A Founder's Notebook

How do you find out what a referee really thinks about your candidate when they often don’t want to say anything negative about the person? Someone called me about a job candidate who had worke...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/reference-checks-is-this-the-best-question-to-ask/

Edited excerpt from The Power of Two by Susan Heitler, PhD: Speak in short segments. In effective dialogue, each speaker generally offers brief comments rather than trying to say too much at once...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/15/how-to-talk-so-people-can-listen/

Edited excerpt from The Power of Two by Susan Heitler, PhD: In contrast to what you were probably taught as a child, interruptions can be considerate. Interrupting can actually help a dialogue st...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/15/surprisingly-good-listeners-interrupt/

From a CEO who asked to remain anonymous: We all want to hire smart people. At the same time, asking an interviewer to rate candidates on how smart they are is too vague. Instead, we’ve found i...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/14/how-smart-is-this-candidate/

From Reflections on freemium by Joel Gascoigne: If you don’t get your free limits right in freemium, it just doesn’t work. However, most think about this purely in terms of being too generous...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/getting-the-free-right-in-freemium/

From Alfred Lin’s section of Sequoia’s presentation to its portfolio companies about adapting to a harder business environment: To prepare your team for the new reality: Start with why. Reaff...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/03/why-you-should-not-call-your-employees-missionaries-or-mercenaries-or-your-company-a-family/

Edited excerpt from What is a good payback period by Lenny Rachitsky: For B2C businesses, a payback period of less than 1 month is GREAT, 6 months is GOOD, and 12 months is OK. And the exceptiona...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/06/03/what-is-a-good-customer-acquisition-payback-period/

From a Twitter thread: Michael Villahermosa: What is a piece of advice a leader (civilian or military) has given you that has stuck with you? Tom Barrett: Listen to understand, not to respond. No...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/the-best-advice-for-how-to-be-a-better-listener/

Daniel Jackson is a professor of computer science at MIT, a talented photographer, and author of Portraits of Resilience. (Full disclosure: He’s also my brother.) Edited excerpt from one of his...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/how-to-be-a-great-team-member-and-person/

Yanay Sela — a superb CMO — sent me the following (edited): I learned a bunch of things in my career, but lately I’ve been noticing more clearly three things that really tweaked my professi...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/12/29/three-tips-for-managing-people/

Edited excerpts from Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds by Matt Lerner: Language/market fit is when you find the exact right words to explain y...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/12/21/how-to-find-language-market-fit-and-why-it-matters/

Edited excerpt from What is good retention by Lenny Rachitsky: We reached out to twenty of the most experienced growth practitioners we knew and asked them two simple questions: What do you consi...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/05/07/benchmarks-for-churn-retention-rates/

Edited excerpt from The Real Public Service by Dr. Thomas Sowell: Do you want to be of some use and service to your fellow human beings? Then let your fellow human beings tell you what they want�...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/24/private-companies-are-the-biggest-driver-of-progress-so-whats-your-vision/

Excerpt from 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings by Maria Popova: Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/why-you-have-to-actively-fight-cynicism/

If you are a manager, you can be far more successful if you ask yourself: For each project or initiative I’m responsible for, is it in the “figure it out” phase or the “scale” phase? Th...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/to-manage-successfully-use-this-simple-rule/

… and five questions to ask yourself after the call. Forwarded to me confidentially: Before your next call with someone, ask yourself:1. How am I feeling?2. How do I imagine they are feeling?3....

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/three-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-getting-on-a-call-with-someone/

Excerpt from What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO? by Ali Rowghani: Phase 1: A CEO’s first job is to build a great product and find a small group of people who love it and use it enthusiast...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/18/the-three-phases-of-the-life-of-a-startup-and-thus-a-founder-ceos-job/

Edited direct message sent to me by a Seeking Alpha contributor: Just wanted to send a message congratulating you on your hard choice to transition the economics of Seeking Alpha from advertising...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/to-generate-change-explicitly-identify-and-empower-change-agents/

From 10 Questions for 2020, by Chris DeMuth, hedge fund manager and author of the fast-growing SPAC investing advisory service Sifting the World: How can I use iterative conversations to harness ...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/to-learn-more-from-other-people-defer-judgment-and-ask-for-actionable-proposals/

From Answering these questions could change your life: Could the act of answering open-ended questions about yourself give you new, important insights? It turns out the answer is “yes”. After...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/questions-to-ask-yourself/

Excerpt from What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO? by Ali Rowghani: Recruiting senior executives takes an extraordinary amount of time. If you are doing it for the first time, meet lots of pe...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/14/how-to-hire-the-right-people-for-your-leadership-team/

From Jack Altman, edited: Job number 1 is get product market fit. A heuristic for everything you do can be “does this activity help me get product market fit?” You’ll know you have PMF is w...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2021/02/09/first-steps-for-founders-to-find-product-market-fit/

Edited excerpts from Engagement beats scale: Inside Morning Brew’s approach to subscriber growth by Jenny Rothenberg: Onboarding: The primary goal of our welcome email is to ensure our emails g...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/how-to-supercharge-email-newsletters/

Edited excerpts from 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Consumer Subscriptions by Nikhil Basu Trivedi: Great consumer subscription businesses have these 10 characteristics: 1. “Must Have�...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/the-10-characteristics-of-great-consumer-subscription-businesses/

From Tomasz Tunguz’ The Secret to Productive Group Meetings over Video (with edits): Say you want to brainstorm ideas for a new product you’re going to launch. Schedule a video meeting for th...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/how-to-make-a-zoom-video-meeting-spectacularly-successful/

