19
Jan

Startup Year 2

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my latest company, fab.com.

Here are some of my thoughts on the difference between year 1 and year 2 of a startup.

Year 1:  Ideas & Faith

  1. Get something out there as fast as possible and iterate like mad to try to find some market traction.
  2. Try stuff!  Throw a lot of shit out there and see what sticks.
  3. Don’t be afraid to jump from new thing to new thing.
  4. Over-experiment.
  5. Do it all yourself.
  6. Try to figure out, “Is this thing gonna work?”
  7. Watch out for false positives.
  8. Be willing to be hunch driven, then measure to see if the hunches were right.  

Year 2:  Facts & Focus

  1. Boil everything learned from year 1 into simple fixes/changes you must do right in year 2.  Get these facts right.
  2. Focus, focus, focus.  
  3. Pick 1 thing and just do that 1 thing better than anyone else out there.
  4. Don’t be afraid to pivot:  change course to pursue a singular focus, without it being a company-wide crisis.
  5. Cancel projects that aren’t in line with your focus.
  6. Know who your customer is.
  7. Get out of the building
  8. Invest in customer development.
  9. Know your acquisition model.
  10. Understand your cost structure.
  11. Figure out repeatable processes.  Turn hypotheses into repeatable, scaleable facts.
  12. Eliminate distractions.
  13. Don’t stop learning and don’t stop making mistakes, just make smarter mistakes and more calculated mistakes than in year 1.
  14. Raise capital to help you capture your market.
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55 Notes

  1. perpetual-beta reblogged this from betashop
  2. dataanxiety reblogged this from betashop
  3. travisoberlander reblogged this from betashop and added:
    Great advice from a guy who’s gone through the shit and come out clean and shiny.
  4. kylewritescode reblogged this from betashop and added:
    Sage advice.
  5. betashop posted this

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About

Betashop is the website of Jason Goldberg,
Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Fab.

Jason founded Fab in 2011 with Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Design Officer) and Nishith Shah (Chief Technology Officer).

Fab is everyday design.

Fab’s mission is to help people better their lives with design. Millions of people around the world use Fab to discover everyday design products at great prices, to connect with the world’s most exciting designers, and to share their favorite design inspirations. Smile, you're designed to.

Some have called Fab "the fastest growing E-commerce company on the planet." We like to say we're just doing our best to serve up great design that makes people smile.

Fab now serves more than 11 million members across 26 countries. Fab grew sales by more than 500% in 2012, one-third of which comes from users of the Fab mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. In February 2013 Fab was named the #5 most innovative company in the World by Fast Company. Fab won the award for Best E-Commerce Company of The Year at The Crunchies in both 2012 and 2011. It's all very humbling and inspiring. The truth is we celebrate our challenges more than our successes at Fab and we're really still just getting started.

Fab is the fourth company Jason founded. Jason previously founded fabulis, socialmedian, and Jobster. In 2009, following the sale of socialmedian to XING AG, Jason was Chief Product Officer at XING, based in Hamburg, Germany. Before starting Jobster in 2004, Jason led product and business initiatives at both T-Mobile USA and AOL Time Warner. In a prior life, Jason spent 6 years working 100 hours a week for Bill Clinton in the White House.

Jason is also an investor in and Board Member at RJ Metrics. He is also an investor in BlackJet and Twitter. Notable prior investments: TweetDeck.

Jason is a product guy. He loves to blog, loves transparency, and loves trying to make people smile. Jason shares everything about Fab on his blog, betashop, at http://betashop.com.

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