TJ - TJ's Blog - Page 22

Know Whose Party You’re Crashing

A startup is a lonely endeavor that never works alone. It works with a dominant player, whether in an app store like a marketplace or…

Three Steps to Deal with Technical Debt

A Startup accrues technical debt at a breathtaking pace. It is inevitable, expected, and painful to watch for even the most pragmatic engineers. If you're…

Can Skills Gap Create Tech Debt?

The moment working source code is live, it is legacy. The code is "in production" and has forever documented the decisions that created it. These…

Three Signup Mistakes SaaS Companies Make

For any software business, the online signup is the lifeblood of customer acquisition. The new tooling available to developers makes it easy to build and…

How to Score Your Budgeting Mindset

I stumbled on the questions I wrote about last week circa 2013-14. Fresh from our first round of funding (Series A to fund EZ Texting's acquisition), I…

3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Asking for Budget

The best managers are superb capital allocators. They take expensive investor money and assign it to the proper growth initiatives. Accountability for a team or…

Protecting Selflessness in Startups

Building a shared sense of purpose is easy when the company is young. There is plenty of work to do and not enough people to…

2021-Seven Books for the Startup Leader

At 75 books read a year, Stephen King considers himself a slow reader. By his scale, my reading speed would be closer to a sloth.…

The RCS Killer App

Once it has won over the geeks and early adopters, new technology needs to win the heart of the everyday user. You do that by…

A Founder’s Ignorance

Smart founders are comfortable with perpetual ignorance and combat it with tireless learning. The preceding Twitter-friendly headline would aptly summarize this article, but outside of…

A Founder’s Arrogance

All Founders are arrogant. How's that for a polarizing statement? If you're a founder and disagree, it means you haven't been rejected, denied, denigrated, ghosted,…

A Founder’s Passion

A startup, like any risky endeavor, requires the persistence of a punch-me doll. As long as a Founder is a principal in the company, they…