Aug 28
Sales team or startup - Figuring out failure from the board level
icon1 Healy Jones | icon2 Customer behavior, Fundable, Market research, Operational strategy, Recruiting strategies, V Said, startup team | icon4 08 28th, 2008| icon3Comments

Pretend you are on the board of a startup. Unfortunately, this startup is not living up to its potential, and is failing to get sales traction as you and the team hoped. Why are sales not materializing? I had a brief, but insightful, conversation with one of my partners today. This partner (like most venture capitalists) is on several startup boards. Most of these startups are growing quite well; however, one of them is not.

The question is why? From a board level, it is quite difficult for a venture capitalist to determine the cause of the startup’s sales slippage. Is it the sales team? Or is it a market/product issue?

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Aug 19
Stealth startups: To blog or not to blog?
icon1 Prasad Thammineni | icon2 Branding, E Said, Marketing strategies, Recruiting strategies | icon4 08 19th, 2008| icon3Comments

To blog or not to blogShould a startup blog even before they are ready to tell the world about their idea? By blogging will you be giving away your idea? Is there a real benefit to creating a blog and updating it on a regular basis? These are questions I asked myself when we founded Pixily and in the ensuing months when we were in stealth mode.

Reflecting back on these questions, we at Pixily wish we started blogging within the first couple of months of founding Pixily. It would have helped us in a number of ways including acquiring customers, being perceived as an authority in the market and in recruiting employees. In this post, I will cover the benefits and in a following post I will talk about blogging strategies that a stealth mode startup can employ.

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