If you're an early stage founder, it can be really easy to lose sight of the big picture. You spend tons of time jumping from fire, fixing bugs for the noisiest of your user base to keep them happy. While this is a somewhat necessary component of startup life, it can also end up giving you a pretty skewed view of how your product is actually being used. Oftentimes, your noisiest users aren't actually representative of your userbase a a whole. In fact, if you spent all of your time worrying about making them happy, you may look up a few months later and realize you've gotten fairly off track of your initial intentions with your product, maybe even making some of your other users unhappy in the process.

Oftentimes when building a company or product, you'll need to turn to others for advice and feedback. Sometimes, that's easy - you have some people in your network who can help. Other times, you realize that it'd be best to ask some strangers... but asking strangers for advice can be daunting! Here are some tips to make your cold outreach go as smoothly as possible.

If you've never had to onboard an employee from scratch before, it can be a little daunting. You want to start your relationship off on the right foot and a chaotic onboarding process won't impress anyone. Here are some of the things you should do to make sure your employee has a smooth first few weeks.

For those unfamiliar, CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Cost. You calculate it by adding up all the money you spent on marketing in a particular time period and dividing it by the number of customers you acquired in that same time period. If you spent $1000 on marketing and acquired 100 customers, you have a $10 CAC.

Buying ads can be expensive and a waste of time early on, especially if you're still trying to figure out who your ideal customer is. Before opening up an Ads Manager or hiring a growth consultant, try a few of these strategies. The best part? The information you get from trying these out will help you run more successful ad campaigns in the future.

If you're starting a business where a set of people are going to sell something on your website, and another set of people are going to give them money for it, then you're starting a marketplace. Marketplaces are a popular business model right now, and for good reason - the internet has made us used to being able to buy, rent or find anything, but sorting through options can be a huge hassle. Plus, many types of sellers need some extra software on top to be able to effectively sell or deliver their product or service. Building a marketplace plus whatever that extra functionality is is a great foundation for a business.

You've probably heard the advice by now: successful people have short to-do lists because they focus on what's important. That's all well and good, but when your to-do list is a mile long, curating it becomes overwhelming... but it doesn't have to be! Here's a quick exercise you can do to get that to-do list in better shape:

One of the most common questions I get asked is "Where do I find my first users?" Unfortunately, most of the founders who ask are already too late.

The day has come. You've finally built an MVP you feel happy with. You're ready to launch on Product Hunt and share to all of your social networks. Take one last look over your product roadmap and launch checklist. Do you see user analytics anywhere?

As a follow up to my previous post, I wanted to talk about a mindset I sometime run into while speaking with startup founders: the idea that it's not okay to admit you want your business to make money, and that your motivation should only be your passion for solving the problem you're tackling.

Does the following apply to you? 1. You have an MVP of a product that people are using 2. This MVP is helping people solve a problem 3. You plan to eventually earn revenue via charging users If you answered yes to all 3 questions but you're still not charging - take this as your sign to start.

For my first blog post, I wanted to talk about one of the biggest open secrets I know: that pretty much everyone has or had had imposter syndrome. For those unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome as “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.” Essentially - you’re worried that you’re not actually as competent as those around you think you are, and instead you somehow tricked them into giving you a chance you don’t deserve.