1. Blowing the headline Landing pages live or die by the quality of the headline. It’s your two-second chance to overcome the swift and brutal attention filters we’ve developed due to information overload and poorly-matched promises. Often, a better headline alone will boost the effectiveness of your landing page, and even overcome some of the other mistakes below. Split-testing different headlines is relatively painless, and can bring you much higher conversions compared with multiple other tweaks.

The first question owners need to ask — and challenge themselves on — is how much money they really need. My experience is that most entrepreneurs think they need much more money than they really do. There is almost always a cheaper way to get things done.

Every month that they are on the hunt for money instead of developing and marketing their product or service, they are wasting valuable time.

Q.What were your start-up costs?A.We started this business with less than $35,000.Q.Did you get any loans or take any equity from anyone?A.No, we took no equity partners and the start-up capital for the business was contributed by the three owners.

What do entrepreneurs use to fund their startup in its earliest stages? Themselves. According to Profit, 98% of those behind Canada's hottest startups fund their startup with their own capital. 62% continue to do this post-launch for growth capital (check out their infographic after the jump).

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.

That you’re not supposed to know how to do anything right, and that’s o.k.

you didn’t need to know how to do anything in the beginning - you just needed to get good at finding the right answers quickly.

If you focused on learning, getting the right advice, in near real time - then you could take on any challenge.  It’s quite liberating once you realize that.

2 weeks ago we walked away from $160,000 in seed funding because we decided after taking advice from many folks, including Joel from BufferApp, that we should get profitable before we take funding to get a better valuation, not rocket science I know, but as it was our first experience with investment the temptation to say yes was definitely difficult.The problem we're solving was born out of our own frustrations of managing the content development process. As I'm sure you can imagine playing email-tennis with word/google documents, and attachments is incredibly unproductive.

One of the themes that came up a lot was the idea of the growth team finding a leading indicator of a user who would turn into an engaged user later on. The growth team would then focus on optimizing for that metric. 

Characteristics of leading indicator metrics The various leading indicators fit into three categories: Network density: friend or following connections made in a time frame Content added: files added to a Dropbox folder Visit frequency: D1 retention

Other points from the speakers A few other interesting things were mentioned at the conference. Josh Elman mentioned that Twitter has two degrees of an active user: a plain “active user” is someone who has visited their timeline at least once in the last 28 days a ‘retained’ or ‘core’ user is someone who has visited their timeline at least 7 times in 28 days.

Among tech entrepreneurs, there is a strong bias toward the single lifestyle for the sake of focus and an obsession pride in working 80 hours a week. But the data suggests this bias makes companies worse, not better.

The pundits proposed the mid-20s as the optimal age to start a company: At 25, entrepreneurs can give “everything to their company,” one pundit opined, suggesting that founders should not be “hamstrung” by families and non-business related commitments.

The Kauffman Foundation surveyed 550 successful entrepreneurs across multiple sectors, determined by profitability and being named a “high-valued” business by their peers. Their data suggests that most successful founders are in their mid-30s and married with children:

Mistake 3: Failing to quickly fire disrespectful and destructive employees. Nothing is more poisonous to a young company than an employee who doesn’t fit, especially jerks.