Sponsored
Scaling Freshdesk, from 0 to 150M requests per week in 4 years
A startup’s dream is to somehow grow exponentially but still stay nimble and super efficient. However, that's not as easy as it sounds. The 32GB RAM that is more than capable of handling the load today is going to look like a joke a week later.
At Freshdesk, their customer base grew by 400% in 2013. And the number of requests per week boomed from 2 million to 65 million. Read all about how they handled their rapid growth and learn how you can apply the same.
Trends
A16z podcast: getting sales right
"It may seem like good apps or services sell themselves. That’s what the whole viral thing is all about, right? Wrong, says Daniel Shapero, who helped build LinkedIn’s enterprise sales team from a small core group to more than 1,200 people all over the globe. Shapero joins a16z General Partner Peter Levine (an engineer who jumped into sales before taking on his first CEO gig, and who now also teaches a class on the topic at Stanford) to discuss the right way to build a sales organization — from answering the basic question of why sales?, to hiring, compensation … and the inevitable culture clash that occurs when salespeople and engineers meet."
Thank you
Thank you
For reading this week's Curated, we hope you enjoy our curating skills. I'd like to believe we're getting better every week at this thing, and we are happy to have you with us. We are also receiving more and more sponsorship requests and we're very lucky that they come with great stories. I want to assure you that we will never have more than one sponsored and one promoted post. The difference between those two is that the promoted slot exists solely for our readers. We've started Curated to help our community out with not just great content, but also to give them a way to showcase their work. So if you have something great you'd like to share, please let us know!
Best, Leon, Eleftheria, Sujan, Anuj & Jeff
ps: With your help we've grown to over 6300 subscribers in just 7 issues. Will you help us grow to 10k subscribers? Click to tweet, and feel welcome to edit the copy :)
- Articles & Lessons Learned
Hiring momentum: underrated component of startup success
According to the author, the top performing founders his firm has backed rarely talking about “hiring” as their greatest challenge. Sure it still takes effort, and some people suggest the CEO should spend 50% of their time recruiting. But these startups have nailed the trifecta of:
Product vision and work that resonates
Core team + culture that others want to be a part of
Equity that’s perceived to have upside
Combine those three and you have Hiring Momentum, an underrated and underdiscussed component of startup success and scaling.
The secrets of writing smart, long-form articles that go viral
"Over the last several years many professional writers and journalists have lamented what's been called the BuzzFeedification of the Internet. This is an Internet where, it seems, a steady stream of churn-and-burn content is king, and anything of substance is only second best. But now a young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive."
Early product metrics and other traction-trackers
"There are no silver bullets for deciding what metrics make sense for your startup's product. Each product is unique and therefore should have its own special logic for what makes sense to measure as a priority.
You see, the hard part is figuring out what to measure as an indicator of progress for your startup given your product, your customer base, your space, your vision, and your funding strategy. Optimizing for the wrong metric is a very dangerous thing. Metrics are personal company matters: to each its own."
How I got 6.2 million pageviews and 144,920 Followers
This guide is for people who don’t have the best writing skills or the budget to spend on clicks, but who need to grab the attention of their audiences through organic storytelling.
This is an article sharing what the author has learned, and please note, pageviews or followers count don’t necessarily mean success or good content.
The man behind MakerBot on finding stories that build your brand
"There's power in a good story. And it's power that any founder can and should wield. In this exclusive interview, Pettis shares lessons he learned from years of startup storytelling — how to craft a foundational narrative, what makes content intrinsically shareable, and why traditional media coverage is more attainable than you think."
Five reasons to join a startup pre-accelerator
"This year at Rockstart Accelerator we saw more applications from companies with relevant market traction. But how does a founder get there? There are several ways, but a fast and effective one is going through pre-accelerators."
Naming your idea (no hair pulling required)
"Step 0: Delay naming your idea for as long as possible"