Insights

As a founder and former CEO, I'm delighted to see so many Alchemist Accelerator portfolio startups executing highly engaged Advisor Councils (AdCos) when acquiring their first 10 paying customers. Yet most startups fall short of scaling their AdCos beyond a few influencers and MVPs. This is a critical mistake.

It's not the product. It's not the timing. It's your body language and tonality. Both have more to do with sales success than other factors because at the core, sales is result-driven communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with how venture capital funding works, it can seem akin to playing the lottery. Anyone can try, but only a few lucky entrepreneurs actually win. Fortunately, fundraising isn’t as random as a Powerball drawing and founders can improve their odds of success by engaging with right-size partners, recognizing what investors find intriguing, and understanding the technical aspects of term sheets.

The greatest expert on your customer is: your customer. I consider that rule number one on any customer development journey.

There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings

I had breakfast with two of my ex-students from Singapore who were building a really interesting startup. They were deep into Customer Discovery and presented a ton of customer data on the validity of their initial hypothesis – target customers, pricing, stickiness, etc. I was unprepared for what they said next. “We’re going to do a big launch of our product in three weeks.” I almost dropped my coffee. “Wait a minute, what about the rest of Customer Development? Aren’t you going to validate your hypotheses by first getting some customers?”

Entrepreneurs take note. More startups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development. That’s why I believe strongly that every new product company should have a methodology for developing customers.

The culture of nearly every business-to-business software startup centers on products. Everyone talks about product innovation and disruptive technology, but I think today’s founders need more than great product ideas to launch successful companies.