Archive for the ‘ My Startup ’ Category

A Slow and Steady Approach to Startup Building

…in Silicon Valley?  Bah hum bug!  We have to go fast!  We need to raise capital, build product, acquire thousands of users daily, analyze metrics, recruit… go go go!  What if we paused, just for a second, to take a breathe.  Would our startup still be around? I know what you’re thinking, “Come on Poornima cut [ READ MORE ]

Blurred vision is better than blindness

Everyone by this point knows that one of the primary tasks of a startup founder is to set the vision for the company.  Yes there are additional tasks such as keeping employees motivated, recruiting new talent, and good old fundraising.  But for now lets focus purely on setting the vision.  Initially, this is one of [ READ MORE ]

Culture of Constraints

In 4 days it will be the 1 year anniversary of launching BizeeBee my second startup. When I started BizeeBee I was determined to put in place engineering principles that I hadn’t been able to at previous companies.  I also wanted to avoid a lot of bad practices that I had experienced throughout my [ READ MORE ]

Challenges of Getting Early Adopters, Acquiring Customers & Monetizing

I’ve gotten some requests recently to write a post on how we’ve gotten early adopters at BizeeBee and how we got them at Mint.  I hate to burst everyone’s tech bubble but there is no secret for getting early adopters.  I also want to address two concepts in this posts getting early adopters vs. methods for customer acquisition.  The [ READ MORE ]

Getting Your Startup Team to Understand Your Customer

Its been 8 months since we launched our first product at BizeeBee.  When we launched we had 3 customers (yoga studios), they saw the value in what we were building, so much that one studio owner  worked very closely with me for almost year.  Since launching my desire to please customers hasn’t stopped.  The buzz [ READ MORE ]

Post-Launch Prep II

After launching BizeeBee I realized that my initial post on what to do after you launch wasn’t enough to cover all the work that the BizeeBee team has done after launching and thought I’d share some of our efforts.  We launched BizeeBee about three weeks ago with a few yoga studios across the nation.  The on-boarding process [ READ MORE ]

A Founder’s Life

On the first day of second grade, I woke up, packed my lunch, got on my bike, and went to school.  I started this trend in second grade, and I’m still doing it.  To this day, how I grew up is a mystery for my dad, and at dinner parties he’ll mention that since the [ READ MORE ]

When to be Scrappy

When I was 16 I asked my dad for a car because thats what 16 year-olds do in America, and because even though I went to a public high school everyone and their mom drove a BMW or a Bentley.  My dad put the kibosh on my dreams of being a teenage driver.  To him [ READ MORE ]

Fundraising and Feedback

Dave McClure’s recent post on investing before product/market fit inspired me to address a few observations I’ve made as an entrepreneur when pitching to investors (angels and VCs), crafting my product proposal, and explaining the vision of my current startup. Risk and Rejection As a first time entrepreneur I understand that I’m seen as a huge risk, [ READ MORE ]

Retaining Startup Engineers

In my previous post I focused on the key issues to think about when recruiting a startup engineer.  In this post I’d like to shift focus on how to keep them. Engineers jump ship early for various reasons, its usually a combination of the following three: instability in management, unclear path to an exit, and work that [ READ MORE ]