The U.S. Small Business Administration is celebrating National Small Business Week from April 28 - May 4, 2024. This week recognizes and celebrates the small business community’s significant contributions to the nation. Organizations across the country participate by hosting in-person and virtual events, recognizing small business leaders and change-makers, and highlighting resources that help the small business community more easily and efficiently start and scale their businesses.
To add to the festivities, this NIST Cybersecurity Insights blog showcases the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 Small Business Quick Start Guide, a new resource designed to help the small and medium-sized business (SMB) community begin to manage and reduce their cybersecurity risks. You’ve worked hard to start and grow your business. Are you taking the steps necessary to protect it? As small businesses have become more reliant upon data and technology to operate and scale a modern business, cybersecurity has become a fundamental risk that must be addressed alongside other business risks. This Guide is designed to help.
The last few years have brought unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and evolution for companies of all sizes. The middle market is no exception. In fact, the pandemic served as an accelerator for a number of initiatives that were perhaps just wishes and dreams for mid-sized companies a handful of years ago, but are now very much the reality for these businesses today. By far, no other force is driving more significant change, and subsequent ramifications, than digital transformation.
Prioritization is a perennial challenge when building a product roadmap. How do you decide what to work on first?
If you’ve put the effort into brainstorming new ideas, finding opportunities for improvement, and collecting feedback, you’ll have a solid product roadmap full of good ideas. But the order in which you tackle those ideas deserves just as much thought. You need to take the time to prioritize well.
So why is prioritizing a product roadmap so difficult? Let me count the ways:
Even if you make it through this mental minefield intact, you’re left with the tough task of consistently combining and comparing these factors across all project ideas. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this in your head.
This article is by Dee Sahni. Dee was Head of Monetization at Clutter and VP of Product at Figment. She spent 6 years in ad-tech at Google and Quantcast. She also advises companies on pricing, packaging and business models.
It was midnight. Sam was two months into a new job when he received a call from the CFO, asking for a nationwide price hike. Sam worked at a luxury goods startup, with prices at the top tier of the market. A 30% price hike on an already premium product seemed excessive. But it was a new job and Sam was eager to impress. "Raise prices to increase LTV. This is going to be an easy gig."
Founders dream of building a captivating product that customers are clamoring to buy. Whether it’s a consumer product or a SaaS tool, no one sets out to start a company and sell a product that’s just a nice-to-have — and it’s certainly not the path to building a thriving, lasting business.
And yet, time and time again, products fail to catch on. The sales cycles take too long, and deals linger without being able to close. The user base isn’t growing much, and customers aren’t getting compounding value out of the product. Word of mouth doesn’t spread. Why? What’s going wrong?
We’ve all heard that product-market fit drives startup success — and that the lack thereof is what’s lurking behind almost every failure.
For founders, achieving product-market fit is an obsession from day one. It’s both the hefty hurdle we’re racing to clear and the festering fear keeping us up at night, worried that we’ll never make it. But when it comes to understanding what product-market fit really is and how to get there, most of us quickly realize that there isn’t a battle-tested approach.
In the summer of 2017, I was waist-deep in my search for a way to find product-market fit for my startup, Superhuman. Turning to the classic blog posts and seminal thought pieces, a few observations stuck out to me. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham described product-market fit as when you’ve made something that people want, while Sam Altman characterized it as when users spontaneously tell other people to use your product.
