Étienne Garbugli's Blog, page 27
September 22, 2014
How Dharmesh Shah Turned a Full-time Job Into a Great Business Opportunity
Before HubSpot and the famous OnStartups blog, Dharmesh Shah worked as a developer for SunGard, a leading software and technology services company working with financial institutions. One day at work, Dharmesh had the idea to create a data conversion tool to allow financial institutions to transfer customers from one institution to another. Dharmesh brought his […]
September 15, 2014
The Importance of “Watering Holes” in Product-Market Validation
You have to go where the customer is. – Michael Wolfe, Vontu Co-Founder and Startup Advisor A “watering hole” is where your prospects gather for pleasure or for work. It can be a conference, tradeshow, seminar, restaurant, bar, hotel or professional association networking event. Finding the watering hole can go a long way in helping […]
September 11, 2014
What the Minimal Pitch Deck Should Be for Solution Interviews
Great presentation decks are like poetry. There’s rhythm and symmetry. – Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Preparing a pitch deck for solution interviews can be counter-productive. A visual aid can help, but it should not make you forget that your goal is to have a discussion, not to present. Solution interviews are not one-sided. […]
September 9, 2014
The Flagback Story or Why your B2B Startup Should be Lean
For my first startup, Flagback, I partnered with a small software development firm and we hired a full-time developer to build the core product. We were four partners invested at very different levels working on a tool to help marketing agencies communicate on live websites for Quality Assurance (QA) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Our […]
September 4, 2014
How Psykler used Spreadsheets to Validate Early Product Demand
After years of watching salespeople burn leads and lose accounts due to personality and style clashes, Wayne McIntyre founded Psykler. The objective of the business was to help users build more effective business relationships using psychometric profiling. Wayne’s hypothesis was this: relationship profiling, a concept he honed during 15 years of corporate and business development, […]
September 2, 2014
How to Motivate Early Adopters to Work with you in the Early Days
With startups, they (the prospects) get to meet with the CEO or the head of products, not just the salespeople, like Oracle or Cisco. The buyers are just people—they want to have fun at work. They’re trying to get smarter, they’re trying to have fun. – Michael Wolfe, Startup Advisor & Investor Initially, there are […]
August 28, 2014
How iBwave Leveraged Niche Expertise to Build a Hugely Successful B2B Business
Mario Bouchard founded iBwave Solutions in 2003. At the time, Mario had been an expert in in-building wireless systems for over 15 years working for telecommunication giants Bell and TELUS Mobility. His business partners were software developers who had the experience of shipping software. When they brought in serial entrepreneur Mike Cegelski as CEO of […]
August 25, 2014
What Every (Pre-Revenue) Lean B2B Startup Should be Doing
The only things that matter early on are Product-Market fit and not running out of money. – Fred Lalonde, Hopper Co-Founder and CEO When you start up, customer development is the most crucial thing you can do. You can build a product, raise money, hire a team and incorporate your business, but if your product […]
August 21, 2014
August 19, 2014
The DotCloud Pivot: How Competitors Suddenly Became Partners
DotCloud started up as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider allowing app developers to focus on the code while they handled scaling, deployment and load balancing. In a busy space dominated by Heroku (Salesforce) and Cloud Foundry (Pivotal), DotCloud managed to get thousands of developers to build applications with their stack. Although DotCloud was successful, the management […]
