Culture
10 habits great small business owners have in common
If running a business were easy, everyone would do it. The truth is, keeping a company afloat requires a lot of business savvy and even more tenacity.
Modern Entrepreneurship
Combining big ideas and lean development practices
Lean and agile work for ideas big and small, as long as testing can provide you with insights relating to its success.
Growth
Product
This is the Product Death Cycle. Why it happens, and how to break out of it
The hardest part of any new product launch is the beginning, when it’s not quite working, and you’re iterating and molding the experience to fix it. In this article you'll read about:
- common wrong steps founders take that lead to the so-called Product Death Cycle.
- the wrong questions you've been asking and how to switch to the right ones.
- suggestions on how to break out of the vicious cycle
Team
Art schools have minted more massive Unicorns than MIT
The most surprising finding in this list is that MIT has produced fewer mega-Unicorns than two tiny art schools, the Rhode Island School of Design and The Art Center College of Design.
10 creative ways to motivate your team when the going gets tough
There’s no getting around it: you’re going to have some tough months at work. Things are going to get slow, favorite employees will leave, and sometimes favorite customers will take their business elsewhere.
Thank you
Techstars acquires UP Global
Some of you reached out to us for our opinion on Techstars acquiring UP Global. We believe that it makes perfect sense for Techstars, and that it might make sense for UP Global. We really don't know how well UP Global was doing, and if it could use the help Techstars can offer, it probably is a smart move.
Questions going through our heads at the Startup Foundation are:
- Could UP Global not stay independent?
- How can we make sure we ourselves stay independent?
The Startup Foundation has never relied on grants or sponsors to date. We do have the occasional sponsors, but none that depict our course. So we might have already learned how to stay truly independent, which does mean we need to earn money in order to grow. People have asked us why we charge for #startup, and have often expressed they didn't understand why SF Experience was more expensive to take part in compared to Startup Weekend. It's not a case of us wanting to fill our pockets, but because we want to do more to grow our impact, and to stay independent.
We trust that Techstars will continue to rock, especially now they have acquired some of the world's best programs to get people all the way from wanterpreneur to a succesful one. We see this as a chance to step up to become the most impactful and independent non-profit in support of founders and their startups, globally.
More info can be found on this community page of UP Global Techstars.
I hope you enjoyed this weeks Curated, and trust you'll help us to grow into this new opportunity.
Sincerely,
Leon Pals
Chairman, Startup Foundation
- Watch
Un-Hooked: increasing focus in the age of distraction
Nir Eyal explains how you can use his Hooked model to Un Hook your 'bad' tech habits.
How has Product Hunt become such a critical startup website?
Mark Suster sat down with Ryan Hoover to find out. Here are some key moments:
- Ryan talked about his transition from product manager to CEO and offers advice [1 minute].
- Ryan offers advice for people who want to get into product management but don’t have a PM background [90 seconds]
- Tips on how Product Hunt built a strong community and maintains positivity [3 minutes, 30 seconds]
- What actually works on Product Hunt? [1 minute]
- What were the early days of Product Hunt like? [90 seconds]