Founder's Toolbox

Founder's Toolbox

Founder's Toolbox

At Go Grow we know how important it is for your startup to have the best possible resources for every stage of your business’s growth. So we have chosen the following key areas and selected what we feel will be valuable knowledge for you.

Resources contain scholarly articles and books by experts, reputable websites, useful blogs and videos of high standard, online tools and guidelines.

Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business. Growth hacking refers to a set of both conventional and unconventional marketing experiments that lead to growth of a business.

Bowles, M. (2012). The Business of Hacking and Birth of an Industry. Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol.17(3)

Chandrashekhar, U. & Nelson, S. (2012). Delivering network assurance through secure and reliable solutions. Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol.17(3)

Growth Hackers – A Community for Growth – Focused Marketers – a purpose-built growth collaboration platform

Copy Hackers – Copywriting and Conversation Rate Optimizing support

SaaS Growth Strategies – Marketing, Customer Acquisition & Churn Reduction Consulting for SaaS providers

Grow Your Website – Google Analysis and suggestions for customer growth opportunities

Sujan Patel – Optimizing the Human Race

The Lifecycle Blog – App Marketing, User Retention and Onboarding

Online Workshop by crunched.com

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leading firms, products and alliances. The term was defined and phenomenon analyzed by Clayton M. Christensen beginning in 1995.

Bower, J. L. & Christensen, C. M. (1995). Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave. Harvard Business Review, 73. No. 1

Christensen, C. M. (2008). Reinventing Your Business Model. Harvard Business Review, 50.

Christensen, C. M., Raynor, M. A., McDonald, R. (December 2015). What Is Disruptive Innovation? Harvard Business Review. 

Christensen, C. M. (2003). The innovator’s dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

Christensen, C. M., & Raynor, M. E. (2013). The innovator’s solution: Creating and sustaining successful growth. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press.

Peer-reviewed chapter on Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen with public commentaries

Clayton Christiansen – Key Concepts

Innovative Distruption – a consultancy specialized in applying disruption theory to create economic value and strategic growth opportunities.

Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards 

The Explainer – Disruptive Innovation – Explanation by Harvard Business Review (2 min.)

‪Disruptive Innovation Explained – Harvard Business Review and Clayton Christiansen (8 min.)

The central hypothesis of the lean startup methodology is that if startup companies invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers, they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches and failures.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort (similar to a pilot experiment).

Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review, 91, 5.

Leanstack – a collection of tools, content, and coaching resources

The Lean Launchpad – How to Build a Startup

Having a customer focus is usually a strong contributor to the overall success of a business and involves ensuring that all aspects of the company put its customers’ satisfaction first.

Customer Discovery, Customers Acquisition and Customer Validation are the customer-related themes we have selected for you.

Go-to-market or go-to-market strategy is the plan of an organization, utilizing their inside and outside resources (e.g. sales force and distributors), to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage.

Friedman, L. G. (2002). Go To Market Strategy. Burlington: Elsevier.

Rangan, V.K. (2006). Transforming your go-to-market strategy: the three disciplines of channel management.

Piercy, N. (2009). Market-led strategic change: Transforming the process of going to market. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Understanding Bottom Up Market Sizing by Nicole Camarre – Investment Associate

Go-to-Market Strategy – Entrepreneurship 101 2012/13

“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

– Henry Ford

Porter-O’Grady, T. et al (2006). Constructing a Team Model, Creating a Foundation for Evidence-based Teams. Nurseing Administration Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3

Laurent, S. (2006). Managing creative projects: An empirical synthesis of activities.International Journal of Project Management , 24

Kets, V. M. F. R. (2013). The Hedgehog Effect: The Secrets of Building High Performance Teams. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Different scenarios for financing in the startup stage of a firm – Venture capital financing, Crowdfunding, Angel investment and Bootstrapping.

Davila, A., & Foster, G. (January). Venture capital financing and the growth of startup firms. Journal of Business Venturing, 18, 6, 689-708.

Elitzur, R., & Gavious, A. (2003). Contracting, signaling, and moral hazard: A model of entrepreneurs, “angels”, and venture capitalists. Journal of Business Venturing, 18, 6, 709-725.

Chang, S. J. (2004). Venture capital financing, strategic alliances, and the initial public offerings of internet startups. Journal of Business Venturing, 19, 5, 2004.

