Eric Marcoullier

90% of startups fail.

They fail because founders make the same logical-sounding and disastrous mistakes over and over.

I’m here to keep you out of trouble.

 
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About You

I work with highly motivated executives and product owners in startups and mid-sized companies. On rare occasions, I work with larger corporations, but I have found that genuine humility and hunger are requirements for any successful client engagement and industry leaders often (understandably) lack both.

My startup clients have usually raised capital (or are in the process of) and are developing or growing their first product or service. My mid-sized clients have already found success with their first offering and are looking for growth through vertical expansion.

My clients are smart, successful and ambitious. They are looking to grow their revenues and their own personal capabilities. They are open to outside feedback and ready to challenge their own beliefs. Over the years I have learned that this requires a combination of both humility and confidence.

I can and do fire clients who nod at the right places and then ignore all of my advice. I’m not always right — hell, I’m lucky to bat .300 — but you can, and should, ignore me for free. I commit to being your biggest advocate. You commit to busting your butt and building the best version of your company, and yourself.

I am excited to work on just about any problem, but the areas in which I’m most useful include the following:

  • Establishing product/market fit

  • Product design (and redesign)

  • Fundraising

  • Personal leadership development

  • Executive strategy and communication

About Me

For entrepreneurs, there is nothing as satisfying as launching and growing a product. I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who established product / market fit and didn’t feel amazing. When you are successfully serving customer needs, you are living your best life. Too bad it’s so fucking hard. 

Entrepreneurship is grueling. It’s lonely. It’s frequently disheartening. Even when you find success, it doesn’t get easier, it just gets different hard. 

Founders and product owners need someone to share the emotional burden of building something new. When you’re obsessing about your dwindling runway at 3am, are you going to call your investors? Your employees? When you’re worried about blowing past a deadline, are you going to vent to your spouse?

Equally, you need real talk. Someone to call out bullshit excuses and justifications. This needs to come from someone who has walked in your shoes. Who truly wants you to succeed. And, critically, who can’t fire you for screwing up. 

I’ve been really lucky in my career and have had the opportunity to start some incredible businesses over the years. I've also launched enough flameouts to know that failure is, in fact, the default state of startups, so it doesn't stress me out. I bring that sense of calm to my clients so that we can find success with clear eyes.

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Fractional

Co-Founder

(You and I go start a company together.)

This is your first rodeo (or your previous startup didn’t go so well). You’re a solo founder — either a business person without a tech co-founder or a coder without a business partner. You have a startup idea and a business plan and maybe even an initial customer or two.

You don’t have experience designing a product, running sales and/or managing a tech team. You’re probably going to over-design your product, which is confusing to the customer and far more expensive to build than necessary. And if you don’t have experience managing developers, you are going to pay far more than necessary for a product you’re unhappy with that can’t even brought to market. And let’s not even talk about the mess that is fundraising.

Further, there’s a really good chance you haven’t completed the discovery phase and are in extreme danger of spending a ton of time and money building a product you won’t be able to sell because you either 1) aren’t solving a real problem, 2) can’t articulate the problem effectively or 3) are attacking a market that can’t be efficiently reached.  

Click here for the full story on getting me on board as your co-founder.

Coach

(You and I meet for an hour each week.)

I don’t have a standard process. I don’t run you through a checklist. Every business is different, every founder has unique strengths and weaknesses, so why would you to expect a playbook?

We focus on the priorities. The things that will destroy your business if you do them (or don’t do them). The things that keep you awake at night. I’m your biggest cheerleader when things are hard (hint: things are always hard). I kick your ass when it needs kicking. You will never wonder what I’m thinking.

I aim for at least a 10X return on your investment in me, through a combination of revenue growth, cost savings and/or fundraising. Much of my advice boils down to “more” (communication, sales, customer discovery, fundamentals) and “less” (hiring, features, code, bullshit KPIs).

You will grow very, very tired of hearing several of my go-to statements over and over. You will use them for the rest of your career…

  • The #1 killer of startups is solving problems that aren’t yet problems

  • What problem are you solving; what’s the value of the solution?

  • Sell before you build

  • Don’t invent what you can copy

  • A CEO has three responsibilities

    1. Communicate the vision

    2. Hire great people

    3. Don’t run out of money

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Testimonials

Eric is insanely experienced, despite how much he downplays it. He has become the single most important sounding board in our company, and forces me to genuinely understand the choices that we’re making.
— David Sturgeon, CEO @ Pivan Interactive
I used to lump all my opportunities into one bucket; it was disorganized and overwhelming. Eric keeps me focused on where my time is best spent, taking pressure off me. This opens more time for creative work and, ultimately, increased profitability.
— Rachel Tribble, Disney Master Artist
I occasionally wanted to punch Eric in the face, and every time I realized he was pointing out how I’d been lying to myself and I needed to step up my game.
— Pascal Wagner, former CEO @ Walkthrough
I feel like Eric says the things I already know deep down to be true, and don’t want to face.
— Melissa Strawn, CEO @ MyPeopleNow
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Entrepreneurial Experience

Companies I’ve started have exited for nearly a billion dollars of value (one IPO, two meaningful exits, one turnaround). That said, most of my value comes from my many failed projects. I can’t tell you why my successes happened (so much of that is luck or other people’s efforts), but I can tell you what killed all of my failures.

