 by Chip Royce, Flywheel Advisors Chip Royce is a Fractional CRO & GTM Architect, delivering fast growth for B2B, SaaS, and Deep Tech Companies. Read the entire article here. URL for This Post. Would you hire a “finance enthusiast” to be your CFO? Or a “legal hobbyist” to serve as your general counsel?
Of course not. They would laugh you out of the boardroom. You know the CFO or General Counsel roles each require a specific, expert skill set. So why is the person in charge of your partnership program just someone who is ‘good with people’? This is the single biggest reason why partnership programs fail. Eager for a new growth channel, CEOs make a critical mistake. They think the hardest part is finding partners. So, the CEO assigns the task of ‘figuring out partnerships’ to an enthusiastic amateur, often a sales rep or marketer who has shown some initiative. When the program inevitably stalls, the CEO concludes that partnerships don’t work for their business. But that diagnosis is wrong. The problem isn’t a shortage of good partners. The real shortage is in the skills and experience needed to build and run a partnership program. Stop treating the role like an internship. It’s a C-level function that demands a general manager’s skill set. Staff it with anyone less, and you’re setting the program up to fail. How to Structure a Partnership Program for Success Structuring a successful partnership program begins and ends with defining the leader’s role correctly. You don’t need a relationship manager; you need a business owner—an expert General Manager who can run a complex business unit. I saw a promising SaaS scale-up make this exact mistake. They had a fantastic product and a huge addressable market. The CEO tapped his top enterprise sales rep, a great talker who knew everyone, to build a channel. The rep signed up dozens of partners in six months. On paper, it looked like a massive success. A year later, the channel’s revenue was virtually nonexistent. Partners were baffled, the sales team saw the channel as competition, and integrations were chaotic. The star sales rep, burned out and frustrated, quit. They didn’t need a relationship builder. They needed a General Manager. Head of Partnerships: 7 Roles in One When you hire a Head of Partnerships, you’re not just filling one role. You’re hiring for seven. The Recruiter: Amateurs think recruitment is a numbers game—it’s all about collecting logos and signing agreements. But successful leaders start by defining a precise Ideal Partner Profile. They search for candidates that actually fit, and then vet them rigorously. They only move forward with partners who bring the right access, capabilities, and commitment to drive mutual growth. The Marketer: A partnership doesn’t promote itself. The Partnerships GM needs marketing experience to create co-marketing programs that generate demand. This means running everything from joint webinars and case studies to integrated campaigns that build pipeline for both sides. Without marketing, the partnership exists in a vacuum. The Sales Leader: The Partnerships GM must build and run a complete channel sales process. That means creating clear rules of engagement, training the direct sales team to co-sell, and equipping partners to represent the product effectively. They are responsible for measuring ROI and treating the channel like a sales territory with a quota. The Negotiator: Poorly structured deals can kill a partnership. The Partnership GM needs the business sense and legal know-how to craft term sheets and contracts that are both attractive and profitable. They must navigate everything from IP rights to revenue sharing, protecting the company’s interests while creating a win-win for the partner. Read the rest of this post here.
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 The one-minute pitch formula that makes investors actually care. by Chris Tottman, The Founders Corner Read the entire post here: URL for This Post. Table of Contents
They’re short.  Not short on substance—short on fluff. No jargon. No meandering intros. No 30-slide marathons trying to prove they’ve reinvented the wheel.
