A Smart Bear
Your target market isn't demographic
Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?
Max MRR: Your growth ceiling
Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness
Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: ARPU/25
More or less
Rude Q&A: The constructive devil's advocate
When customers buy your competitor's product… and then buy yours
Invention is Drudgery
Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don't buy
How to get customers who love you even when you screw up
SSEBITDA--A steady-state profit metric for SaaS companies
Startup Exercise: What can't be solved with money?
Sometimes never compete on price
How to simplify complex decisions by cleaving the facts
All pretty models are wrong, but some ugly models are useful
Reframing "Freemium" by charging the marketing department
The wrongness of relativism
"I scratched my own itch" isn't good enough
Why it's nice to compete against a large, profitable company
How to select your first marketing channel
Our unhealthy fixation with emulating #1
The Startup Drake Equation
On the (un?)importance of design
"Stealth mode" and other f'ing brilliant strategies
The Important Thing--powerful enough to override all your deficiencies
Explore vs Execute
A butterfly flaps its wings and you make a sale
When you have nothing: How to find potential customers to interview
Solving the Low-Budget Online Marketing Dilemma
Brittle Points: How to make companies robust
Scars
Intense Asymmetry and Self-Flagellation
p-Hacking your A/B tests
A life-changing challenge guided by Pascal's Wager
No wait, of course THAT is the single most important SaaS metric
Tech Support is sales
The Serengeti Plain: Fallacies that aren't fallacies
You're a little company, now act like one
Why startup biz dev deals almost never get done
Pivot Points
The Code is your Enemy
Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds
Legacy
Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund
Profitable on day one!
The mid-market briar patch
Individual efficiency vs administrative efficiency
Double your productivity without more work or stress
"Authentic" is dead. And so is "is dead."
How much of success is luck?
How annual pre-pay creates an infinite marketing budget
Procrastinate for Success!
Not disruptive, and proud of it
"It's a Balance" isn't always the answer
Being who you are, while becoming better
The Lindy Effect on startup potential
When being "first" is not a competitive advantage
Disentangling the three languages: Customers, Product, Business
Rare things become common at scale
Hello, I'm 1074018628
Adjacency Matrix: How to expand after PMF
Capturing luck with "or" instead of "and"
It's a torturous chaos until it isn't
Learn by Copy
The "Convergent" theory of finding truth in darkness
Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works
Stubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded Fools
The Pattern-Seeking Fallacy
AI startups require new strategies: This time it's actually different
How startups beat incumbents
Easy statistics for A/B testing and hamsters
Easy to criticize, hard to create
Deciding whether an investment is worthwhile
Pick one and own it
The "errors" that mean you're doing it right
How to measure the accuracy of forecasts
Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected
"ROI" is the wrong way to sell your product
The roadmap to Product/Market Fit (PMF)… maybe
The unfortunate math behind consulting companies
How many things should there be? (Hint: Not 10)
Change: Damned if you do, damned more if you don't
Quarterly strategic planning using the fairytale structure
Reputation isn't as powerful as you imagine
You're a real company when…
Product/Market Fit (PMF): Experience & Data
Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
Metrics that cannot even be measured in retrospect
Building in public forces true competitive advantage
Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization
Never say "no," but rarely say "yes."
The fundamental forces of scale
The only way to guarantee startup success
Stop saying "fail"
Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead.
Worse, but unique
Impostor Syndrome: Why I felt like a fraud, and how I overcame it
What makes a strategy great
Startup identity & the sadness of a successful exit
In command
Distinguishing constructive criticism from bad business advice
Selecting the right product metrics (KPIs)
Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias
For probabilities, use Fermi numbers, not words
Discount gambit
The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies
Satisficing vs Maximizing
Using the Needs Stack for competitive strategy
In its emptiness, there is the function of a startup
Willingness-to-pay: Creating permanent competitive advantage for the right reasons
More money if you do, more money if you don't
You can have two Big Things, but not three
What a startup does to you. Or: A celebration of new life
How repositioning a product allows you to 8x its price
When you want to quit because it's just not worth it
Excuse me, is there a problem?
When should a decision be fast, or slow?
Pricing determines your business model
Navigating the unpredictability of everything
Finding Fulfillment
The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method
JIT selection from independent streams: An alternative to the "big backlog" of work
Rocks, Pebbles, Sand: How to implement in practice
Binstack: Making a maximal multi-dimensional decision
Fermi ROI: Fixing the ROI rubric
The "Talk vs Walk" workshop
Productive meeting activities: Leverage the team, empower the individual
Moats: Durable competitive advantage
The "Great" Product Manager, a.k.a. the Impossible Product Manager
Failure to face the truth
Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas
The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
Who's lying?
Distributed Logical Time
What if there isn't another 10x?
Refutation: An acquisition is always a failure
Ho Rudolph
Why I don't like the LTV metric (LifeTime Value)
COC: A new metric for measuring cancellations in SaaS business models
Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price?
Hiring Employee #1
Ballad of The Lean Startup
If you build it, they won't come, unless…
Real Unfair Advantages
Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass
Enough with the "expert" guilt
Put down the compiler until you learn why they're not buying
Letters to Joel Spolsky
Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
Breaking the Rules
Limiting Options
The "Opposite Test"