Startup books

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How to Navigate The Titanic Effect Blog

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How to Navigate The Titanic Effect Blog

To the Titanic Effect followers: This is an exciting week for us. The printed copy of the book was released earlier this week! If you are new to the party, here is a brief video summarizing the book’s contents, with props from a few endorsers: http://bit.ly/TitanicEffect.

We have been writing a weekly blog since October. It has been a lot of fun and a good learning experience for us. We’ve creatively thought about how to package the book’s key contents in bite-sized morsels. To be honest, it is also a lot of work! But our followers have grown over that time. We hope this effort will continue to “scale” as the book gets out there. We also realized that the long scrolling list of blog topics online is quite a challenge to “navigate.” In fact, a newcomer might find it intimidating. Even a hard core follower might have difficulty finding that blog they liked on product/market fit, for example.

 With that in mind and to celebrate the book launch, we are using this week’s blog to recap our blogs by category, with a brief guide to how to “consume” them. This is a longer blog than usual, but we wanted to be comprehensive.

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Startup Strategy is NOT a Road Map

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“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”  - Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

How many times have you heard the statement, “We need a road map to make sure we are headed in the right direction?” In fact, sometimes the business plan is described as “the road map” for the buddingstartup. Unfortunately, the road map as a metaphor prompts all the wrong associations for even the most promisingnew startup. Why?

What Should Investors Look for in an “A-Team?”

What Should Investors Look for in an “A-Team?”

We frequently get asked two questions from members of the startup community:  

1.    As an angel investor – “What should I be looking for in an investment?” 

2.     From entrepreneurs -  “What are early-stage investors looking for in a company?” 

We hope this blog sheds some light on both questions…

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Entrepreneurship is an “Uncertainty” Management Job that Evolves over Time

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People sometimes describe entrepreneurs as risk takers. They see starting a company as a risky activity. Yes, there is risk involved. But, navigating uncertainty rather than being risky is the essential task of the entrepreneur. What to build, how to build it, whom to partner with, whom to sell to, and how to fund growth… these are really tasks laden with uncertainty. 

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Startup Story: What REALLY Sank The “Titanic?”

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 The “Titanic” and “Titanic” Iceberg are central characters in our narrative on uncertainty and avoiding venture failure. But, how—or perhaps more importantly, why—did she really sink? We thought we’d share some of the alternative hypotheses and conspiracy theories through the years…

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Why A Startup Needs to Launch in An Existing Market Category

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If you listen to a variety of startup pitches or work closely with startups, one refrain you often here is – “we are unique, there’s no one else like us.” What appeals to a founder about this idea is that they don’t have any competitors. Instead, this is a hidden debt that we explore in the Marketing Ocean. 

So, why do we say being in a market category of one company is a bad idea?

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Why Getting to Product/Market Fit can Sink a Startup

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The most important job of a startup in the early stages is figuring out product/market fit. Turns out that this is much, much harder than it sounds like. You know the basic story:

-     Entrepreneur has a great idea for an unsolved problem to fix

-     They envision what they think needs to be done to fix it

-     They built that product (BTW – when we say product, it could be either a product or a service)

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Click To Send…The Point of No Return

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After 3 years of development, 18 months of writing, and a seeming lifetime of editing, revising, and fine-tuning, it is finally time to commit to being done. Our book The Titanic Effect: Successfully Navigating the Uncertainties that Sink Most Ventures is complete and going to design.

By “clicking to send” the final document to the publisher and design team, we are committing to being done with writing. It is actually quite an agonizing and unnerving step! But we hope that whatever blemishes or inconsistencies remain will be graciously ignored or accepted by our readers.

Given the stage of transition, we thought we would share a brief overview of our journey as we created this work.