Thank you
Hi!
We hope your weekend is going great. We are actually doing a small hackathon and it's almost beer 'o clock over here.
There are some great information nuggets in this weekend's Curated. I particularly like to read a lot about culture lately, I hope you do too as I've included a nice article on that topic.
Enjoy,
Leon, Eleftheria, Anuj, Jeff & Sujan
- Articles & Lessons Learned
Capturing and scaling startup values
How leaving our values unclear started breaking our culture, how we fixed it and what we learned.
How technology tricks you into tipping more
A new report by the tech research firm Software Advice discovered that digital point-of-sale terminals increase the frequency and amount of tips left by customers. What’s the secret behind how these manipulative machines get us to pony up?
7 Awesome talent / recruitment hacks
'I used to be a recruiter like you, then I took an arrow in the knee'.
How to leverage the new Twitter partnership with Google
On February 4, Bloomberg broke the news about a deal between Google and Twitter, allowing tweets to appear in Google’s search results as soon as they are posted. This is big news for who are active in Twitter, or who are actively implementing SEO.
The most common mistake when forecasting growth for new products (and how to fix it)
The way to create a better forecast is to focus on inputs, not outputs. It would: a. Focus on leading indicators that are specific to your product/business – not cookie cutter metrics like MAU, total registered, etc. b. Start with inputs not lagging vanity metrics c. Show a series of steps that show how these inputs result in outputs d. And, how the inputs to the model would need to scale, in order to scale the output
In other words, rather than assuming a growth rate, the focus should be deriving the growth rate.
Why (most) SaaS startups should aim for negative MRR churn
Having significant account churn doesn't necessarily have to be a big problem and can't be avoided completely anyway. MRR churn sucks the blood out of your business though. That's why the author thinks that SaaS companies should work very hard to get MRR churn down, as close to zero as possible, or even better achieve negative MRR churn.
Hiring a data-driven marketing team
How do you identify, hire and keep talented modern marketers in your company? Here are three suggestions.
- Test marketing candidates like you test engineers
- Hire the unbiased marketers and the outliers
- Train, retrain and empower
Product feedback you should ignore
One of the issues you face as your startup grows and starts to gain traction is that suddenly everyone has opinions about your product. You will drown in them. But where do they come from, and which can you safely ignore?
Prioritize Product Development by the four stages of use
When prioritizing feature development, think of a product in four pieces: Ongoing Engagement, Onboarding, First User Experience and Marketing/Growth.
These are actually the steps a user goes through during their lifecycle with your product (listed in reverse). Think of your product less in terms of features and more in terms of the experience you’re trying to provide from start to finish.