Just clear, confident storytelling that makes you sit up straight. That’s why I love this visual so much: The One-Minute Pitch. It forces you to do the hard work up front. To get brutal with your messaging. To strip it all back until there’s nowhere left to hide. And that, for a founder, is gold dust. Because here’s the truth: If you can’t explain your business in a minute, you probably don’t understand it well enough yet. Why Shorter is Smarter (Especially Early On) We’ve all been there. You’re at an event. You’ve got five minutes with someone who could change your life. An angel, a VC, a potential partner. They say, “So, what do you do?” And you freeze. Or worse—you waffle. You start describing your product features instead of your customer problem. You name-drop TAM figures without context. You jump to your ask before they even know why they should care. It’s painful. But it’s avoidable. The earlier your stage, the simpler your pitch needs to be. That’s not a handicap—it’s a feature. In the early days, your edge is clarity. Clarity about who you’re helping, what pain you’re solving, and why you’re the one to do it. And that’s exactly what the One-Minute Pitch gives you. Let’s Break It Down: The 6-Part Formula This cheat sheet from the Founder Institute isn’t just a nice visual—it’s a weapon. Use it. Fill it in. Rework it. Tape it to your desk. Let’s go line by line. 1. The Opener “My company [NAME] is developing [OFFERING] to help [AUDIENCE] solve [PROBLEM] with [SECRET SAUCE].” This is your positioning, compressed. You need to communicate what you do, who it’s for, and why you’re different—all in one sentence. Don’t be clever. Be clear. Example: My company, GreenGrid, is developing a carbon analytics dashboard to help mid-size manufacturers reduce emissions with AI-powered tracking and compliance tools. See? We know who it’s for (mid-size manufacturers), what it does (carbon analytics dashboard), and why it’s special (AI-powered compliance). 2. The Market “We compete in the growing [MARKET] market, which last year was a [VALUE] value market.” This line adds weight. You’re placing your startup in a macro context. Be specific. Use credible data. Show you’ve done the homework. Example: We compete in the growing sustainability analytics market, which last year was a $2.5B market and growing 18% YoY. 3. The Competition “We are similar to [COMPETITOR 1] and [COMPETITOR 2] but we [DIFFERENTIATOR].” This isn’t about slating the competition—it’s about showing you understand them and have a plan to beat them. Pick relevant comps. Be honest about overlaps. Then draw your line in the sand. Example: We are similar to Watershed and Normative but we specialise in manufacturers with under 500 employees and offer integrations with legacy ERPs. Read the rest of the post here.  By Victoria Olajide Victoria is a product and content marketing strategist. With over six years of experience driving growth for B2B and B2C brands across SaaS, tech, and creative industries, she designs strategies that connect founders and teams to global audiences. Her work merges storytelling, innovation, and cultural insight, empowering brands to scale with purpose and impact. Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn. Read the entire article here. The URL for this post. Summary: This article examines how startups can achieve sustainable growth by making trust a strategic asset. It examines trust as a growth engine, its cultural variations across markets, the role of ecosystems in improving credibility, and how founders can track and scale reputation effectively. Key Topics:
 Introduction
In the early days of the digital economy, startups were taught a single mantra: grow fast, build funnels, optimize conversion rates, get attention, and outspend competitors in performance marketing. For a while, that logic worked. The platforms were new, digital ads were still efficient, and customers hadn’t yet developed the reflex to ignore banners, pop-ups, and endless email drips. But something has shifted. The world is noisier than ever before. AI has made it possible for anyone to generate a thousand blog posts or ad variations at the click of a button. Customers scroll past marketing content with barely a glance, not because they don’t need products, but because they don’t know who or what to trust. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer highlights this erosion: only 59% of people globally say they trust businesses, a decline from 64% just five years ago. For startups, this scarcity of trust is not just a public relations challenge; it is an existential one. Growth is no longer defined by who can grab the most attention. Growth now depends on who can build the deepest credibility, the most resilient reputation, and the most enduring trust. This is what I call the new architecture of global trust in startup marketing. Trust as the Core Growth Engine Historically, trust was something startups hoped to earn once they had proven themselves. Build a good product, deliver on promises, and a reputation will follow. But now, reputation has become a prerequisite for entry, not a reward for success. Consider the fundraising process. When a top-tier investor backs a startup, the money is important, but the reputational signaling is often more valuable. That endorsement tells other investors, potential employees, and customers that the company is credible. A 2023 CB Insights analysis found that startups backed by leading VC firms were 2.4 times more likely to close enterprise deals compared to peers without similar backing. The same principle plays out with customers. Landing one marquee client, a Fortune 500 enterprise, a respected university, or even a beloved consumer brand can cascade trust across an entire market segment. Suddenly, every sales conversation feels warmer, and every introduction comes with less friction. Trust, in this sense, acts like network capital. It flows across stakeholders: investors, customers, employees, regulators, and multiplies as it spreads. The startups that scale most effectively are not simply those that advertise well, but those that learn to engineer these reputation flows. Traditional marketing often obsesses over messaging: the crafted tagline, the perfect elevator pitch, the carefully designed brand voice. But trust rarely comes from what a startup says about itself. It comes from what others infer. This is the shift from messaging to signaling. ● A compliance certification does more than