I am not smarter than you, I just have more battle scars and more experiences to pattern match against. Basically, I’m you from the future.

 

Successes

Beatport
Provided strategic consulting on an e-commerce turnaround. Simply asked “hey, what are you doing with these 40 million fans who visit every year? Let’s tell a story about them.” Went from an $8M acquisition offer to $52M acquisition in 14 months.

Gnip
Founding CEO of big data provider Gnip. Initially founded on the belief that social APIs were going to take over the web. Raised capital with a 12-page Powerpoint deck and a dream. Sold to Twitter for $134M. Straight up, smarter people than I made that acquisition happen.

MyBlogLog
Co-founding product guy. We started out as a blog stats company and pivoted into distributed social media company at the suggestion of a random dude who cold-emailed us (we hired him as our CEO). Sold to Yahoo for $12M without ever taking funding.

IGN
I dropped out of college in 1995 to come up with a web strategy for publisher Imagine Media. Launched IGN, the web’s first videogame news network, a year later. IGN grew to a Top 50 web site, went public in 2000 and eventually sold to News Corp for $650M.

 

Failures (abbreviated)

OneTrueFan
Co-founding Co-CEO. Tried to recapture the zeitgeist of MyBlogLog while failing to recognize that blogging had ceded the market to microblogging platforms. Also spent way too much time on a strategic partnership that failed to materialize. Lost $1.2M of investor money.

Zentact
My white whale. I still think this thing should exist, a software consiglieri that reads the news and helps you strengthen your network by suggesting opportunities to reach out to people you haven’t connected with in a while. As co-founder, I assembled the team and raised capital and lost $250k of investor money.

Minerva Software
Founding CEO of a videogame-based training platform back when “Serious Games” were a thing. Landed a multi-million dollar contract with Best Buy and was unable to raise capital because I could never land a second customer. Beware outliers. Put a second mortgage on my house to finance the company.

BuzzSite
Launched an entertainment aggregator in 2000 because 1) IGN had moved away from the network play and 2) I was pissed that I wasn’t given an executive role in IGN’s spin-out. Effectively my rebound/revenge girlfriend. You know how well those work out.

Atlas Consulting
Tried to launch a digital media agency back in 1994, selling to radio stations and publishing companies. We could have been Razorfish or Agency.com. Crowning moment was when I landed my first meeting and brought my desktop PC to their office to run a demo.

 

Additional Experience

Startup Coach
Yeah, what I’m doing now. But when I launched this web site in 2017 I was still a babe in the woods. Since then I’ve coached nearly three dozen startups full-time, and dozens more companies on a monthly basis. That experience has given me X-ray vision :)

Techstars Mentor
I’ve been a mentor with the Techstars accelerator since their very first cohort in Boulder in 2007. Over the years I’ve worked with many, many Techstars companies in Boulder, Denver, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle.

Cloudspace
I co-owned a software development shop for four years and worked with dozens of companies, from startups to tech darlings like SoundCloud to Fortune 50 companies like AIG. It doesn’t matter what size the company, people make the same mistakes.

Investment and Advising
Very occasionally I invest in a company. Slightly less occasionally I accept stock options for advising. I was the first advisor to Zynga. That was neat.

Contact

I’m ALWAYS available to chat with someone new. If you’d like to connect for an hour, tell me about what you’re working on and some of the challenges you’re facing, just fill out the form below. You’d be amazed at what we can accomplish in an hour, and meeting someone new is plenty of reward for the time spent.

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Weekly Blog Post

More Information Is Always Better

New founders regularly answer my questions with “I don’t have all the information.” And that’s ok. I love that honesty. But the thing I don’t hear often enough is the followup statement, “I’m going to find the answer.”

There are several reasons why business owners are afraid of asking questions. I’ll tell you right now, all of them suck. But here they are:

  1. They will get answers and information they don’t want.

  2. They’re embarrassed they don’t already know.

  3. They believe they’ll frustrate a potential investor or customer by asking hard questions

Don’t say I didn’t warn you — these are all terrible reasons to lack the information you need to succeed. But rather than just close with that, let’s break down WHY each one is awful in its own right.


Continue reading this blog post at ObviousStartupAdvice.com