The Startup Weekly: #25
The Startup Weekly is a journal for startups. We handpick some of the best articles out there, to help you learn and grow.
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Why you should choose an ambitious startup idea
We usually write off Facebook and Google as highly unlikely successes (they are!), and aim a lot lower in our own startup aspirations. But as Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Google challenger Duck Duck Go, says — if you have to start a company, always choose an ambitious startup idea. It’s equally hard to build a business, whether highly ambitious or less so. So why not aim for a much larger prize? Plus, it’s much easier to attract talent, publicity, investment, etc. if you’re planning on “changing the world”.
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How to Design a Pitch Deck: Lessons from a Seasoned Founder
A great resource from a founder who’s had success with pitch decks before. I especially like how he lays out one of his own pitch decks, and explains slide by slide how to create impactful messages. I’m definitely going to look this up when I’m making my own pitch!
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What’s wrong with the lean startup methodology?
I strongly believe in the Lean Startup methodology. I’ve shared numerous articles on this in this newsletter over the last few weeks. But, as this article says, sometimes the advice can be over-simplified. Here’s what’s wrong with the Lean Startup philosophy as most of us understand it.
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Design the Beginning
Pretty much any time we design something new, we start at the middle. So says Julie Zhuo in this insightful article. We start by building ‘the money feature’ — the main solution our app provides. But it’s almost as important to design the beginning of a user’s interaction with your app. How will she hear of your app? How will she understand, at a glance, what the app does? Unless you design the beginning well, your target users will not even see the core product you’ve developed.
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How one startup beat the average churn by 1000%
As this article from Baremetrics says, churn is the silent killer of growth. But one startup was able to restrict churn to 1%, in a world where most players in its category had a churn of over ten times that. How did they manage it? No magic tricks, but just some very sound product principles. Read the article for more.
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Flexing It | The Big Four… Trends That Are Transforming the Freelance World
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Basic Mistakes Every Entrepreneur Makes
I don’t normally include articles from James Altucher in the newsletter, but this is a great one. He talks about the basic mistakes you should not make as an entrepreneur. I especially like his point about hiring software devs — far too many of us hire 5 mediocre developers, instead of 1 great one. Even though we know that great programmers are usually 10x better than average ones. Many other pearls of wisdom here — check it out.
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