As a seed investor at Streamlined Ventures, I spend most of my time meeting amazing entrepreneurs with product and engineering backgrounds. While building beautiful products and complicated algorithms comes naturally, getting started acquiring users can be a little daunting. I often find myself running through the same few steps with…

COVID-19 has changed the market for enterprise software. How adjustments in your business model, value proposition and more can help your B2B software startup survive through 2020. — While COVID-19 has had an immediate and obvious impact on consumer spending, the public markets and in our daily lives, the effects on B2B software spend haven’t yet been quite as apparent. Unfortunately, this lag doesn’t mean the market for software won’t also soon be affected. Forrester recently projected a…

Five Key Tactics for Selling Your Product Bottoms Up — In Part I: The Founders Checklist For Bottoms Up, I’ve talked about how to decide if bottoms up is the right go-to-market approach for your B2B software company. If you’ve gone through the checklist, this post outlines five main core growth tactics for scaling your bottoms up company: Let’s dive…

When is bottoms up growth right for your SaaS startup? — With Part II: The Bottoms Up Growth Playbook. Why Everyone Is Buzzing About Bottoms Up With the Zoom and Slack IPOs and a flood of free new productivity tools, 2019 has been all about bottoms up growth. And for good reason! Bottoms up growth is based first and foremost on a high quality product that depends on…

Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing frustration with VCs about consumer investing. “The only things people care about in consumer today is cannabis and crypto”, a frustrated friend in venture told me a few weeks ago. “All the real money is in enterprise”, said another. …

We’ve all read the headlines. Equifax. Yahoo. Cambridge Analytica. Every second we share personal information with third party applications, from our address and credit card number to our browsing history and photos with friends. At the same time, we’re losing confidence by the day that these services are handling our…

Many Americans will spend more on education than almost anything else in their lifetimes. We place a high value on an expensive education at a college or a university. For some, the beautiful campuses, small class sizes, and tenured professors are well worth the investment. …

3 ways we’ve grown the Skillshare community with a personal touch. — How do you scale community building? For smaller communities, connections can mean personal phone calls, in-person events and swag. These tactics are important because they allow you to engage with and understand your community. Investing in these relationships helps create trust, brand loyalty, and engaged users. But as your community…