Truly, it has been a busy and productive year! Here at Startups.co, we will be taking it easy, spending time with our families and drinking way too much ‘nog until the New Year.

While we are on this short hiatus — lets take a stroll down memory lane and review the top 17 articles that we published in 2017.

Read them all at once, or portion them out like a kid trying to make Christmas candy last until Easter. Either way — we won’t judge. Enjoy!

1. How to Write a Business Plan For Investors (That They Will Love)

A good business plan should do more than explain what your company does, how you earn money and what you want to do. It should also tell a persuasive story and illustrate the many ways that your company and product are Grade-A Awesom...

Out of the hundreds of thousands of people using my company Open Listings to shop for and buy homes, I thought I knew who our worst users were — even by name.

There was Sarah* in San Diego who went on 134 home tours before finally buying one. Then, there’s Dan in San Francisco who’s asked our in-house agent team questions about nearly 1,000 properties but hasn’t submitted an offer on a home yet. And, there was Chris, who tried to negotiate our already low fee down to zero by blackmailing us with negative online reviews.

As CEO, I cared deeply about all users and every shred of feedback. I read every review, internalized problems, and prioritized solutions. I felt confident that we were super customer-centric and solving the most important p...

Growth expert Steve Patti joined us for a Clarity Live webinar last week to share some of his key lessons for growth. We’re sharing his top tips to keep you on the right track for startup success.

Steve’s three steps for startup growth are outlined below.

Step One: Understand the Approach for Becoming Customer-Centric

Get the Story Right: Be clear about why buyers should care about what you have to sell. Nail your positioning statement and then quantify it in terms of business outcomes that matter to customers.

Apply It: Once the brand positioning is defined and quantified, apply it to your messaging strategy, content production, lead generation tactics, and in your sales process so that you become your positioning.

Keep It Relevant: Audit ...

Millennials have set a high bar in terms of tech and entrepreneurship, but Generation Z could be even more ambitious than its predecessor. The newest generation in the workforce grew up surrounded by Snapchat, YouTube, and Musical.ly — and Gen Zers probably had an iPad before they could walk.

A whopping 98 percent of Gen Zers own a smartphone, and this generation expects to get smartphones at a younger age than any other generation. Research indicates that 45 percent of Gen Zers are on their phones “almost constantly,” and about 62 percent of Gen Z and Millennials would rather leave their wallets at home instead of their phones.

But the differences go beyond tech. Young people in 2018 know how to work for what they want, know how the gig ec...

WHAT IS SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP?

A sole proprietorship is an unincorporated business owned and run by one individual with no distinction between the business and the owner.

Sole proprietorships are the simplest and most common form of small business ownership, representing 73% of all small businesses in the United States today (a total of 23 million were reported by the IRS in 2010 and again in 2018 by the small business administration (SBA)).

The business owner is entitled to all profits and is personally responsible for all of the business's debts, losses, and liabilities, and pays personal income tax on profits earned from the company. The owner is not required to formally register their business with their state as corporations or LLCs do.

With...

Just a couple of weeks ago, I closed my first ever investment in a private Silicon Valley startup. I didn’t go through the standard procedures though: while I did conduct my due diligence, I did not get pitched face-to-face in a nice conference room, negotiate deal terms, or seal the deal with a firm handshake.

Instead, like many other educated folks who are excited about startups but don’t quite have the wealth to be accredited investors, I invested through a crowdfunding campaign.

There’s a storm of hype building around this new equity crowdfunding model, which allows middle and even working-class people to invest in a startup by the tens or even hundreds of thousands, without many of the onerous regulatory and accounting issues that so ...

During the early days of my first startup I stumbled upon a huge liability that was killing us quickly — me.

What's funny is no one else needed to have this discovery. The rest of the organization had figured out long ago that I was immature, combative, prone to anxious tirades, and generally a pain in the ass to work with.

And looking back, I'm probably being kind.

As a Founder (and CEO), every single one of those idiosyncrasies becomes amplified a hundred-fold because my liabilities to the organization become rooted in every decision we make, every interaction we have, and the entire morale of the company.

If we don't exercise some serious self realization — and do it quickly — we may be creating one of the biggest hurdles our organiza...

The past few years have seen an explosion of podcasts — it seems like everyone wants to get in on the audio. And startup founders (many of whom have probably been listening to podcasts since they started in the early aughts) are no exception! But how do you know what to listen to in this vast sea of startup podcasts?

Don’t worry — we have you covered. Here are the top 20 best startup podcasts as we head into 2020. Grab your noise cancelling earphones — and get listening.

1. Startup Therapy

Hosted by Startups.com founders and serial entrepreneurs Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan, Startup Therapy is an inside perspective on issues startup founders really care about. From what to expect in your first year after launching to how to deal with the e...

Building a startup that drives our lifestyle choices is incredibly hard, no matter what that carefree Founder's Instagram might suggest.

In order to make our startups work around our lifestyle, we have to make a deliberate choice to bend the fabric of reality to meet our demands.

It's crazy hard. But it can actually be done.

It Starts With Strong Commitments

The foundation for having a startup that supports our dream lifestyles is making really strong commitments to those lifestyle choices. For example, if we're parents and we want to make sure we never miss our kid's soccer game, we have to publicly make that commitment and stick to it.

Sometimes just announcing those commitments is a great way to get the ball rolling. When we launched ...

Pandora was never the darling of Silicon Valley. Ever. It never had the hype of Spotify, the scale of a hot social app, or the vision of Netflix. And yet, what it has always had is a leadership team that would not quit and a passionate user base who wouldn’t quit on the product either.

You hear a lot about the great entrepreneurs not giving up… but you hear less about founders pitching 348 investors before they got a yes, less about founding teams who went years without pay, less about founders who personally racked up half a million in debt trying to stay afloat. It took three acts of Congress to save Pandora at one point… and that was when a grassroots campaign by its users bailed the company out. More people complained that Congress migh...