reassure auditors; it signals discipline to prospective clients. ● A partnership with an established enterprise doesn’t just create revenue; it signals legitimacy to an entire industry. ● A feature in a respected publication provides more enduring credibility than a dozen paid ads. Signals are powerful precisely because they cannot be faked at scale. Anyone can write a blog post; not everyone can earn inclusion in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Anyone can claim “enterprise-ready” on their website; not everyone can secure ISO certification or close a deal with Microsoft. The startups that thrive are those that stop asking, “How do we explain ourselves better?” and instead ask, “What signals are we sending into the market, and are they credible?” Building the Architecture of Trust What does it mean, then, to build a trust architecture? It means designing the business so that every layer signals credibility: ● The foundation: compliance and operational rigor. ● The walls: partnerships, ecosystems, and reputation flows. ● The roof: external validation from media, analysts, and independent bodies. ● The windows: cultural adaptability, showing the outside world what credibility looks like in their context. This architecture is not static. It must be reinforced continuously as the company expands, enters new markets, attracts new customers, and navigates new regulations. Read the rest of the article here. by VC Unfiltered Read the entire article on VC Unfiltered (Pegasus Angel Accelerator) URL for this post.  Let’s be real—cold calling is uncomfortable for most founders. You’re dialing into chaos, you’re interrupting someone’s day, and you’ve got maybe 30 seconds to earn the right to keep talking.
But here’s the thing: objections aren’t rejections. They’re signals. When a prospect pushes back—whether it’s “we already use your competitor” or “call me next quarter”—they’re actually inviting you to test your pitch, prove your value, and show you’re worth five more minutes. That’s where the cadence comes in. Every cold call objection handling moment should follow a simple rhythm: Agree → Overcome the objection → Create urgency → Close for the call Below are real-world examples of how to handle common objections founders and early GTM teams face—no fluff, no scripts that sound like they were written in a call center. “We’re already using your competitor.” Totally with you—my last client just came from Competitor XYZ, and they said the exact same thing. Let’s grab 30 minutes next week so I can show you why they made the switch. “Follow up next week.” Totally fair—but just a heads-up, my calendar fills up insanely fast. Let’s pencil something in now for Tuesday or Thursday, just to make sure I can hold a spot for you. What works best? “[Competitor] is cheaper.” Absolutely—they’re cheaper, and so are five others. But I’m not here because we’re the cheapest. I’m here because we actually solve [problem] better. Let’s set aside time next week so you can see the difference. “Call me next quarter.” Totally get it. Some of our pricing is actually going up next quarter—so I’d love to get you in before that happens. Let’s get something on the calendar now. Read the rest of the post here.  Founder OS: How AI-powered no-code tools are reshaping how modern founders build and launch software in 2025. by Chris Tottman and Ruben Dominguez Ibar, The Founders Corner Read the entire post here: URL for this Post. From Code to Conversation: A New Development Philosophy A founder opens Claude and types: “Build me a waitlist app with email capture and a dashboard to view signups.” Ten minutes later, it’s live on Vercel. No engineers hired. No tickets opened. Just vibes. That’s what we now call vibe coding. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy earlier this year, and it describes a new way of building software. One where the developer’s role switches from writing syntax to prompting intentions. It’s not programming in the traditional sense. It’s a back-and-forth conversation with an AI tool that already knows how to code. You simply describe what you want and the AI generates the code. You test it. Then refine. The loop is fast, forgiving, and completely redefining how technical work gets done.  What makes vibe coding different from older no-code tools is that you’re not locked into rigid interfaces or workflows. You’re working with real code, but you're not writing it line by line. Instead, you're collaborating with tools like Cursor, Claude, and GPT-4o to generate, revise, and extend software through natural language. The experience feels more like pair-programming with a genius intern than clicking around a drag-and-drop builder. And suddenly, the fundamental ideas of starting a business have changed completely. You no longer need to be an engineer to build products. Domain experts, solo founders, even non-technical operators are spinning up full-stack products simply by describing what they want. That barrier between idea and execution is evaporating. The tools finally caught up. And the mindset “I don’t code, I converse” is spreading fast. Table of Contents 1. The Modern No-Code (Vibe‑Code) Stack 2. What It Means to Be “Technical” Has Changed 3. New Workflows, New Mindsets 4. Where Vibe Coding Shines and Where It Doesn’t 5. New Roles Are Emerging 6. Vibe Coding Is a Gateway to Real Code 7. Build With Vision, Not Just Tools 1. The Modern No-Code (Vibe‑Code) Stack If vibe coding is a conversation, the tools are your interpreters. Today’s founders use a modular stack of AI-native, no-code, and low-code platforms to build surprisingly complete products, fast. These tools aren’t new individually. What’s changed is how seamlessly they interact when driven by AI. Here’s a practical stack most founders use in 2025, along with how each fits into the vibe workflow:  Why Quitting Your Job Isn’t Always the Answer Read the entire article on VC Unfiltered (Pegasus Angel Accelerator) URL for this post.  Leap. Quit your job. Leave it all behind. Follow your dream. These are the rallying cries of romanticized entrepreneurship, championed by people who often have little experience in the trenches. But for the vast majority of aspiring entrepreneurs, this approach is reckless. The idea of walking away from a steady career or educational path to pursue a startup dream without a viable plan is a recipe for failure unless your venture has the traction to sustain itself or raise capital to hit an inflection point.
