flâneur

Nathan ju

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on the atlas — 7

highlights — 15

  • hat is possible is controlling your schedule so that you have 3-5 hours regularly of “open time” where you do not have an agenda. This means that when a really famous potential business associate is interested in taking a meeting, you make them wait for when it fits into your schedule. You prioritize the time you’ve blocked out for cultivating ideas. Your future self will thank you. It means you don’t take meetings in the middle of the day if you can avoid it, because this stunts creative energy. You can never get into “idea flow” if you have a commitment hanging over your head, even a 30 min …
    The Art of Ideation, Part 1: Be a BUM — gaganbiyani.com
  • That’s it? Yes and no. The whole point of the exploration phase is to chill the fuck out. Don’t over-analyze things; instead, be a bum and let it flow. Free time will give you far more ideas than the intense energy you bring to work every day.
    The Art of Ideation, Part 1: Be a BUM — gaganbiyani.com
  • x, y, and z are seeds of ideas. Too many people take these seeds and assume they will end up with a great business. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Historically, there have been “moments in time” when a specific business idea is actually possible or practical. If you started a mental health company between 1990-2020, you probably failed. If you built a mobile games company in 2000, you were likely too early. If you get stuck on just one market, you will almost certainly be reducing your chances of finding a timely business opportunity.
    The Art of Ideation, Part 1: Be a BUM — gaganbiyani.com
  • The American dream is the belief that anyone can be successful if they are smart enough and work hard enough. Whether or not it is the reality for most Americans, Silicon Valley thrives on this optimism.
    Tom Blomfield: Taking Risk
  • If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter.
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • Paul Buchheit’s now-famous blog post, “If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.”
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service. As they listened to their ever-growing flock of users, the Slack team iterated accordingly.
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • “We made it very simple to adopt Slack. We didn’t have to convert the whole company and facilitate committee-level decisions,” Butterfield says. A couple of years in, they’ve matured to the point that security audit reviews and marked-up terms of service are becoming the norm. “But at the beginning, we bypassed all that, and it was a big advantage.”
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • “If you’re building a sales team for your startup, you know you will absolutely make a decision about what CRM to use. It’s a no-brainer. If you're a software development team, you are absolutely going to choose a system for source control. That’s a known category.”If you’re innovating in a nascent market, the push for recognition of your product category needs to be a major chunk of your go-to-market strategy.
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • So Butterfield made it a goal to teach customers that thisisindeed a product category — one they’re already filling poorly — priming Slack as a better solution. Helearned pretty quickly that the app's laundry list of benefits wasn't going to land sales on its own.
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spent minimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,” Butterfield says.
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • “If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, ‘I hate it. I am not going to use this,’ that’s it for us. We won’t get evaluated.”
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • A person tries it on a couple of devices, likes it, and commits to spending a few bucks a month for it. “We have to convince a team, and no two teams are alike.”
    From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy
  • Watershed is a software platform aiming to help companies decarbonize their operations. The company provides both a carbon accounting platform for customers to accurately measure and track their carbon footprint, and a carbon offset marketplace.
    Report: Watershed's Business Breakdown & Founding Story
  • Even before accounting for future mandatory carbon accounting, the voluntary carbon offset market is set to grow over 25% annually from 2022 to 2028. Over one-fifth of the world’s largest 2,000 companies had published net zero carbon targets as of March 2021.
    Report: Watershed's Business Breakdown & Founding Story