Introduction: This comprehensive blog post is a step-by-step playbook for launching (new and untested) products – whether it be a start-up co-founder or an existing company. It describes a philosophy of “entrepreneurial selling” and step-by-step process to put this philosophy into practice. Purpose: Ultimately this guide is trying to answer the question – how should entrepreneurs sell their way to success – the single most important activity for their survival? Remember, startup is a temporary organization built to search for the …
Category: Startups
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All blog posts related to startups by Jawwad Siddiqui
Update: Sharpscholar.com is still a small-business in operation. We hope to work towards a niche product-market fit. As a co-founder of an edtech startup, SharpScholar, we have learned important edtech business lessons while building the startup over the last two years. Along the way we got to be on Dragons’ Den (aka SharkTank of Canada), interview at Imagine-K12, accepted into the DMZ incubator, won awards, and learned from people at Khan Academy, GoogleX and others. However, along the way we also made …
Tl;dr; I built a mediocre SaaS startup, SharpScholar. Running a mediocre startup is like cancer: slowly attacking each part of your company – team, vision, etc until it becomes a zombie. You are constantly fighting the disease instead of building the company. The solution? Extract learnings and restart. *(See Caveats) I have been taking stabs at creating companies for about 4 years now. The most committed project has been SharpScholar – consuming 50% of the journey. If you are building a …
Tl;dr: As a co-founder or founding CEO of a startup, everything that goes wrong is your fault. This mindset is psychologically-painful but truly empowering at the same time. Over the years as an entrepreneur, I have had other entrepreneurs share their problems and had a fair chunk of my own to deal with. Unfortunately, there is one trend that I still see after all these years. Most of them simply complain and blame external things. They complain about not having money. If …
Almost all thought leaders in entrepreneurship emphasize learning fast as an entrepreneur. “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else” – Eric Ries of Lean Startup However, rarely any focus on HOW to learn fast and measure if you are doing it EFFECTIVELY. They assume entrepreneurs will take care of that…… But in my experience, entrepreneurs are most likely to be blinded with biases. This is due to a variety of factors – stress, fear, uncertainty, making …