The Next Web

After the Funding Checklist

Written on April 16, 2008 – 12:09 pm
Mark Schiefelbein, Product Management Consultant

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

Several people have asked me to turn the “After the Funding” posts into a document for offline reading. I thought this was a good idea and hope that the document will be a useful checklist for all startups having received funding recently and making plans for the next phase.

Here is a link to a PDF document that provides details on the following five crucial guidelines for recently funded startups:

• Base Decision-Making on Long-Term Strategy instead of Short-Term Constraints
• Set-up a Repeatable Sales Process First, Then Expand Sales Force
• Align Business and Technology around a Product Roadmap
• Establish a Product Heartbeat – a Continual Rapid-Fire Release Plan
• Build a Team that is Smart and Gets Things Done

I will be back in May with more advice on how to unlock startup growth. In the meantime I would be quite curious to hear about what you consider the most significant challenges in the post-funding stage. Strategy? Sales expansion? Roadmap? Releases? Teams? What are the three challenges that keep you awake at night?

after the funding, startups

About the author: Mark is founder of agilician, an Amsterdam-based consultancy that unlocks startup growth. He has advised numerous startups on questions involving strategy, positioning, roadmap, process and team. He previously held management positions at startups across Europe including Backbase and Tridion.

Post that could be related to this post:
Checkser.com: checklists database in the making

After the Funding: Base Decision-Making on Long-Term Strategy instead of Short-Term Constraints

After the Funding: Establish a Product Heartbeat – a Continual Rapid-Fire Release Plan

After the Funding: Align Business and Technology around a Product Roadmap

After the Funding: Set-up a Repeatable Sales Process First, Then Expand Sales Force