Brian Balfour, a product and growth executive, writes essays on product-market fit, customer acquisition channels and growth frameworks for startups.
Commenters recommend his essays, especially the product-channel fit framing and the customer acquisition piece, as useful for startup growth, alongside Paul Graham's writing.
First of all, congratulations on the raise. That's an awesome accomplishment. A lot of books on entrepreneurship seem to basic or general to help you at your stage of having secured funding but trying to figure out sales. I found a few books that might be helpful.
Entrepreneurial finance and accounting for high tech businesses by frank fabozzi (2016) 448 pages
Seems to be a decent overview of the issue.
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wick Man (2012) 271 pages.
Seems to be recommended often enough on the accounting podcasts that it's worth mentioning.
The Great CEO within
LEAN analytics by Josh Wright
LEAN startup
The Startup Playbook: Founder-to-Founder Advice from Two Startup Veterans [2 ed.]
Startup Myths and Models: What You Won't Learn in Business School
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups (featuring Bonus Article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” by Steve Blank)
The Finance Playbook for Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurial Finance, Third Edition: Finance and Business Strategies for the Serious Entrepreneur
Startup CFO
The 80/20 Rule
60 Minute CFO
Handbook of Inflation Indexed Bonds (1997, but much still applies today)
The Return of High Inflation: Risks, Myths, and Opportunities (2016)
Inflation Hacking (Inflation Investing Techniques to benefit from high inflation)
https://brianbalfour.com/essays/customer-acquisition
Best of luck.
Inflation hedges include cyclical businesses like mining or Norsk Hydro, commodities,…
I've spent a ton of time as a developer trying to make money from various side projects and businesses. So most of my top "wish I'd discovered this earlier" list revolves around tech+business stuff:
* Strategy #1: Charge more. patio11 has been shouting this from the rooftops for years, but it didn't sink in until after I started Indie Hackers[0]. If you charge something like $300/customer instead of $5/customer, you can get to profitability with something like 50 phone calls rather than years of slogging. It's still hard, but it's way faster.
* Strategy #2: Brian Balfour's four fits model[1]. It's not enough to think about the product. You also need to think about the market, distribution channels, and pricing, and how each of these four things fit together. I imagine them as four wheels on a car. It's better to have 4 mediocre wheels than 3 great ones and a flat.
* Book: The Mom Test.[2] Amazing book about how to talk to customers to research your ideas without being misled, which is a step I've stumbled on before.
* Tool: Notion. I just discovered it recently. I use it for all my docs and planning.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com - my latest business, and the one that actually worked
[1] https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth-framework
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742
Reforge | Software Engineers, Product, Design | REMOTE US | Full Time
Reforge is reinventing professional education. Our mission is to help people level-up in their careers, and meet like-minded people.
read about our founder here: https://brianbalfour.com/
We're a team of about 50 and we raised a Series A from a16z earlier this year. By end of year we'll likely be between 80-100.
We were profitable in the Millions completely bootstrapped before taking that round: https://www.reforge.com/blog/weve-raised-21m-to-grow-reforge https://a16z.com/2021/02/23/investing-in-reforge/
We have always been a remote-first environment, but do have an office in San Francisco. Half our team is in the Bay Area, the rest are across the US.
Tech Stack:
Ruby on Rails
React, vanilla javascript, webpack
Postgres, redis, memcached
Our engineering team is 7 right now. We're looking for product-focused, full-stack engineers. Everyone we have right now is a generalist.
Email with title: "HN" to recruiting@reforge.com
All positions here: https://www.reforge.com/careers/all
Read books. See what works for you.
The firs thing is to decide acquisition method. Inbound or outbound?
Inbound is great if you are well known inthe space. Else it's slow.
If you don't have a large network reach out to people.
Find the right channels that would work for you. Read https://brianbalfour.com/ he has a page for learning to be customer acquisition expert. Lots of good recommendations.
Most companies survive on a single channel. So you must find which one is that for you.
If your only way to reach prospects is ads, you must have a good price on your product . High LTV to support CAC.
If your users are active on LinkedIn. Then try apps like clickedIn.
If your prospects read emails (e.g. marketing, swe ) then try cold outreach. Read more on lemlist.com
Join Facebook groups where SAAS founders hang out. You might find more tricks.
If you dont have sales experience then focus on product led growth. Read the book.
Regardless of sales, you must have good grasp of marketing even if you intend to drive product led growth.
Good luck.
Why is everyone so obsessed with ideas? Out of everything needed to succeed with a startup (idea, audience, acquisition channels, competition), the "startup idea" is the thing you can ALWAYS change. It's the thing you have the most control over.
That's not the case, however, with acquisition channels (a topic I write extensively about [1]), or your audience (they come with pre-defined beliefs/behaviors that are hard to change.)
Having this in mind, it makes more sense to focus first on analyzing a) The audience b) The channels through which you can reach to them. Once you get enough knowledge about these 2, you can create a pretty good startup idea WITHIN these constraints.
This is why people have invented things like market-product fit or product-channel fit [2]. I'd like to add that you're more likely to succeed if you FIT your idea TO the channel/audience, rather than doing the reverse.
Would love to hear other perspectives on this topic.
[1] https://firstpayingusers.com
[2] https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
It's hard to reason from his post, but it seems like he's spending money on branded search terms. E.g. queries that include his website in its name.
The effectiveness of branded search terms is absolutely worth discussing, and it's pretty easy to run a small scale test on if it works by comparing organic and paid traffic after the fact.
But the issue is that this article doesn't differentiate between branded and non-branded search terms. Did he run campaigns on non-branded searches like "Registration checker UK" to get build awareness of his service for new customers doing broad searches? Did he compare his organic non-branded search engine presence with his results when running paid ads?
Also, his service doesn't seem like a great match for the advertising channel either. It's hard to turn a profit when your service costs £8. The product - channel fit [0] doesn't seem right. So all in all, not such a great experiment.
https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth