Rob Go: 

In search of things new and useful.

Crowdsourcing Our Next Growth Guides

Rob Go
May 18, 2014 · 2  min.

We have always been believers in trying to be helpful to the entrepreneurial community through the content we publish on our blogs. But we find that these only go so deep, and at times, certain practical topics warrant more attention.

This is why we are going to start publishing a series of “Growth Guides” over the next 6-12 months. The point of these are to:

  • Take on topics that we often here as questions that are held specifically for early-stage companies in their first 12-24 months of life
  • Offer more practical insight than what one could gather through blogs or Quora and bring in both our perspectives and those of other experts in the field.
  • Present information that is actually useful to founders and their teams.  So in addition to some theory or broad commentary, these will include actual hacks and other tips and playbooks that are immediately actionable for a founder or an early team member.

We launched our first one of these around content marketing for startups.  It’s a form of marketing that we often hear a lot of questions about and can be effective for early stage companies.  But it’s also a form of marketing that is very noisy, so we tried to cut through the noise and present something that is practical but has sufficient depth. It also helps that Jay, our Director of Platform and Community led content marketing efforts at HubSpot prior to joining.

Looking forward, we are going to be publishing more of these, and I’d like ideas for common topics that early stage founders and team members care about.  It can be anything from mission critical stuff, or even more mundane stuff that takes up time and makes you think “why hasn’t anyone just figured out the answer and told all of us founders?”  Here are a couple ideas that we’ve been throwing around, but I’d love to hear from you what we should include!

Current possible topics are:

  • Hiring your first five engineers
  • Product management before product-market-fit
  • Seed stage board decks and board management
  • Interviewing and reference checking
  • Tools, providers, and services. All the stuff you will need after raising your seed round, but don’t really want to research
  • How to incorporate user feedback into product decisions
  • Performance marketing tests that you should do before PMF

Others or more broad suggestions? All thought are welcome. And again, check out our first Growth Guide on how Content Marketing can be used for startups.


Rob Go
Partner
Rob is a co-founder and Partner at NextView. He tries to spend as much time as possible working with entrepreneurs to develop products that solve important problems for everyday people.