So you want to make a hit product. How do you know if your plan is a good one? How do you maximize your chances of success? 

Releasing a new hit product is the best thing any company can do to grow and attract investment. A hit product can grow revenue and users exponentially with very little (or no) marketing investment and can be the rocket fuel behind a company’s ascent for years (think iPhone). 

And yet very few products succeed at being the rocket boosters they could be. Most new products either produce only incremental gains that don’t justify the time and expense of getting them to market, or actually turn out worse than the current product, or never ship at all. 

Building something users don't want to use is the number one reason start-ups fail. I believe this is entirely avoidable…

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Every year around this time you'll find me alone in a cabin in the woods.

The reason is I like to take a day or two, clear space in my calendar, and plan the year ahead.

The goal is to get perspective on where I've been, recenter myself on where I'd like to go, and then use the resulting high-altitude perspective to plan out the route I'll take for this next year.  

I’ve refined this process over the last few years and it's incredibly useful for me.  I'd love for you to try it out and let me know how it goes.  

So here goes: 

What you’ll need: blank white paper, pencil, pen, colored markers or pencils, tape, a stapler, a file folder, your preferred journaling system (either digital or paper), and any notes from previous “Year In Review”s.

Here are the ten steps: ...

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A business is either sustainable or it isn’t. For a business to survive it needs to be sustainable. Meaning it needs to make a profit, or easily be able to make a profit by cutting expenses or investments. 

Most startups are not sustainable, and that’s why everyone at them is so stressed, because they can sense impending death. 

This stress causes people at unsustainable companies to do dumb things. Focus on the wrong stuff. Make matters worse. This stress is a big part of why so many startups die.

It’s like you're staying at a cabin in the woods...

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Welcome to my guide on how to give great gifts! I've received a lot of feedback in my life that I give good gifts, so I thought I'd write down how I do it as a gift to you. I hope you enjoy the 7G! 

(and if you have someone on your list who likes innovative lighting, check out DiscoChristmas)

Preface: The Power of Gifts

Gifts are powerful. Gifts can bring joy, cement relationships, and even change the world.

A great gift is sometimes remembered forever, maybe even cherished lovingly after your death.

A great gift can...

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Rigorous Speaking is a conscious practice of choosing words that are consistent with what we really mean, and the world we want to create. Simply put it’s the practice of being intentional with the words we use.

Since words create our world, and we get to consciously choose our words, every time we open our mouths we have the opportunity to shape the world we are creating.

Rigorous Speaking is one of my Linguistic Assets.

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What does the coronavirus pandemic mean for you as a founder raising money? How do you navigate this new landscape? Will funding dry up? Or are there new opportunities being created?

My mission is to help founders succeed at fundraising so they can help create a better world, and these questions have been top of mind for me and my team these last few weeks.

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A few weeks ago this press release went out and made public the news that Kindara (the company I founded with Kati Bicknell) was acquired acquired by Prima-Temp, another Boulder-based women’s health company.

This marks the end of a big chapter of my life, and I feel a mix of emotions announcing the news.

In 2009, a few months after I met Kati, we started talking about birth control. I asked her about going on the pill but she was having none of it.

She introduced me to fertility charting and the Fertility Awareness Method instead. When I was skeptical, she gave me a (big) book to read.

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Let's talk about step two. So step two is practicing your pitch. What this means is when you've got your pitch to the point where you truly believe in everything you're saying and you've done all your research and homework, now you're going to go out and practice the heck out of it with real people…

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Today in the shower I mentally crystallized a really simple way to think about making a lot of money. 

First, I was contemplating the fact that money is not inherently valuable of itself. It's just ones and zeros on a screen or dirty paper in your wallet. What money is, is an idea that we use to signify value. And this is key: Value is what's valuable. 

So an easy way to think about creating wealth is to break it into two steps: 

First, create something of value and

Second, get the value you create to a lot of people.

And that's all there is too it. 

It's simple really, and mirrors my favorite Peter Drucker quote "Business is Innovation and Marketing". 

So which is harder? creating value or distributing it to a lot of people. For me, it's...

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