idea to profitable business. Accept friendly executors only - preferably smarter than yourself. Have fun and be personal. You ain’t shit without your homeboys.

2. Product

Provide a worthwhile solution to a real problem. Build an effective (and pretty) product that add value and is scalable. Design is a competitive advantage - use it.

3. Simplify

To build something useful, you have to be great at saying no. Rather be perfect for someone than useless for everyone. In product design there’s a hundred no’s for every yes.

4. Entry point

Find group(s) of like minded people and launch into a community. There’s a much better chance it’ll spread throughout the community and eventually beyond. If relevant, focus on a narrow geographical area for faster critical mass.

5. Users

Get to know and value your existing users. Implement clever software like Intercom and Groove to extend your knowledge and optimize user behavior. Focus on onboarding, engagement/lifecycle marketing, customer development and retention messaging.

6. Social

Make your app social and shareable. Provide one-click sign-up methods and prompt sharing without pissing users off. Invest in importing social graph data to enrich your product. Date FB - but do not marry.

7. Network

Encourage users to recommend by rewarding them. Know/estimate customer lifetime value (CLV) and implement a referral programme which reward both referral receiver and sender.

8. PR

Avoid hiring a PR firm to do your “free” marketing for you. PR is an on-going process and a core capability you must own and execute, because it’s closely related to who you are and how you want to be perceived. Be authentic and connect with (or hire) influencers who know the right people.

9. Search

Be highly SEO’d by nature, but don’t be a Google bitch. Create systematic landing pages, comparison pages and long-tail content. Experiment widely with paid traffic but spend your budget on proven profitable campaigns.

10. Competition

Copy cool stuff. But adapt to match your business. Be slightly evil if effective. If no competition in market - reassess your business idea.