Feld, B., Mendelson, J., & Costolo, D. (2013). Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, 2nd Edit. John Wiley & Sons.

Gianforte, G., & Gibson, M. (2005). Bootstrapping your business: Start and grow a successful company with almost no money. Avon, Mass: Adams Media.

Funding your startup: Crowdfunding vs. angel investment vs. VC

Bootstrapping + Lean Startup = Low-burn Startup

Benefit from a selection of articles and books on leadership and expand and redefine your leadership skills.

Amabile, T. A., & Khaire, M. (October 2008). Creativity and the role of the leader. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.101-109

Goffee, R., & Jones, G. (September-October 2000). Why Should Anyone be Led by You? Harvard Business Review. 63-70

Hill,L., Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., & Lineback, K. (June 2014). Collective Genius. Harvard Business Review.

Kelley, R. (November 1988). In Praise of Followers. Harvard Business Review. 142-148

Simon, L. (2006). Managing creative projects: An empirical synthesis of activities. International Journal of Project Management 24, 2: 116-126

Waldroop, J. & Butler, T. (September 2000). Managing Away Bad Habits. Harvard Business Review.

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

Boynton, A. C., & Fischer, B. (2005). Virtuoso teams: Lessons from teams that changed their worlds. Harlow, England: FT Prentice Hall.

The creation of products with new or different characteristics that offer new or additional benefits to the customer. Product development may involve modification of an existing product or its presentation, or formulation of an entirely new product that satisfies a newly defined customer want or market niche.

Barczak, G., & Kahn, K. B. (May 01, 2012). Identifying new product development best practice. Business Horizons, 55, 3, 293-305.

Verganti, R. (1999). Planned flexibility, linking anticipation and reaction in product development projects. Journal of product innovation management, vol. 16, no. 4

Blanks, S. (2005). The Four Steps to get to the Epiphany.

Cagan, M. (2008). Inspired: How to create products customers love. Sunnyvale, California: SVPG Press.

Merholz, P., & Adaptive Path (Firm). (2008). Subject to change: Creating great products and services for an uncertain world. Sebastopol, Calif: O’Reilly Media.

Verganti, R. (2009). Design-driven innovation: Changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.

Social entrepreneurship is the use of the techniques by start up companies and other entrepreneurs to develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. This concept may be applied to a variety of organizations with different sizes, aims, and beliefs.

Hamschmidt, J. & Pirson, M. (2011). Case studies in social entrepreneurship and sustainability:The Oikos collection. Greenleaf Publishing.

Dees, G.J., Emerson, J. & Economy, P. (2001). Enterprising nonprofits: A toolkit for social entrepreneurship. John Wiley & Sons.

Barinaga, E. (2014). Social entrepreneurship: Cases and concepts. Lund: Studentlitteratur. 

Bornstein, D., & Davis, S. (2010). Social entrepreneurship: What everyone needs to know. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bjerke, B., Karlsson, M., & Edward Elgar Publishing. (2013). Social entrepreneurship: To act as if and make a difference. Northampton, Mass: E. Elgar Pub.

Bornstein, D. (2007). How to change the world: Social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas. Oxford University Press.

Become a Social Entrepreneur – Coursera – Copenhagen Business School

Acquire an essential marketing toolbox, covering themes of Viral Marketing, Content Marketing, Search Engine Marketing and Optimization, Email Marketing and more.

Jutkowitz, A. (2014). The Content Marketing Revolution. Harvard Business Review.

Westergaard, N. (2016). Your Content Marketing Strategy Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated. Harvard Business Review.

Beel, J., Gipp, B., & Eilde, E. (January 06, 2010). Academic Search Engine Optimization ( ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 41, 2, 176-190.

Vero – The Ultimate Guide To Successful Email Marketing by Chris Hexton

Litmus blog – Email Marketing Blog

Gregory Ciotti – A Not-So-Brief Guide to Better Content Marketing

Practical Ecommerce – The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

Startup Marketing – A blog about unlocking startup growth by Sean Ellis

Business development entails tasks and processes to develop and implement growth opportunities within and between organizations. It is a subset of the fields of business, commerce and organizational theory.

A pitch typically takes the form of an entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs presenting or describing their ideas to prospective investors. An elevator pitch is simply a very short pitch that distils the idea into a short summary that takes only as long as a short elevator ride.

Soorjoo, M. (2012). Here’s the pitch: How to pitch your business to anyone, get funded and win clients. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley.