Category: Archives

I had an interesting discussion with an entrepreneur friend yesterday. She has a consumer Internet (Curated marketplace) startup, which she has been working on since Jan. She soft launched it in May and has been seeing a doubling of revenue every 2 weeks so far. She is on the fund raising circuit and has a… Continue reading What If You Were Given 10x The Amount Of Money You Wanted To Raise?

I have been watching / following 7 startups (3 in eCommerce, 2 in SaaS and 2 in consumer Internet) that target the Indian market over the last 14-18 months. All the entrepreneurs approached me with an intent to get seed funding so I had a chance to go over their traction, progress and future projections.… Continue reading The “two Speed” State Of Indian Market Adoption

This is a post on the problems & solutions in higher education from someone clearly not qualified to make those observations. The only information I have is the 79 pitches from entrepreneurs large and small who are all trying to disrupt Higher Education from around the world. Besides that over 500+ articles, blog posts &… Continue reading The Coming 20+ Year Disruption In Higher Education

I spoke to an entrepreneur yesterday who is focused on the health and HR markets – two of the toughest markets to target. Health has so many regulations to work with and HR has so little budget. So, take both of them together and unless you have a “head on fire” situation – aka compliance problem,… Continue reading 2 Important Aspects for Your Market to Get Venture Investors

When you are doing your initial customer development, by talking to many potential users, there are many cognitive biases you need to be aware of. Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment. Usually most founders tend to solve problems they have exposure… Continue reading How “Clustering Illusion” Stalls More #startups Than Any Other Bias

There are over 7500 SaaS companies according to angel List. Over the last few weeks I had a chance to review 89 of the companies to understand their free to paid conversion and also a chance to talk to 13 companies. What I learned was that time spent on the pricing page was a key indicator of conversion and you can A/B… Continue reading How to Name Your SaaS pricing Plans?

There are 5 key inflection points I have noticed which makes founders question their startup, to either make a call to continue working on their startup, pivot to a new problem or quit their startup altogether. It is at these points that you really get to know the startup founder and their hunger and drive… Continue reading Perseverance with the Ability to Pivot on Data

There are multiple methods to keep track of your projects and priorities. Here is one technique I used when trying to keep track of customer validation. This approach works best when teams are in one single location since it is visually appealing and easy to update. It is called the Kanban method of Do, Doing and… Continue reading Validation Using Do, Doing Done to Customer Development