Category: Venturing, Entrepreneurship, Innovating
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Failing fast isn’t always easy for startups when tackling complexity or inertia
“Gain traction fast, or fail fast and move on”. All start-ups hear this. The logic behind this is sound: if enough users attach to a product, the need must be strong enough to back. Then, it becomes a race hinged on marketing and viable customer acquisition. Create website, build prototype, beta and MVP. Get early…
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Why are business payments in the US still analog?
NACHA in the US recently approved same day ACH, something consumers and businesses in the UK take for granted. There is plenty if activity in person to person payments, mobile wallets etc. We can save the last 10 feet of effort to buy a coffee, or having to even dig into our wallets for a…
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I summarized some of the bumps/lessons that, despite being ‘common sense’ still had to be experienced. Sales cycles: As a startup, everyone makes you wait and everything seems to move at a glacial pace. Banks and corporations take time. We all ‘know’ this but yet the world of enterprise…
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 1
In the previous post, I listed some of the bumps we could have avoided. In this second part, I’ve summarized some of the lessons that, while easy to dismiss as common sense, would need to have been experienced one way or another. Unanticipated, Harder to Avoid Lessons 1. Immunity to Change: This is always the…
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5 bumps my banking experience didn’t avoid in my fintech startup
I’d like to think we did a few things really well in our fintech start-up, Bilbus. And, of course, we made our share of mistakes. In between, there were a lot of things we could have done better. Good timing forgives mistakes. Bad timing highlights them. It’s easier to simplify some of our lessons learned…
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How well do we absorb and strengthen from failure?
The medallions of our failures nestle closely to us through the seasons. Whether slight, or solid, invisible or gleaming, these battle trophies remind us of lessons learned, fruitless journeys and tangential epiphanies. I grew up in a time and place when failure attached itself to you, finding its way into the sense of self, as…
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Closing a chapter
Sometimes we get an opportunity to reset, reorganize and push ahead. Timing, funding, team: all the pitons that slow the start-up climb up the cliff. And sometimes, the climb isn’t the one you set out on and it would be quicker to start again using lessons learned, than to try to pivot from the current…
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Here’s to another interesting year
I say this a lot. Time flies! Here we are and another year whizzed by! 12+ months ago I took our start-up in a different direction, turning off functionality, changing the business model and rearranging the product set. Months were spent diving deep into unravelling the reason for so many curious but unengaged users.…