Article source Reproduced below.

tl;dr

Find a mentor and track metrics
Don't over fundraise
Find a partner to complement you (techie or non-techie)
Care about your impact
Everyone overestimates their market


The start up genome Report -interesting findings
After interviewing 650 early Internet startups a group of incredibly smart people based on empirical information summarize what makes a successful internet startup

1.Founders that learn are more successful-Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money have 3.6xbetter user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.

3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founder sand founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.

4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company's operational performance.But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)

5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.

6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.

7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.

8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money , have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.

9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.

10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.

11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely
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12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.

14.B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business


Noam Zur

Sales Mentor - Customer development for startups
4 months ago