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Conventional wisdom advocates the concept of ‘all hands support’ — getting everyone from the CEO to the lowliest intern supporting customers so the entire team understands the customer’s problems. It’s a great goal, but is there a downside? What if your dev team starts spending much more time than usual on support and it eventually starts impacting your business?

Our Churn Issue

Around January 2015, we noticed an unusual increase in customer churn. A user churn rate of 3.9% had increased to 7% in just a couple of weeks.

We’re a revenue transparent company, so yes — these are our real numbers.

And it didn’t stop there. Over the next couple of months, our user churn slowly increased to a peak of 9.8%! This was alarming, so we decided to go a...

How could we possibly be "right" as Founders when literally everything we are doing is unknown?

Think about it — we're building a startup that has never existed with a product that's being invented and run by a team that's never worked together delivering to a customer who has never heard of us. Oh, and did I mention as Founders we've probably never done this before?

What about that formula drives certainty?

Separating Founder Mistakes from Failure

Let me start by saying this — there is no possible way, NO possible way, that as startup Founders (especially first-time founders) we could possibly make the right decision over and over in our early-stage startup.

In fact, the only way TO make the right decision is going to be to make tons of mi...

It's really hard to convince people that money isn't the most important metric of a startup's success. Especially if those people happen to be investors, in which case, it actually is the most important metric.

But what we're talking about, as always, is what's important to Founders, and by extension to the people that work within that startup.

The broken part of the startup narrative has become this — "If it's growing fast and making money, it's successful, no matter what other costs are incurred."

I'd like to just go crazy for a moment and offer a new narrative — "If it's making everyone's lives geometrically better, then it's successful, and hopefully that means it's making money."

Focus on Making Lives Better? What?!

I know, I know. W...

A crypto startup is a business that deals with cryptocurrencies. Startups focused on this industry have been popping up all over the world in recent years. With the rise of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, many entrepreneurs are looking to create their own crypto or blockchain-based startup.

It sounds easy enough in theory, but for those new to the industry, it's much like learning another language. In this article, we aim to define, expand on, and share insights we have compiled to demystify the process of launching a crypto startup.

There are five main steps to starting a crypto startup (we'll expand more on this below):

1. Identify a problem that needs solving.

2. Create a white paper outlining the idea (i.e. a solution to the...

Welcome to our four-part Splitting Equity Series. This is our Introductory piece and will continue to be split up into four phases:

Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes

• Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works

• Phase Three - How to Split Equity

• Phase Four - Equity Management

We are excited to guide you through your equity-splitting experience. Let's dive in!

We’re going to identify and isolate each of the key issues in splitting startup equity in a young company. Then one by one we will lay out which options are available, how most startups address this problem, and what key decisions the team will need to make to split the founder equity fairly and manage a plan...

Continuing in Phase Two of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

• Part 1 - Introduction to Startup Investors

• Part 2 - How to find Startup Investors (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Phase Three - The Pitch

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let's dive in!

The search for investors takes time. However, we can at least make sure the time you do invest is well spent. These days “investor research” really means combing through a handful of databases and Web sites to find potential connections to the investment community.

Finding investors isn’t like finding a plumber. There’s no “directory of interested investors” available from the small business administration that you carpet bomb with emails and wait for people to ...

What's the least we need as Founders to be happy?

For as much time as we invest in building our startups to achieve our goals, we spend shockingly little time in identifying what those goals actually mean. The danger in not defining our minimum viable happiness goals is that we wind up hoping to "find happiness" but never really defining how to get there.

And that's a pretty big problem when we're in the early stages of building a startup when very little helps fill our "happiness meter."

It's easy to make big, lofty, far away goals, but frankly, that's pretty useless right now. What we need to do is identify the shortest term, minimum goals that will make us happy so that we do everything in our power to get there as quickly as possible.

Someone holds the elevator for you. No “thank you”? You end up waiting in the lobby next time. You spend all weekend helping a friend move and at the end of it, all they say is, “Well, I’ll see you around.” Looks like someone just made your Nixon-esque enemy list.

Those two simple words could be the difference between a functioning society and an admittedly exaggerated chaos, but even if that chaos is exaggerated, there are plenty of reasons to remember to say “thank you.” Here are just a few.

You’ll Make More Money

It’s true. There are economic benefits to be gained by merely expressing gratitude. Don’t buy it? Check out this study about how waiters who write “thank you” and personalized messages on receipts get larger tips than their less...

In the weeks leading up to the launch of Startups.com in 2012, I was coming off running 5 startups at the same time, 3 of them venture-funded (high stakes), on top of launching this one. I got married, had a child, lost my grandmother, moved across the country, and had nearly every major life event you could have happen — in less than 12 months.

On this specific day, I was at lunch with my co-workers and something about me just felt "off." I couldn't put my finger on it, but I was feeling dizzy for no reason and my body felt like it wasn't mine. After lunch, I hopped in my car and headed home to rest. While I was on the phone with my wife, driving on the highway, I said, "You know, I don't feel right..." and as soon as I said that — my wor...

Founders won't change people's personalities, we can only manage them. And that's where we fail over and over.

How often do we get frustrated by someone in our organization that we just wish we could change? They lack motivation, discipline, or they just don't play well with others. In our Founder minds, we just need this one inspirational heart-to-heart talk, or some Karate Kid montage, where they come out the other end a changed and improved human.

We have a hard time believing we can't "manage" our way into the outcome we're looking for, but what we're actually missing is that there are certain aspects of humans that go beyond what we can manage in the first place. And our lack of recognition of this boundary creates a colossal waste of ...