zefi

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
411
Submissions
94
Member since
Jun 13
gm at ef berlin ex ycs13

YC Badge: 0x51dc7ad434e83374eefb9fcdcf12ad4cf8024dd5

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Comment · 11 years ago
Thanks for the comment. Did you have a chance to see how the dashboard of screenshots works at the moment? Is this what you're commenting on?
Comment · 11 years ago
Thanks for the heads up. The button is only active after you've successfully added a comment - as we presume you haven't finished if you haven't made one. cheers!
Comment · 12 years ago
think about everything YC/PG has said about 'toys' and the Altair BASIC/Microsoft comments
Comment · 12 years ago
There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem is and how little you know how to solve it right now.
Comment · 12 years ago
This sounds like a bad idea. We are not King Solomon, nor should either party want his help. For simplicity's sake, neither party should take the opinion of anyone other than a lawyer on this.
Comment · 12 years ago
This product looks great. I think that automating the sales process, from prospecting to closing will be a vertical that'll see huge growth over the next few years. Anything that helps companies make money faster and integrates with salespeople's existing workflows is an obvious winner. That's the good news, the bad news is how low the barrier to entry for this market is right now and will continue to be with the current business model. The company that becomes the leader in this will work out how to make something that is seemingly highly commoditisable (email sending and read receipts) solidly defensible so the next startup down the block can't just undercut you on number of prospects contacted per pricing tier. I suspect the answer will have more to do with more impressive mass personalisation rather than any network effects these companies can create. Fascinating space, this is a growth sector without doubt. The companies I recommend checking out: Stacklead, AutopilotHQ, Yesware, Streak and Docsend among others.
Comment · 12 years ago
This is absolutely fantastic. Well done for creating such a great product Andrew, really well implemented.

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