Seattle has a ridiculously strong bulletin board + email list sorta culture.
When Buster invited me to join one of these lists, I was skeptical at first. Who needs more in her inbox, right?
But the brutal honesty of founders sharing really tough sh*t changed my perspective.
Ye Olde List Serve…
Habit Labs: Hard or Soft? Which Way to Launch? How to Make Getting Good Press a Habit
Habit Labs: What the Health is Happening? Trying to be a "Market Creator" is Crap, and Don't Waste Your Time Stalking Competitors...
“Easing” back into blogging. Brevity obviously not my strong suit. Via habitlabs:
As a startup founder, it’s often tough to figure out what news has direct import for your sector.
One commonly adopted habit path I’ve seen fellow founders pursue is to sit down, crack the laptop, slam a Red Bull or coffee, open up Hacker News/TC, and wallow around for a bit reading whatever…
“A startup can maximize its speed of progress by keeping the 5 core dimensions of a startup Customer, Product, Team, Business Model and Financials in balance. The art of high growth entrepreneurship is to master the chaos of getting each of these 5 dimensions to move in time and concert with one another. Most startup failures can be explained by one or more of these dimensions falling out of tune with the others. In our dataset we found that 70% of startups scaled prematurely along some dimension. While this number seemed high, this may go a long way towards explaining the 90% failure rate of startups.”
—
The No. 1 reason startups fail: Premature scaling - GeekWire
We’ve completed the Startup Genome Report, and got some VERY useful analysis. We’re above average on every metric included (yes!).
However, that’s still not good enough.
The report is designed and delivered around a core survey document, designed to be filled out by one executive/founder, and apparently that’s usually the CEO.
But I think greater utility for the report lies not in the initial benchmarking and REACTIVE analysis (ie I answer the questions and it gives us a report on how we’re doing relative to our fellow startup folk) but rather in its potential use as a PROACTIVE, whole team, in-depth, metric-oriented, data-driven planning tool.
At Habit Labs, we need to complete the whole Startup Genome Report again, *as a team.*
Sounds like a perfect activity to do on a retreat to celebrate Health Month’s first anniversary (October 7, 2011)…
“Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. Crucible into which Destiny casts a man whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demigod. For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.”
— from Les Miserables shared over email from a friend who knows how to turn small struggles into great deeds. (via brycedotvc)
Fab.com Flash Sale. Black “Hi” T-shirt, 60% off
Buster Benson, this tee was made for team Habit Labs…
“Goals are very personal; success, attainment is social…”
— Amy Jo Kim
Bustr Bensn: Announcing Habit Labs!
I have something very exciting to tell you! (I love when I can start a post with that line.)
My one-man shop, Health Month, started almost exactly a year ago, is growing! I’ve merged my company into Jen McCabe’s Contagion Health, and formed a new company called Habit Labs!
Also, we…
(Source: bustr)
“
Rather than ask complex, high-cost institutions and expensive, specialized professionals to move down-market, we need to look at the problem in a very different way.
Managers and technologies need to focus instead on enabling less expensive professionals to do progressively more sophisticated things in less expensive settings.
*Exactly what Habit Labs is building with curated health…
”— Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Health Care? - Sponsored by GE - Harvard Business Review