For most aspiring entrepreneurs, hybrid entrepreneurship—building a startup while maintaining your job or studies—is a more practical, calculated path. Not only does it reduce risk, but research also supports its effectiveness. Why Hybrid Entrepreneurship Works Professor Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, offers valuable insights into the trade-offs founders face. His analysis, combined with Dr. Joseph Raffiee’s groundbreaking research, reveals a striking statistic: hybrid entrepreneurs are 33.3% less likely to experience a hazardous exit than those who dive headfirst into full-time entrepreneurship. These numbers are hard to ignore, especially in an environment where failure rates for startups are staggeringly high. Hybrid entrepreneurship is not about playing it safe; it’s about playing it smart. By maintaining a steady income and established network while building your venture, you can extend your runway, mitigate risk, and test your ideas in real-world conditions before fully committing. But like any strategy, it comes with its own set of advantages and challenges. The Positives of Hybrid Entrepreneurship 1. Your Runway Doesn’t Start In the startup world, runway refers to how long your business can operate before running out of money. Every entrepreneur faces the ticking clock of financial burn, and once you quit your job, that clock starts immediately. By pursuing hybrid entrepreneurship, you can defer this pressure and give your venture the time it needs to develop traction and stability. This additional runway is especially valuable during the early stages when uncertainty is highest. You can experiment, iterate, and learn without the existential threat of financial collapse looming over your head. 2. You Retain and Leverage Your Network Your network is one of your most valuable assets as an entrepreneur. It provides access to advice, referrals, partnerships, and potential investors. When you leave a job, you often lose daily access to this network, which can severely limit your ability to navigate the challenges of building a startup. Remaining in your current role while starting your venture allows you to maintain credibility and access to these connections. Your colleagues, mentors, and professional relationships can become key allies in your entrepreneurial journey. 3. Failure Becomes More Manageable Startups are inherently risky, and setbacks are inevitable. However, failure hits differently when you’ve burned through your savings and left behind a stable income. Hybrid entrepreneurship provides a safety net, allowing you to recover more easily from missteps. If your venture faces challenges, you still have the financial and emotional stability of your job or studies to fall back on. This safety net also enables calculated risk-taking. You can test bold ideas and strategies without the fear that one misstep will leave you destitute. The Challenges of Hybrid Entrepreneurship 1. Protecting Your Intellectual Property When you’re developing a startup while working for an employer or studying at a university, there’s a risk that your organization could claim ownership of your intellectual property (IP). Many employers include clauses in their contracts that grant them rights to inventions created during your tenure, even if they’re unrelated to your job. Read the rest of this post here.  by Jason Cohen - @asmartbear, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncohen/ Jason built 4 tech startups, both bootstrapped & funded, alone and with co-founders, all to $1M+ annual revenue, sold 2, currently at the 4th, https://WPEngine.com with 200k customers and 1200 global employees. He’s an angel investor, founding member of Capital Factory, an Austin incubator/co-working space, and has been writing about early-stage startups since 2007. This entire post can be found here. URL for this post. Dozens of founders have used this technique to transform the cash-flow of their businesses. Now it’s your turn. Multiple founders have told me the ideas in this article were responsible for the financial success of their startup. They might be exaggerating out of kindness, but if it’s even 10% as useful for you, it will have been worth your time. We’ll explore how growth affects cash-flow, and conclude with several techniques that can transform the cash-flow of your business. The cost of a dollar of MRR What does it cost a SaaS company to add $1 of new monthly recurring revenue? Using the typical acronyms: CAC (Cost to Acquire a Customer) is the total cost to get one new paying customer—Marketing and Sales costs, including fully-loaded salaries.1 The simplest way to compute it is “total spend in a month” divided by “total new customers added during that month.” ARPC (Average Revenue per Customer) is the average monthly-recurring revenue you get from a customer. The simplest way to compute it in aggregate is “total recurring-revenue in a month (MRR)” divided by “total number of paying customers during that month (N)”. 