Kateryna Pysmenna

The principles of customer development were devised by Steve Blank way back in the 1990s. So why does every third startup continue to fail because of ignoring them? Customer development tends to be a painful process. It requires startup founders to shift their mindset. Instead of blindly believing that their ideas and gut feelings are rock-solid, they need to find gaps in their ideas, prove themselves wrong, and invalidate their hypotheses. Who wants to beat themselves up of their own will?

You have a brilliant startup idea. But guess what? So do your competitors. What really matters is that your potential customers notice you. Your product either has to meet customer needs that have been unmet by competitors or serve customers in a better way than existing solutions. In this post, we’ll show you how to conduct a competitor analysis that will allow your startup to find the right spot in the market. Why do you need to conduct a competitor analysis? Find the five top brands

To keep afloat, every startup needs to be profitable. In theory, all you need to do is maximize the difference between the cost of production and the marketing costs for your product or service. In practice, just as you can’t reduce the cost of production to zero, you can’t endlessly increase your marketing costs because of competitors and the solvency of your target customers. How to find the right balance between expenses and revenues that will make your business viable? There’s one possible

Like most entrepreneurs, you believe in your startup’s success. But what if this belief is blind? Picture this. After spending 18 months and $70,000 on launching your new business, you recognize that revenue doesn’t meet your expectations and never will. The market is too small, the competition is too high, there are too few paying customers. Is there no way for startup owners to avoid financial losses and frustration? In this article we will dive deep into how to do market research for st

Want to improve your real estate business, get an unfair advantage over your competitors, or entice solid investors? In this article, we consider real estate tech startups in 2025 that have already raised millions in funding along with five technology trends that lie behind them. What PropTech startups are attracting VCs? Heightened interest in technology investment is no longer a novelty for the real estate market. The Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI) reported that in

Entrepreneurs have mixed opinions of software development outsourcing these days, and for good reason. The failure of a payroll app development project outsourced to IBM in 2007 cost the Queensland health department $1.2 billion. On the other hand, outsourcing development to the US allowed Jack Ma Yun, the founder of the Chinese company Alibaba, to bring in $60+ billion in revenue in 2021. What did Ma know that Queensland Health didn’t? In this article, you’ll figure out how to reduce the ri

Building MVP is no simple task. Startup founders face great disappointment when, after months of exhausting work and large sums of money spent, their company fails to withstand the fierce market competition. Here’s what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us about the survival rate of private sector establishments: * 20% of new businesses fail in the first year. * 34% of businesses close within the first two years. * More than 50% of businesses remaining after the second year close by