The Research Mentality... and how to adopt it for product-led growth
Building software has gotten insanely cheaper and faster. The infrastructure provided by the cloud or IaaS vendors has evened the technical ground for builders. A flourish of no-code tools have…
«Research is only done until a decision has been made and action has been taken – not when a report or insight was shared.»
More from a16z
Hidden Networks: Network Effects That Don’t Look Like Network Effects
Some network effects (when a network gains more value to its users as more people participate in its platform) don’t show up in the usual metrics. Their hidden nature makes them hard to measure – but they can confer significant long-term competitive advantages. In an insightful article for A16Z.com, D’Arcy Coolican – an Andreessen Horowitz partner and a co-founder of the peer-to-peer lending platform Frank – shines a light on hidden networks, giving useful guidelines for identifying when they’re at work.
Choosing Your North Star Metric
How to decide the guiding metrics for every type of business, based on a survey of employees at over 40 of today's most successful growth-stage companies.
«By maintaining a laser focus on a single metric for too long, teams risk short-term thinking, missing new opportunities, and sacrificing the user experience.»
The Power of Product Thinking
In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you’ll be assessed on a dimension called “product thinking,” sometimes also called “product sense.” If…
«The simplest way to define product thinking is that it is the skill of knowing what makes a product useful — and loved — by people»
Kickstarting Network Effects
Network effects can be found powering almost every major technology company, from messaging apps and workplace collaboration tools, like Slack and Zoom, to marketplaces, like Airbnb and Instacart to…
A Guide to DeSci, the Latest Web3 Movement
What to know about the new DeSci movement
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«the unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better.»
The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
Startup leaders, use this framework to master the art of annual and quarterly planning.
Product-Led Growth’s Failure
How a Scrappy Utah Software Company Ignored Every Silicon Valley Heuristic and Won Anyway
«This article was informed by exclusive interviews with over a dozen current and former early employees of Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey.»
The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas
The traditional approach is to do some customer research, throw an MVP out there as fast as possible, and hope it hits. After being early at three startups that achieved over $1M in run-rate in their…
«In an MVP, you try to simulate the entire car. In an MVT, you are just testing whether the drivetrain is more powerful with an electric engine or a gas one.»
What I Learned at Clubhouse 📓
I’ve learned a lot about building startups over the past few years, and have become much more opinionated on how to do it well. I spent the last 2 years at Clubhouse, where my learning was…
«Importantly, don’t just tell, rather show users how you want them to engage. Collaboration between community and product can be very valuable here.»