1 --- In smaller companies, typically the founder and others are spending time on marketing and sales activities as well; include the fraction of their time, or the salary that you would have to pay someone else to do those same tasks. Also include commissions. Since it costs CAC dollars to get ARPC new dollars of recurring-revenue: The cost to create one more dollar of MRR = CAC / ARPC If you haven’t done it before, computing this metric will be eye-opening. Let’s posit a hypothetical company with a $10/mo consumer-targeted SaaS product, where they pay $1.60/click for Google Ads; that traffic converts at 5% to a free trial, and those trials convert at 40% to a paid customer. Their CAC is $80,2 and their ARPC is $10, therefore we would say “it costs them $8 to create $1 of MRR.” 2 ---$1.60 / 0.05 / 0.4 = $80 It’s tempting to conclude that “It takes 8 months of customer revenue to ‘pay us back’ for the marketing and sales costs of getting that customer. That customer is unprofitable before then, and becomes more and more profitable after.” (Figure 1)  But, unfortunately, it’s worse than that.
Revenue we can spend All companies have mandatory expenses associated with delivering the entire product to the customer. Not just the product itself, but everything else the customer expects, like being able to pay with a credit card or call tech support:
Read the rest of this post here.  By Charles (Chip) Royce, Flywheel Advisors Chip Royce is a Fractional CRO & GTM Architect, delivering fast growth for B2B, SaaS, and Deep Tech Companies. Read the entire article here. URL for this Post. You have the better product, but they have the lower price. Here’s how to stop fighting on their terms and start winning on yours. I had a client, a CEO at a sharp B2B SaaS company, who was just gutted. His team had lost another deal to a competitor that was, frankly, worse. The product was clunky, the support was slow, but they were cheaper. “They loved the demo,” he told me. “They saw all the features. I don’t get it.” This isn’t an uncommon story. It’s a special kind of frustrating to have a better product and still lose. You know you’re the superior choice, but prospects are signing with the other guys anyway. The reason is simple, but fixing it isn’t. Your product is losing because you’re playing a game of feature-for-feature comparison. That’s a game that always ends with a discussion about price.  The Wrong Reflexes in a Price Fight
When leaders get backed into this corner, I’ve seen them make a few common mistakes. First, they blame the sales team. They tell them to “sell harder” or “improve their closing skills.” This completely misses the point. The sales team is fighting with one hand tied behind their back because the conversation is flawed from the start. Second, they bloat the product roadmap. The logic feels right: more features must equal more value. But it doesn’t. It just adds more noise to the sales pitch and makes your product look even more like a commodity. You are just adding more items to a checklist for them to compare. Third, they offer a discount. This is the most dangerous one. It might save a single deal, but it poisons the well for every negotiation that follows. You’ve just taught your customers that your price isn’t real. These are just symptoms. The actual disease is the feature-selling trap. Diagnosis: Product Commoditization via Feature-Selling The feature-selling trap is what happens when you try to be everything to everyone. Your go-to-market message becomes a generic list of capabilities. This is the very definition of product commoditization. Your unique, innovative solution accidentally becomes an interchangeable good. And when that happens, price is the only thing left to talk about. Think about it like this. If you sell a hammer, and your competitor sells a hammer, the buyer will pick the cheaper one. It makes perfect sense. But what if you sell a “roof-framing system for commercial construction”? You’re no longer selling just a hammer. You are selling a very specific solution to a specific problem for a specific buyer. You’ve changed the conversation from price to value. Here are the signs that you are stuck selling features:
If this checklist feels a little too familiar, it’s time to change your approach. Read the rest of this post here.  by Jonathan Simnett, Managing Director at Hampleton Partners, Co-Host of The Difference Engine Podcast Originally posted on the Categorical Blog. Read the entire post here. URL for this Post.  Building Categories is hard. It requires creativity and in-depth market understanding combined with meticulous planning and faultless execution, particularly in the early days, as you establish both the Category and your leadership of it and as you execute your go-to-market strategy.
