While this may seem like a great time to launch a CS startup, according to fast Venture’s seed-level investor, Landscape is crowded with designed applications that promise an “obviously fast and pleasantly easy” experience. Most SaaS startups will fail, but not because of a talk marketing promotion or server downtime. Most of these companies would call Chen a “story of a frictionless ship.”
Despite the hype about ease of use, enterprise firms are always asking customers to leave familiar tools so they can learn something new. “Just like a new fitness program, participants feel better after a workout, but it takes a lot of activation energy to get started and hard work to get there,” Chen comments. Instead of turning customers away, he suggested that sauce startups learn from the cryptocurrency culture and find ways to “encourage users to do the necessary work to gain the right experience.”
But how do you encourage users to put in the time and effort needed to create the best customer experience? “In a world where there is a surplus of options for doing every job, very little resources are content, not tools or hacks and tricks,” Chen says. “It’s attention.” We have a holiday on Monday 31st May to commemorate Memorial Day; I hope you have a leisure weekend!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Fundraising has moved from a formal affair on Sand Hill Road to a process that can happen anywhere from Twitter to zoom, as start-ups and venture capital have grown. Fundraising may not require a trip to California right now, but it depends on whether you’re invited to a private audio app and you can’t have any internal, second-time founders – mainly male and white – still have competitive advantage.
The growing complexity of fundraising has the potential to include or exclude technology. The VC is a flashy gold medal, but the rapid growth of emerging fund managers means the first check can be sliced together from a variety of sources. Financing options seemingly endless: syndicates, public crowdfunding, VCs, accelerators, debt financing, rolling funds, and bootstrapping for a few profitable people.