From Redpoint’s profile of VC Tomasz Tunguz: Best learning as a founder? Things are never as good or bad as they seem. Throughout the rollercoaster ride, your have to keep your head, even if al...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2020/09/01/the-most-important-thing-to-remember-as-a-founder-ceo/

From Churn is the single metric that determines the success of your subscription service by David Packman: “There is a laundry list of optimizations subscription services implement to improve r...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/to-reduce-churn-by-more-than-2-percentage-points-you-have-to-address-product-value-and-usage/

From How Jeremy Corbyn Lost The Election – And Started The Race To Replace Him: One big problem was the sheer size of the manifesto and the number of policies on offer. Candidates complained th...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2019/12/15/what-happens-when-you-talk-about-too-many-goals/

Excerpt from How to Succeed in Business? Do Less by Morten T. Hansen: Most top performers in business have one thing in common: They accept fewer tasks and then obsess over getting them right. Th...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/the-key-to-success-do-less/

Edited excerpt from Lean Startup’s Eric Ries on How to Make ‘Gatekeepers’ a Source of Power and Speed: Eric Ries calls functions like Legal, Finance, IT, and HR “gatekeepers”: Gatekee...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/how-to-manage-legal-finance-it-and-hr-to-enable-you-to-move-fast/

In his book How To Be An Effective Executive, Peter Drucker identifies five key habits of effective executives: 1. Manage time. Use a three-step process: (i) Track your time use, and eliminate ti...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/five-key-takeaways-from-peter-druckers-how-to-be-an-effective-executive/

Edited excerpt from Why Retention Is The Silent Killer by Brian Balfour: When I ask someone from a SaaS business, or another subscription model business, about their retention, I almost always ...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/why-revenue-retention-is-the-wrong-operating-metric-to-combat-churn/

Edited excerpt from How Meredith built Allrecipes into a digital-to-print, multichannel success by Cobus Heyl: When designing each experience, we look to the unique strength of each medium. Web ...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-habits/

Excerpt from The One Growth Metric that Moves Acquisition, Monetization, and Virality by Brian Balfour: Most people think retention is so crucial simply because it means you lose fewer users tha...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/improving-retention-helps-growth-in-4-ways/

Excerpt from The Front of the Jersey by Doug Weaver: Call out the elephant in the room. “We both know that you won’t necessarily always work here…” can be the phrase that really opens up...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/four-ways-to-show-you-care-about-your-teams-careers/

Excerpt from How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting: A Board Meeting for Product by former VP/CPO at Netflix and Chegg, Gibon Biddle: I think the most important job of a product leader...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/the-most-important-job-of-a-product-leader/

Excerpt from Subscription Business Models Are Great for Some Businesses and Terrible for Others by Robbie Kellman Baxter: I love freemium, the idea of combining a premium paid membership with a f...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/when-freemium-makes-sense/

I was chatting with someone who ran HR for a Fortune 500 company and is now an HR consultant. “What are managers’ biggest mistakes in HR?”, I asked him. “And what’s your best advice...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/05/10/managers-biggest-hr-mistake-and-how-to-fix-it/

Edited excerpt from How to Become Insanely Well-Connected by Chris Fralic: 1. Convey genuine appreciation — think about what they know that you don’t. 2. Listen with intent — demonstrate ...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/chris-fralics-7-rules-for-making-memorable-connections/

Edited excerpt from The Right Sales Metrics For Your SaaS Startup, an interview with Jason Lemkin: Q: You share a lot of advice about business growth on your blog, Saastr.com, taken from your own...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/04/03/if-you-have-any-paying-customers-dont-quit/

Yesterday I ran a workshop for seed stage startups about how to use the Job To Be Done framework to raise their chances of achieving product-market fit. The surprise: many seed stage startups a...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/job-to-be-done-for-seed-stage-startups-jtbd/

Maoz is a not for profit which helps leaders in the Israeli public sector make better decisions by inviting input from a network of smart volunteers. This is how they conduct their brainstormin...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/a-better-format-for-brainstorming/

Edited excerpt from 1 Interview Question That Cuts Through the BS to Reveal Someone’s True Character by Betsy Mikel: Organizational psychologist Adam Grant says that the more often people help...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/how-to-find-out-in-an-interview-if-someone-is-a-giver-or-a-taker/

From The School of Life, via The Difficult Art of Self-Compassion by Maria Popova: To survive in this high-pressured, crazy world, most of us have to become highly adept at self-criticism. We le...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/11/23/dont-let-self-criticism-become-self-flagellation/

Excerpt from the Startup Genome Report — A new framework for understanding why startups succeed: 1. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached pro...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/vcs-make-two-common-errors-the-data-shows/

Edited excerpt from MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up by Farhad Manjoo: Start-ups fueled by venture capital often need to figure out how to run like ordinary busi...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/how-money-can-mess-up-your-startup/

Edited excerpt from I Used to Be a Human Being by Andrew Sullivan: Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak —...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/can-digital-products-leave-space-for-silence/

Here are three company descriptions. In which is the value proposition for customers clearest, and why? How would you improve them? CliClap helps you generate sales leads by sharing article...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/does-your-company-description-resonate-with-potential-customers/

Edited excerpt from Startup founders’ most common mistake in meetings — and how to avoid it: Before you talk with someone, set a target for what % of the conversation you want them to be tal...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/if-you-want-to-be-a-better-listener-heres-a-simple-tip/

Edited excerpt from Eurekalert: Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of cu...

https://davidjaxon.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/how-your-mood-at-the-start-of-the-day-impacts-your-productivity/