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According to figures reported in the GEM Global Report, 100 million new businesses are launched annually.

Thats nearly 11,000 startups per hour.

So, how do you beat this competition? By raising more funds? By marketing more aggressively? Maybe. But, I believe that increasing the brand value of your startup can help it not only survive the competition but thrive.

When it comes to marketing your business, branding is an old concept. Unfortunately, it’s one that few startups utilize properly. Review these 7 tips to improve (or build!) your startup’s branding:

Tip #1 — No persistence, no brand

For example, what are the labels you would associate with the Nike brand?

You’re probably thinking somewhere along the lines of sports, Michael Jordan,...

Raising money isn't just about getting some cash in the bank, it's about committing to a very different path to building our startup.

And there's sorta no going back.

What no one told us going into the capital-raising game was that once we take money from investors, we're basically locked into a handful of outcomes, but more importantly, we're locked out of a few that we're probably going to want back!

We Significantly Limit our Potential Outcomes

When we're looking to raise capital, we're all thinking the same thing "We need more money to grow!" which of course makes sense. What we miss, however, is that taking on investors might increase the potential of our upside, but often comes at the cost of limiting other potential options that coul...

Today’s society glorifies startup life. Most see startup culture as acquiring VC funding, getting a fancy office, and rapidly scaling. The problem is that no one wants to talk about the grueling path every startup must endure before acquiring funding— this is the side hustle stage. This means you are still working your full-time job and starting a business on the side which will eventually become large enough to be your new full-time priority.

Marc Andreessen stated that the life of a startup could be divided into two phases: before product/market fit, and after. The latter is the fun part – when VCs and scaling the business come into the equation. This article is about the former, less glamorous part of building a business. The part that ...

Congratulations! You've made it to the end of our four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

• Part 1 - Investor Outreach

• Part 2 - Investor Introductions: How to Get Them

• Part 3 - The Investor Email Pitch

• Part 4 - How to Contact Investors ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Let’s dive in!

So you've got your list of angel investors, venture capitalists, random private investors, and even your rich Aunt and you're ready to blast all of them with your email pitch...

Please don't! Step.. away.. from.. the.. keyboard!

Most Founders (and we help thousands) wind up tanking their entire fundraising process the moment they hit the "send" button to potential investors. That'...

Legendary Founder stories are great — unless you're the poor bastard who had to live through it.

As Founders, we're regaled constantly of comeuppance stories of our fellow Founders who risked it all... almost lost it all... and then won it all in the end. It's entertaining, inspiring, and sometimes even true.

Often we wish we could have such an epic story ourselves. But what we rarely comprehend in those stories is that in order for the story to be so epic, someone had to go through a massive amount of pain to be able to tell it.

The reality of that pain and suffering is not only overlooked quickly but entirely justified by the outcome. But does that make it all OK?

The Against All Odds Legend

Recently a good friend of mine shared a tale of...

Let’s get one thing out of the way quickly, the following tactic is not how to raise capital from Angels.

Selected this example because the sender clearly has ‘1 mutual connection’ and yet it wasn’t worth their time to use that connection to get a warm intro.

Cold introductions are infertile ground.

This is true not only of capital but most other lead types also.

With that out of the way, one way to approach the question of Seed capital for your startup is to understand what it isn’t.

Seed Capital is not

• a way to fund building your minimally viable product
• a way to avoid using your own cash to get started
• a bridge loan to your Series A funding
• a way to get free incubator office space

Seed Capital is…

Money to help raise a toddler.

Allow...

Welcome to Phase Four of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.

Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes

Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works

Phase Three - How to Split Equity

Phase Four - Part 1 - Equity Management ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 2 - Recovering Startup Equity

Let's continue!

Splitting startup equity is only half the challenge for early-stage startups — managing startup equity is a whole different issue! How much equity we split and the founders' ownership percentage is generally determined by what we expect each founder to contribute.

But the problem is once ...

There is a ton of hidden treasure in failed startups — you just have to know how to look for it, and ultimately, how to capture it.

After my first (not last) venture-funded startup tanked, everyone pretty much ran for the hills. Investors bailed, the team got other jobs, and customers found better solutions. But I kept thinking "We just spent a ton of money to build all of this, can't I capture this value back?"

Then it occurred to me — the same thing is happening for countless other failed startups. All of the assets that they spent millions to build just get buried. Everyone tries to make a last-ditch effort to sell them off, but in most cases, it never works and they just evaporate.

But what if we were the ones looking to dig up that bur...

From Mark Twain to Mark Zuckerberg, some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century were renowned for their lack of organization. Indeed, Einstein famously said that “a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,” permanently cementing, for better or worse, the association of brilliance and disorganization in the popular imagination.

This dynamic seems to have carried over to the theater arts as well. Aspiring writers, performers, and producers won’t find a single, clear avenue for proceeding from proof of concept to execution. Unlike other industries (such as publishing), the theater arts don’t have an effective progression for stories to grow from an idea in a writer’s mind into a fully-fledged musical ready for the public.

The sol...

Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act way back in April of 2012 — and the startup world rejoiced. Finally, we’d be able to raise money through non-accredited investors, just like all of our friends were doing to pay for their EPs and trips to South America and medical procedures! Crowdfunding — which the startup world invented — was finally a legal option for startups.

So what’s so great about the American JOBS Act, anyway? The ability to raise equity crowdfunding without having to make a public offering is probably the most significant change that the JOBS Act made, of course. Any startup founder can tell you that raising money from friends and family — or, if you have the right type of product, running a crowdfund...