Hello and welcome to part three of my coverage of The Startup Conference LA. If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series you can find them below:
The Startup Conference LA – Part One
The Startup Conference LA – Part Two
Now onto part three! After lunch we went right-into another talk with Jason Nazar, the co-founder and CEO of Docstop, a website that reaches over 20 million people a month. Jason put together a solid gameplan for making the right choices for your business.
There are four variables you always want to look at:
- Potential Upside
- Likelihood of success
- Effort involved
- Strategic value
Every decision you make in your startup should be analyzed looking at these four variables. You should be putting the most amount of time into the things with the greatest potential upside. Figure-out a way to delegate-out everything that is not going to have the greatest potential upside.
Identify items that can get done in each weekly sprint and don’t do anything that takes more than four sprints – keep it lean! Tie goals to revenue – i.e. what can we do this week that will increase revenue by 1%. Don’t only do this, but make sure to consistently knockout smaller items while trending towards the big goals.
As an entrepreneur you need to be capable of selling ether, you need to be able to sell the dream and the potential of future revenue. Jason gave a great talk and really excellent tips that apply to any business, not just startups.
Next up came my favorite segment of any startup conference – the pitches. Tony Gauda from Bitcasa listened to the pitches and gave great entrepreneurs initial feedback on their pitches. There were some very interesting companies pitching from a dog-sitting service called DogVacay to a platform for finding advertising leads online.
The best pitches get people excited as quickly as possible, which usually means sharing some exciting, real data. The entrepreneurs who went on and on about their ideas lost people’s interest quickly. Those who shared social proof, i.e. “we have five hundred people already using the system,” or “we have already made $20,000” immediately captivated the crowd. Heck, even sharing how big the market you are going after is will get someone’s attention.
More to come in Parts Four and Five! There were truly incredible lessons learned at this conference and I can’t wait to share even more of them with all of you!
