Results for “Rand Fishkin”

Another hugely common mistake is optimising your business for investors, and not customers and employees. If you don't believe me, look at the fact that consulting businesses have a 5 year survival rate of 60% and venture backed businesses, less than 10%.

When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do. I struggle to align my business objectives with my life and my own motivations rather than externally formed motivations that come from culture and society.

There's a culture in Silicon Valley that believes that you should be obsessive and not be able to think about anything else other than your business. You shouldn't have kids… friends… just your company as a vehicle to make millions of dollars. That's the kind of founder that many investors want to back, but we need to kick those people out.

One of the biggest myths in startup-land is this idea that the pinnacle of startups is building a venture-scale company, backed by venture capital, growing exceptionally fast and being OK with high failure rates as a result; in other words, returning a significant amount of capital to an investor rather than any other outcome.

If you are able to share the things you're scared people will find out? That's real transparency, and that's how you earn the trust that transparency can bring, but if it doesn't feel uncomfortable, it's just marketing.

Another hugely common mistake is optimising your business for investors, and not customers and employees.

When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do.

In the same way that kids would benefit from healthy, happy parents- startups would benefit from healthy, happy founders.