Do you sign Non Disclosure Agreements(NDAs)? In general, I’m told most funding folks do not. I have signed many but I do so cautiously. There are many opinions on signing and not signing. I tend to view it as a red flag when early stage projects request that I sign an NDA before we’ve met, […]
So founders suck at grammar, or at least I do. We host a weekly event in our space that we named Founder’s Club. It’s a peer based group of individuals who are starting something, or about to. Actually a lot of members are in between startups as well. Ultimately our event is group therapy for […]
Have you ever created and maintained a Product Roadmap? It’s an excellent tool that allows a team, or the execs, to plot the precise path a software development team is heading. You then simply share the roadmap with the team and they start following the directions that will take them on their way to a […]
Are you forgetting the names of your plants, and where you purchased them? Do you wish you could find new plants without driving to the garden centre? We are building a mobile App that makes it easy for gardeners to catalog and share their plants with friends and retailers. The App will be released this […]
Jim Collins book Good to Great introduced the concept of getting the right people on the bus. The idea being that curating the people who make up your company is as important as developing the business itself. As immersed as I’ve been in coworking, including founding and running ThreeFortyNine for 3+ years, I’m only now […]
I always struggle to explain our weekly Founder’s Club. I’m quite comfortable in that, in fact I feel no pressure to explain it. The people involved are comfortable with it’s ambiguity and people not involved can stay curious. “Success requires no apologies, failure permits no alibis“, Napoleon Hill My simplest pitch for Founder’s Club is that it’s group […]
I had a great discussion the other night with a friend about what our city will offer our kids as they grow. What will they gravitate to? What will they think is cool? As Logan points out in this great video, when kids are asked what they’ll be when they grow up… “See, us kids […]
It’s not optional, it’s not just good to have, and it shouldn’t be low priority, feedback, is vital to success. Not everyone will like you, things won’t just click for your audience, and not every idea you have will be a home run. Don’t ignore those that can make or break your product, but rather […]
I reference this great post by Jason Fried almost weekly. He compares learning to create new businesses to learning to play an instrument. Getting is more about pickup up an instrument and making noise around like minded folks than it is about pitch contests and incubators. My kids and I were watching Danny MacAskill’s video the […]
Founder’s Club recap for January 17th meeting… We had Michael Lewkowitz from Igniter start a wide-ranging discussion around shifting business focus from products to services, or vice-versa. We touched on many topics: A false dichtomy? Received wisdom recommends small businesses focus on seeking either products or services, but not both. But a business may slowly […]
