Author: Jeff Francis

How many $50MM exits have you read about in the mainstream business press? Even regional business publications don’t highlight what I’d call huge wins enough. You read about unicorns. If you’re not taking on hundreds of millions in funding and exiting / IPO’ing for billions, you’re seemingly forgotten. That dynamic... Read More

If you’re a founder (or considering becoming one), you’ve probably heard the advice: build to scale. Hire the right people, delegate tasks, and free yourself up to focus on the big picture. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this advice (no one expects you to carry the weight of your company... Read More

As a software founder, one of the most critical moments you’ll face is trying to secure software startup funding. Whether you’re a startup or growth-stage company, raising capital is very often a pivotal part of your business growth. Having worked on over 200 innovative software products in the last 15... Read More

Perfection is the enemy of good. I know it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason — this one is true. For our purposes, if you’re a software startup founder (or the head of engineering in an enterprise software company), you’re probably all-too-familiar with the constant tug-of-war between... Read More

When you’re an early-stage software startup, making your first in-house hire can feel like a pivotal moment… because it is one! We get this question allll the time: “Help! Who should my first in-house hire be?! And that’s for good reason; there’s a lot on the line — product vision,... Read More

If you lead engineering or software development within your enterprise, you know that you walk a shaky tightrope between maintaining your existing systems and pushing forward with new innovations. Balancing technical debt and new feature development is no easy feat — sure, you have to service technical debt, but you... Read More

We’re doing something a little different this month. Instead of a normal ENO8 Answers webinar + video, we wanted to switch it up and interview someone with decades of experience building and launching software startups who could speak to all things founder’s journey.  I met Brenda Stoner about a decade... Read More

I wish the news coming out of startup-land were better, but unless you’ve pivoted to A.I. in some way, funding is tighter, budgets are shrinking, layoffs are in the news every other week, job searches are taking forever… it’s grim. (Not to mention the fact that too many of those... Read More

It’s the boring stuff that makes or breaks businesses. Maintenance? Boring. Daily stand up? Boring. Data scrubbing? Boring. But if you’re not doing those things well and often, your product can crumble. We all love to focus on inventions and new features because they’re fun, capture our imaginations and can... Read More

We’ve built hundreds of innovative digital products over the last decade. With that experience comes some trends — you start to notice signals for success. One of the biggest signals we see in product development success is on the staffing front. We’ve identified three mission-critical roles and what it takes... Read More