How to make your business recession-proof

The Recession-Proof Playbook

App development agency Krit asked a handful of founders—including yours truly—for advice on how startups can get through a recession. This playbook covers it all: How to find opportunities in an economic downturn, how to de-risk your business, why self care is so important when running a startup, and more. If you're building a company and you only read one thing this week, let it be this recession-proof playbook. 

Stripe: The Internet's Most Undervalued Company

"Stripe is a payments company that describes itself using the word 'infrastructure.' It doesn't get more boring than that in tech, and yet, Stripe is fanatically adored." It's also crazy underrated and undervalued. This is a fantastic teardown that explains Stripe's business strategy and what might be ahead for the multi-billion-dollar payment processing company. 

Box CEO Aaron Levie on Trump, the Tech Giants, and the Stock Market

Box CEO Aaron Levie recently shared his thoughts on why the current economy is unsustainable, why we're experiencing a fairly artificial acceleration of a marketplace, and how he really feels about the tech giants. I appreciate Aaron's candor and found his perspective to be thought-provoking—it's rare to get this level of honesty from the CEO of a public company. Do you agree with his perspective on the state of the U.S. economy? 

Forecasting Sales in a Product-Led Business

Forecasting sales has always been a challenge for companies, but it's become even more complicated with the rising popularity of the product-led growth model. This model requires little (if any) traditional sales interaction. If you run a SaaS business with a product-led motion along with a traditional sale-led approach, things can get confusing quickly. This post explores how you can create a hybrid forecasting model that takes both approaches into account. 

Post a Link to Your Product and We'll Suggest Where to Acquire New Users

This thread on Indie Hackers is fascinating. You can post a link to your product, along with your business objective and where you're currently acquiring new customers, and get suggestions on the acquisition channels you should be focused on moving forward. A lot of the advice is spot-on. Bonus: I discovered several interesting startups I hadn't heard of before. I think you'll find this as interesting as I did. 

How and Why I Launched Roam

Conor White-Sullivan founded Roam, which is a note taking tool for networked thought. He recently did an interview with Harry Stebbings on the 20 Minute VC podcast explaining why he started the company, how it became cult software, and why he chooses to live with his team (seriously). If you've never heard of Roam before, you'll want to learn more about it by the time you're done listening to this podcast episode. 

Not All Net Dollar Retention Is Created Equal

Often, metrics can be misleading if you're not careful about how you track and apply meaning to them. This is certainly the case with Net Dollar Retention (NDR), which is typically defined as today's ARR divided by ARR from the same set of customers 12 months ago. NDR is a helpful metric for understanding annual growth and net churn, but you first have to understand all the drivers that impact this metric. Here are the four main ones. 

6 Small Steps for Handling the Emotional Ups and Downs at Work

If this year has taught us anything, it's that plans and priorities can change in an instant. Along with those changes often comes a rollercoaster of emotions at work. If you've been feeling the ups and downs of this year, make sure you read this. These six steps are tactical things you can do to better understand your emotions, clear through emotional fog, and cultivate abundant thinking.