Jason Lemkin is a seasoned tech executive, venture capitalist, and author based in California. Known for his candid opinions, I recently witnessed one of his presentations on the Top Ten Go-to-Market (GTM) Mistakes that many companies make. These are the missteps he thinks that can destroy a SaaS business and should be avoided at all costs. I’d also argue that in go-to-market terms these will also ruin your chances of building a SaaS Category. Here’s a look at Jason’s warnings: 1) Don’t Hire a Sales VP Who Can’t Sell Face-to-Face or Demo a Product Lemkin stresses that in the early stages of a SaaS company, hiring a VP of Sales who can’t roll up their sleeves and engage directly with customers is a huge mistake. In the fiercely competitive world of sales, the top people need to be in the trenches. If a sales VP can’t demo the product or communicate directly with prospects, they’re not the right fit. Confidence is key in sales, and if a leader can’t engage directly with customers, it’s a major red flag. 2) Don’t Hire a VP of Marketing Who Can’t Do Demand Generation Hiring someone focused on corporate marketing or strategy at an early-stage SaaS company is a mistake. At the start, the focus should be on generating revenue, and the right marketing leader should be able to drive demand generation. Ask candidates if they’ve “held a commit”—i.e., been responsible for meeting sales targets. If they haven’t, they’re not the right fit for your early-stage company. 3) Don’t Step Out of Sales Founders often want to return to product development, but Lemkin advises against it—at least for a while. A great sales VP will open and close deals, but founders need to be deeply involved in sales to build credibility. Customers love meeting the founder early in the process, and as the business scales, founders need to keep their hands in sales for as long as possible. 4) Never Cut Marketing Too Deeply During tough times when cash is tight, many companies make the mistake of cutting marketing budgets. But Lemkin warns that cutting marketing is cutting future potential. While cutting sales might affect immediate revenue, cutting marketing hinders growth in the long term. If you trust your VP of Marketing, let them spend the budget wisely to drive growth. 5) Not Properly Jumping on the AI Bandwagon AI is no longer optional. While it may not be a perfect fit for every B2B space, it’s where the budget and competition are heading. Lemkin suggests that failing to integrate AI into your product offering could mean losing out on potential business. If your CTO doesn’t understand how to leverage AI, it might be time for a change at the top. 6) Putting Profitability Above Growth In today’s market, growth is often more valuable than profitability—especially for private companies. Lemkin highlights that growth is worth 2x profitability in public companies, but 10x profitability in private ones. If you want to scale and eventually have an IPO, focus on rapid growth, even at the cost of short-term profitability. Read the rest of this post here. Table of Contents
 Here’s the truth they don’t tell you about fundraising:
Pre-Seed: Prove You Can Build It (Technical Risk) At this stage, you're raising belief capital. No revenue, no customers, no proof. Just a trong conviction—and a fragile prototype. The Biggest Risk: Your idea sounds great… but can you build it? You need to show investors (and yourself) that this isn’t just vaporware. That your MVP isn’t just a prototype—it’s the proof point that the product works and that you can build it faster, cheaper, and smarter than anyone else. Your job is to de-risk technical feasibility. Key Actions:
When I backed a devtools startup in this phase, they had zero revenue. But they showed me a CLI tool with 50 developers using it weekly—and they could demo real-time results. That was enough. Seed: Prove It Solves a Pain (Market Risk) Now that the thing works, the question changes: does anyone care? This is the land of product-market fit hunting. You’re not scaling yet. You’re still listening. Tinkering. Validating. The Biggest Risk: You’ve built something technically sound… but is there a real market that needs this now? Your job is to de-risk market risk. Key Actions:
At this stage, I’m not looking for a polished revenue engine. I’m looking for evidence of love—strong pull from a specific user base. One founder I backed had just 20 customers but a 90% activation rate and 100% month-on-month retention. No brainer. Series A: Prove You Can Sell It Repeatedly (GTM Risk) Now you’ve got product-market fit. You’ve figured out what to sell. The next question is how you sell it—and whether that model scales. Welcome to go-to-market hell (and heaven, if you get it right). Read the rest of this post here. |