Edmonton Lean Startup Circle

I was once on the board of a company that was cash-flow positive early in its life. The entrepreneur decided to raise more money, even though he didn’t need to. I was perplexed and asked him why he was raising the amount of money he had decided to raise. His answer was that when he had no cash in the bank, he was willing to run $1,000 experiments. When the company was cash-flow positive, he was comfortable running $10,000 experiments. He now wanted to feel comfortable running $100,000 experiments, and this financing enabled him to do this. If he ran a $100,000 experiment and it failed, it wouldn’t tank the business.

When an experiment works, do more of it. So the $10,000 experiment that pays for itself in three days by generating $4,000 of gross margin on a daily basis is worth doubling down on and running at the $20,000 level. If this generates $8,000 of gross margin on a daily basis, double down again.

I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works.

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.

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.

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.