Lindsey DeFalco

The two biggest things to ask are: "would they?" and "could they?". This is both a question of strategy and tactics - of both you, and the competitor. My first startup was a directly competitive product with multiple established players in the space, so this was a topic from day one. My second startup is a "first of its kind" product with no direct competitors initially, but we have asked ourselves this same question a few times about large, tangential incumbents as we've built our company. The ...Read More

This is heavily dependent on the type of product you are building, but you can get very far with high fidelity designs and manually "hacking" things together. I worked at a company where we "generated" (hand created) an analytics report for a customer (who was actually paying us) once a month. It took an insane amount of time to create (20+ hours) but the feedback on both how to sell, and how to build our product from that experience were invaluable. Start light: with high-fidelity designs and c ...Read More

Ah, brainstorming: it sounds so simple, but it can be so hard to do well. I've tried many different approaches over the years, and have found different ones successful depending on the company size, co-location of folks, etc. I'll go over my favorites, but first I want to touch on a few important pre-requisites to the brainstorming itself. Attendees Representatives from teams that will be working on the problem: in startups, this is likely almost everyone on product, design, engineering. At larg ...Read More

#1: Trust. You have to earn it. It's all fun and games when there is "nothing to lose" and you're a small scrappy startup. But once you have paying customers, usage targets to hit, churn numbers to report on, and revenue numbers to hit, it starts to feel harder to launch. I've been through this transition as a startup turns into a real company and have found having the following things in place really helps: Trust from the rest of the org that you are THE expert on your customers. I was fortunat ...Read More