The top 10 “growth drugs” misused by ambitious software companies
When you have a growing business and you are pushing hard, you look for every advantage, shortcut, and resource that can help you keep growing. Grow or die! Some revenue-accelerating tactics create immediate results and can be repeated at will. Unfortunately, many of...
Founders are Chief Believer Officers
When you start a company, you do every job in the business. As you add employees, you stop doing a few things yourself and hire others to do them. For companies that grow big enough, your team members eventually do all of the day-to-day functions of the business. What...
Find the Right Funding
When savvy founders with real businesses ask me if they should raise money from investors, my first response is always the same: “Don’t raise money right now. Wait a little longer and gut it out.” I know they desperately need additional cash to fuel product...
Keep moving forward
Last year I met with over 300 founders and CEOs, worked deeply inside 30 businesses all over the U.S., and spoke to thousands of people at conferences and events. Despite that, my own business wasn’t a cakewalk and many things didn’t work out the way I had planned. My...
How I became Greg Head from Egghead
In 1987, I returned to the Chicago area with a newly minted liberal arts degree in economics, with honors, from the University of Iowa. I had no clue how I was going to enter the adult world and get a real job. During a few interviews, I felt totally uncomfortable and...
Startups should be called “experiments”
My 23-year-old son Ethan is the co-founder of a software startup that has taken him from San Jose, California to Manila, Philippines to New York City. He put his electrical engineering degree on the shelf to start his company, called Groundwork, almost a year ago....
Why doesn’t Chick-fil-A sell hamburgers? The real reason will surprise you.
Chick-fil-A is one of the most successful fast-food restaurant chains in the United States. They just sell chicken sandwiches. You’ve probably had one. Their average revenue per restaurant is more than 50% higher than McDonald’s. Their restaurants do more than three...
What VC investors mean when they say, “We invest in people”
Experienced venture capital investors have been telling us for years how they “invest in big markets and founding teams.” Markets and People. First, there needs to be a new market category that can grow big enough to support a couple market-leading companies that will...
The biggest myth about marketing
All of us experience marketing all day long, almost everywhere we look. Surprisingly, this causes most people think they understand the marketing game. That’s like eating a nice meal at a restaurant and proclaiming you can cook it yourself and run the restaurant. “I’m...
Hard lines create long lines
When I see a movie or a painting, I see the result of what someone created. I don’t think much about how it was made. I don’t understand it like someone who studied art or made a movie. When I see a website, ad, sales pitch or product design, I don’t just see it for...
Entrepreneurs figure it out
I’ve noticed something that all successful entrepreneurs say when they are interviewed about how they grew their crazy startups into big businesses. You also hear it in interviews with Olympic gold medal athletes. And when successful individuals talk about their...
How I got great PR results on the second try
Public Relations is one of the trickier parts of the marketing game. It’s not like digital advertising or email marketing, where you can push a button and make measurable things happen right away. A year ago, I hired a savvy PR agency to book me for speaking, podcast...
Scaling Points are everywhere, yet hidden in plain sight
I have been an observer and student of the Scaling Point for 25 years. It’s the strangest thing. It’s completely obvious on the outside, yet we don’t notice it or understand it. It’s hidden in plain sight. Like the joke about the fish that says to another, “How’s the...
What’s the difference between Product-Market Fit and the Scaling Point?
In the startup-to-scale-up growth game, achieving “product-market fit” has become a common indicator of a startup’s potential to grow into a successful company. This term was created and popularized by startup tech founders, investors and advisors in Silicon Valley....
Beware the Startup ADD Trap
Discovering and executing on your Scaling Point is a necessary requirement for growing a little company into a big one. But why is it so rare? There are two reasons why Startup ADD is an almost universal disease that is very hard to cure. First, starting up requires...