DocSend publishes an annual study of how investors read pitch decks that tracks time-on-slide, page-by-page engagement, the correlation between specific slides and whether a founder receives a follow-up meeting. It is one of the few pieces of data in the fundraising world that goes beyond what inves...

The minimum viable product is one of the most consistently misapplied ideas in the startup world. The concept is clear enough — build the smallest thing that lets you test your most important assumption — but what founders actually build under that label is often not minimum, rarely designed aro...

Most founders know their runway number. They can tell you, to the nearest month, how long the company has at its current burn rate before the bank account runs out. What is considerably rarer is a founder who treats burn rate as a live strategic variable rather than a financial constraint they monit...

Product-market fit is one of the most used phrases in the startup world and one of the least precisely defined. Ask five experienced founders what it means and you will get five different answers, most of which are correct in some partial sense. The definitional looseness matters, because it creates...

VentureFactory 2.2: Meet the brain behind the machine. If you've ever hired a brilliant team and then spent half your week deciding who should do what, you know the real bottleneck in building a company isn't talent - it's judgement. Knowing which task needs a five-minute gut call and which one need...

Every startup business plan guide eventually tells you the same thing: executive summary, market analysis, competitive landscape, financial projections, appendix. The advice is not wrong. The problem is that by the time most founders finish following it, they have produced a document built to be rea...

For several thousand years, humanity has been attempting to remove human beings from anything tedious. We invented writing because memory was unreliable, spreadsheets because arithmetic was exhausting, SatNav because nobody wanted to admit they had missed the turning, and management consultants beca...

The first ten customers are different from the hundred that come later. You have no reputation to borrow from, no useful volume of customer data and probably no case studies proving that the product works. What you do have is the founder, a problem you believe is worth solving and a small number of ...

September NewsFlash - LettsGroup AI VentureFactory and its Ventures. LettsGroup AI VentureFactory has now passed 130 registered businesses, with the platform currently running at a rate of more than 300 new startups and scale-up customers a year. That figure is where the trend line currently poin...

AI is making it remarkably cheap to act on an idea. A founder can research a market, produce a prototype, write a campaign or construct a financial model without assembling the sort of team that would once have been required. This is plainly useful. It also creates a slightly uncomfortable problem: ...