Tag Archives: startup

Six surprising facts about potential startup founders

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Party Time

Party Time

Teaming up with Bloomberg Beta, the ‘startup signals tracker’ Mattermark studied 1.5m budding entrepreneurs in the US to see who was likely to be a startup founder.

Below are the six surprising facts they discovered – I have to confess pretty much all six surprised me. I wonder what Berlin Startup Ranking will find out about London startups, when it launches in the capital in the next few weeks?

  • 38% of venture-backed founders are over 40 years old

  • Only 15% of venture-backed founders have a Computer Science degree

  • Management consultants are more than 2x more likely to be venture-backed founders than engineers

  • 43% of venture backed founders worked at a venture-backed company immediately before founding

  • Two thirds of venture-backed founders were not in a senior leadership position prior to founding

  • Contrary to conventional wisdom, being “stuck” in the same company or position for a long time (even a decade) does not diminish your likelihood of becoming a founder

Why customer discovery matters

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The aim of a ‘customer discovery’ plan for a start-up is to:

  1. Test your hypothesis about what is the customer problem we are trying to solve
  2. Test if the your concept or app/website feature set solve that problem

Therefore the aim is firstly to find out from customers what the problem is regarding support to help turn their ideas/skills into creative/business reality.

In other words ideally with a start-up you would create a hypothesis about a customer need, then talk to customers to find out if that was correct as an answer to their problems, then build a prototype to meet those problems, then go back to the customers and find out if that solved the problem – and tweak it accordingly to make sure it did.