The Startup Weekly: #30

Handpicked articles for everyone who is part of a startup, to help you learn and grow.

Subscribe here

How Uber solved its Chicken and Egg Problem

If you want to create a marketplace (or any multi-sided business for that matter), then you’ll first have to surmount the chicken and egg problem. Users on one side of the model find it useful only if the other side also exists. So how do you even start? This article outlines four ways in which successful multi-sided platforms like Uber, LinkedIn and Square solved their chicken and egg problems, and what we can learn from them.[Disclaimer: this was written by one of the curators of this newsletter.]

Read here

First Round 10 Year Project

A Silicon Valley VC takes time out on completing ten years and over 300 investments, to share what it has learnt.Some very interesting insights. Sample this: Female founders outperform their male peers quite meaningfully (63% better is very, very meaningful). Solo founders do much worse than teams. You can win outside the big tech hubs. And the most counter-intuitive finding — investments in repeat founders didn’t really perform better than those in first-timers.

Read here

18 Ways to Make Your Financial Model Stand Out to Investors

Are you struggling with the financial model for your startup? Or do you think you’ve made a mean model, but unfortunately no one else understands it?

Read here

Presumption of stupidity

Whenever we make competitive decisions, we unconsciously assume ceteris paribus. We assume that the market will stay constant, while we make our moves.It’s very easy to say, “Our competitor is pricing his product incorrectly. We’ll fix this problem, and steal the market away from him.” But, as Aaron Harris says here, this presumption of competitor stupidity is flawed.It’s a far better bet to assume intelligence, and try and understand why they’re doing what they are. Such an analysis will help you understand challenges well ahead of time, and build actually better solutions, rather than just something that looks new.

Read here

Projects and Companies

Don’t you get irritated when people refer to your startup as your “project”? “How’s your project going? Have you found anyone interested?” I know I get irritated. But as Sam Altman says here, there are some natural advantages of thinking of your company as a ‘project’ for as long as possible.

Read here

You’re Still Modeling Growth Incorrectly

99% of entrepreneurs model their startup’s growth incorrectly.The way most of us model growth is by starting with a target X months from now, and modelling an exponential curve towards it. So, the hockey-stick growth is not ‘derived’, it’s modeled with a mathematical equation.Instead, let the growth be an outcome of your model. List down all your marketing techniques and the expected impact of each, and then see what the growth will be. Rather than the other way round.

Read here

30 Brilliant marketing growth hacks

Some very sneaky growth hacks in here. All of them are simple, some are weird, and others are brutal. Sample this: Putting ‘>>’ after the words in your “Go here” buttons can actually increase clickthroughs!

Read here

If you liked it, hit ❤!