Photo credits; Marcos Ojeda As we have mentioned before, one of the beliefs in our investment thesis is: “The time of the unicorn is over. We need revenue-driven and problem-solving startups.” Why is this such an important part of our thesis? The system as it is right now, we feel, is broken. VC’s are steering startups […]
At NEXT Amsterdam we believe in helping others. Not only startup founders but also our fellow (informal) investors. That is why we are sharing our knowledge and experience in a series of blog posts about how and why we invest. Two weeks ago we wrote about the investment thesis as the basis of every investment […]
This is Part 2 of our Investing series. There is often a lot of debate about choices investors make. “Why on earth did Investor X invest in Startup Y?” As an investor, you have to make bold choices. Every investment should have the potential to become really big, otherwise, you will never make up for […]
Most startups are familiar with agile development sprints of 1 or 2 weeks. They try to plan work that ‘belongs’ together and release a new version either at the end of the sprint or when the work is done. That structure works pretty well and helps to build a flow into your company. We used […]
Last weekend Diego Menchaca, founder of Teamscope and apparently also a big fan of our blog posts, proposed that I should write a blog post about Mixpanel. “Most blog posts tell what to track on Mixpanel, but it would be great to know what’s your approach when defining events and properties.” We love Mixpanel at […]
For three years in a row, the most valued session during the Rockstart Accelerator programs has been the Braintrust. Esther introduced it as Lean Mentor checkins, based on Salim Virani‘s Braintrust model, but it has slowly evolved in much more and is now a standard part of our proven Lean Startup curriculum. What is a […]
Yesterday we had the first introductory session with a potential portfolio company and tried once again to explain why it is so important to focus first on a clear early adopter. We often compare the early adopter with a person who fell of his bike (we’re from Amsterdam after all) and broke his arm. His […]
Learn how to run successful lean startup experiments and get inspired by reading about the most used experiments used by startups.
In the first 5 blog posts about Analytics we covered Vanity Metrics, the Pirate Metrics framework, the criteria of a good metric, the key activity, the key metric and cohorts. The final problem we need to overcome is one we wrote about in almost all the previous blogposts: The danger of having metrics that make […]
This is Part 4 of our Lean Startup series. One of the most important Lean Innvoation tools or experiments you can do throughout the search for your business model is the customer interview. Whether you are finding out if there is a problem, or want to know about what it really is that people are […]
When I first started using good metrics (I was no longer focussing on vanity metrics like total registered users) I had a hard time wrapping my head around Retention. What does it mean when you have 25% active users. Do they come back every day? Or every week? How do you measure that 25%? It […]
In the last post, I talked about the importance of validated learning. Trying to validate your way to a working business model. You don’t validate your business model by running one single experiment. Continuously testing risky assumptions is important in every phase of your startup, this process is called Lean Innovation. Helping you to de-risk […]