Failed to delight. Part II.
Lessons learned from three breakups in two startups.
It is already too late if you have already been thinking about it.
You would have all these excuses in your head on why you shouldn’t break up with your cofoudner. Sadly, if this thought of breaking up ever creeps up on you, you have already lost confidence in your cofounder. Act and focus on the next steps instead. It’ll be a relief and you will be surprised by the productivity you gain back.
By the way, your team or your investors may have already expected the…
I was recently invited to talk about starting up in Hong Kong and what areas these startups could work on to increase their chances of success. I have always rooted for Hong Kong’s startup community but honestly we aren’t there yet as a whole at the time of writing. The good news is we are starting to hear about local success stories.
Here are the slides and I think the thought process applies to other regions as well.
TL;DR:
- Figure out distribution for your product.
- Utilize your region’s competitive advantages
- Test in your local region but have other…
Getting a yes from investors
Since I have been on both sides of the table, first-time founders often ask me what went on in investors’ mind while being pitched. It’s been written up a lot on the web, but I particularly like this simple three-why framework.
- Why it?
Why does your product need to exist? What pain points are you solving? What are your target customers using now because you haven’t built your product yet? Is it a vitamin or pain killer? Even if it starts off as a vitamin, can your product eventually become a habit-forming drug? Do your metrics support your hypothesis? - …
Post-mortem of my first startup. Part 1.
We decided to flip the switch on Delight at the end of this month and it officially marks the end of my first startup. Bittersweet moment.
The vision of Delight was to build a new kind of mobile analytics: visual analytics. Traditional metrics tell you the what and we tell you the why by showing you the real interactions from your users. We had some good initial response but we failed to take off. Here are some lessons we learned along the way.
- Price for the values your service delivers.
Our most expensive monthly plan was US$300. Customers who churned never…
