Voilà the 9 very best articles of this week.
In this issue, we have 2 great opinion pieces on raising capital in the EU vs the US, and on Improving Startup Accelerators. You will also read about How to Nail CustDev Surveys, When Saying ‘I don’t know’ is the Best Thing to Do, and 4 great articles on growth. On the “Must Read” learn How to Build a Growth Model for your Company.
Enjoy this week’s Curated! We’d love to hear how you liked it. Just hit reply to let us know :)
On behalf of the Startup Foundation Team,
Must read
How to building a growth model for your company
Growth is more than the acquisition channels, growth hacks, and growth tactics you use. Instead of jumping straight into growth tactics, take a step back and understand your company’s full growth model. The writer introduces "The growth equation" model and exemplifies it with a case study from Amazon.
Modern Entrepreneurship
7 things I’ve learned about Lean Startup
You read everything there is to know about Lean Startup: Eric Ries / Steve Blank / Alexander Osterwalder / Ash Maurya / Dave McClure / Brant Cooper / Patrick Vlaskovits / Jeff Gothelf / Josh Seiden / Giff Constable and so on. But doing Lean Startup in the real world is another story. Here are 7 findings after 5 years of advising startups and corporates on Lean Startup.
Growth
14 hacks for effortless social media success
Suggestions for specific tools and apps. You will learn what to use to: - boost growth - increase engagement - optimize the process
10 things you are not doing in Google Analytics
This is a list of commonly missed features of Google Analytics that you can use to generate great insights. Chances are that you use Google Analytics to track sales and conversions, and understand how visitors use your site. But are you doing it right?
The biggest social media science study: What 4.8 million tweets say about the best time to tweet
The Buffer data team analyzed over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, pulling the stats on how clicks and engagement and timing occur throughout the day and in different time zones. Here is what they found out.
Product
Lessons from sending 5M SaaS customer sevelopment surveys
You are going to learn: 1. why shorter surveys are better (and why you need to tell customers how short your survey is), 2. how to not be lazy in the questions you’re asking, and 3. how to ask better questions to get better feedback.
- Productivity & Personal Growth
The hidden power of ‘I don’t know’
Despite what we are taught in school, the most dramatic creativity happens when ideas are combined in new and unintended ways. In this article, you will learn how to break through creative blocks, how to step back and think about your work in a different way—to find fresh eyes.
- Analysis
Improving startup accelerators (or anything helping entrepreneurs)
Most startup community things suck (incubators, accelerators, schools, government initiatives, hackathons, conferences, etc) - well intended but most don’t deliver real value, except for cash.
Perhaps the best critique on accelerators with some straight-forward suggestions to improve.
- Articles & Lessons Learned
The difference between raising early-stage capital in the US vs. Europe
VC funds in Europe and in the United States are two very different things. This is an opinion piece by a European founder that did fundraising in both sides of the pond. Includes observations and comments related to seed funding, up to Series A stage.