Note: This is not investment advice. At heart, I’m a value investor, and Tesla is no value investment. I view it as a binary venture-type bet. I am a shareholder. I believe that Tesla is one of the most misunderstood (and most exciting) tech companies right now. After I rented a Model S for a…
Tag: Startups
Investing Lessons from Running a Startup
[This is an edited version of a talk I recently gave at a MOI Global event.] I’d like to share some of the lessons I learned from being a startup founder, and how these can be applied to investing: Lesson 1: I’m a better investor because I was a founder As Warren Buffett famously said:…
15 Years of (Failed) Side Projects
When writing about the hyper-niche strategy, I thought back to all my own side projects. In this post, I offer a brief post-mortem for each one, so you can learn from my mistakes and don’t repeat them. (There were even more projects, but these were the main ones.) Webmaster forum (2003-2015)While this started as a…
Why You Should Go Hyper-Niche
Since the agricultural, and more recently the industrial revolution, specialization has been one of the key drivers of human economic progress. It allows for a unique win-win situation: You focus on what you do best. I do what I do best. Then we trade. In total, we produce better and more things, which keeps increasing…
31 Takeaways from START Summit 2019
My main motivation for going to START Summit 2019 was to meet old friends and acquaintances from the St. Gallen area, but also to learn from the talks. I was positively surprised. It ended up to be one of the best and most innovative tech/startup conferences I have ever attended. Check out the opening video…
Growth Hacking 101
Usually, marketing focuses on getting new people into the door. Online marketing is great, because you can measure conversions. But that is not enough. If you take a closer look at your metrics, you may discover that up to 90% of your signups / downloads / free-trials don’t get active. Your bucket has holes. So…
Calculate your customer lifetime value
How to calculate the customer lifetime value of your internet business: Use a simple cohort analysis Take e.g. 1000 users that signed up 24 months ago, sum up the total revenue generated by these users, and calculate the average revenue per signup Do the same for users that signed up 12 months and 6 months ago Based…
Startups don’t die, they fade away
One of the most unfulfilling things I have done is to hold on to projects for too long. Especially projects where I’ve lost my commitment. Now I have a simple rule: Move forward, or move on. Fading away is not an option! After starting Trigami, our project Ayom was in limbo for a full 8…
Obsess about growth
Here are two fantastic posts from Y Combinator‘s Sam Altman and Paul Graham. Startup advice, briefly: Basically everything what Sam Altman knows, condensed in a very short and excellent post. Do things that don’t scale: Excellent essay by Paul Graham Key parts: “Listen to what your users tell you, improve your product, and then listen again. Keep…
ZenFriend looking for new owner
Update: We have found a great new home for ZenFriend. The project will be in good hands and live on! In the past two years the ZenFriend app has grown to 41.232 downloads. Together we have completed 126.250 hours of meditation in 380.634 sessions. Wow! For me ZenFriend was always a side-project. I never wanted…