Brett Martin: Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup

by Kraettli Lawrence Epperson in Startup 101

Here’s a great post-mortem post by Brett Martin, former CEO of startup Sonar, shared with me by a friend .

This post focuses how to navigate the crazy market and capital signals your startup will receive through the founding, funding and growth process. Some signals are true and some are false. Telling the difference can make all the difference between success and failure!

Some favorite quotes:

I realized the error of my customer acquisition strategy as I awkwardly made my way through a small Meetup I had just pitched. It was 11pm on a Tuesday, I was exhausted and still had real work to do once I got home. Yet there I was, in a shitty bar trying not to skewer anyone with my Sonar sign as I dodged person after person asking me to install THEIR app.

And this one:

Removing friction from existing user behaviors (e.g. checkins) almost always has a higher ROI than building castles in the sky (e.g. hypothesizing about your API). Find all the dead ends/local maxima in your current products before building new ones!

Read the whole post here: Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup — Medium.

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Kraettli Lawrence Epperson

Managing Director at JumpPhase Ventures
This blog is dedicated to providing advice, tools and encouragement from one entrepreneur to another. I want to keep this practical and accessible for the new entrepreneur while also providing enough sophistication and depth to prove useful to the successful serial entrepreneur. My target rests somewhere between the garage and the board room, where the work gets done and the hockey stick emerges.