Hey — It's Nico.
A new change in the content: instead of one story, I'm sharing two resources, analyzed.
The reason: I felt like the story was only helpful to a small percentage of the audience that was in a similar situation to that of the startup.
Here's what I got today:
Ping.gg’s founder discusses burnout and shares his “No Zero Days” approach to staying productive (Link).
Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners list 25 startups likely to become unicorns (Link).
An interview with Tim Schumacher, from saas.group, on how he buys and grows SaaS companies (Link).
AI startup founder is charged with defrauding investors and manipulating financial documents (Link).
Gustaf Alströmer, a group partner at Y Combinator, believes design doesn’t make a pitch deck better (Link).
Techcrunch discusses startups and trends from signups in their Startup Battlefield competition (Link).
Calvin Chenn, a Y Combinator founder, shares his experience pivoting and finding a new idea (Link).
Richard Socher shares his views about AI and his journey building an AI-powered Google competitor (Link).
The stories behind how Tinder, LinkedIn, and Reddit solved their cold start problems (Link).
A teardown of XO’s recent acquisition of Growthbar, an AI writing SaaS (Link).
In 2011, Hubert Palan was VP of Product of a company that suffered from the shiny object syndrome: they couldn’t stay focused long enough to build something great.
Tools like Jira or GitHub weren’t helping the company to have a clearer alignment and understand their customers and their pain points. These tools were too focused on engineers.
That’s when Palan came up with the idea for Productboard. He’d build a project management tool but with what product managers needed: features for customer feedback and pain points.
A decade later, Productboard has become a $1.75B unicorn startup with more than 6,000 customers and 500 employees.
In an article recently published in First Round Review, Palan shares Productboard’s path to PMF. Here are the main events from the 3 main stages of this journey:
1) Validating the idea:
2) Defining customer segments:
3) Beta testing:
When CommandBar was just a one-month-old company, someone working at a Unicorn SaaS company emailed them saying he wanted to try their product during an internal hackathon.
Internal hackathons are events that last 1-5 days where teams of members from different areas of a company are formed and given the goal of solving some problem or building a new project or feature.
The team at the Unicorn implemented CommandBar during the hackathon - and they won! But unfortunately for CommandBar, the Unicorn didn’t end up buying their tool.
However, this showed CommandBar what would later become one of their GTM channels: hackathons.
How it works? You help a team competing in an internal hackathon implement your B2B tool to solve some problem or add some feature.
How did I do it today?
That's all of this week.
Cheers,
Nico
