When you’re a startup founder, there are certain materials you’re going to work with again and again. Balance sheets, term sheets, customer journey maps – get comfortable with these. You’re going to be seeing a lot of them.
Another startup stalwart you’ll definitely want to have down cold: the landing page.
Landing pages are the ultimate utility players of startup marketing. Want to validate an idea? You need a landing page. Need to build an email list? You need a landing page. Got a new product you need to tell people about? Seems like maybe you should think about creating a landing page.
You get the picture: if you’re starting a company, you’re going to need a landing page at some point, if you haven’t already. So you might as well pop th...
Access is power, and customers have never had more access than they do today. The Internet brings products and services worldwide right to a customer’s fingertips — and simultaneously brings the customer’s experience to the world. With an abundance of choice, dissatisfied (or bored) customers can brand-hop with ease. And with a tweet or a Facebook Live post, customers can make or break a company’s carefully crafted image.
But knowledge is also power, and startups can take advantage of it. If you truly know your customer and understand what it takes to transform new customers into loyal fans, you can restore the balance of power, ensuring revenue is headed in the right direction.
A 2016 study by For...
Growing slowly is the fastest way to build a sustainable startup.
From the outset that sounds like a contradiction, right? How could "growing slowly" and scaling possibly be congruent? They are if we take the time to understand that scaling is only possible once we've identified the assumptions in our business that are actually true.
As it happens, most Founders don't realize that "growing slowly" isn't about the long-term growth curve of a startup, it's about the near-term growth curve, the part where we are still trying to figure out exactly how this thing works.
The case for acceleration is that we'll get to where we need to be faster. But that rests on one (often) broken assumption — that we're acc...
We can all agree that bringing qualified customers to a new website is no easy feat. To add to that, most of your customers won’t be willing to pull out their credit card the first time that they reach your site.
Yeah, we know. It sucks to hear, especially since half of the people who stumble upon your site probably won’t come back for a second visit.
So how do you actually sell to these online customers?
Well, you don’t.
You give them insane amounts of value for free and make it easy for them to buy when they’re ready.
That’s right. The days of bombarding your potential customers with sales tactics and TV commercials are coming to a close. The secret to winning customers is to offer them exactly what they’re looking for when they actively ...
You'll hear the terms “founder” and “co-founder or cofounder” thrown around a lot in Startup Land. But what, exactly, do they mean? What's the difference between the two? And how do you find a good one? It's not very easy to find cofounders that properly fill the business needs and help in the early stages of a startup. So, where do founders even start?
We'll answer the above questions and six more in this breakdown of everything you need to know about founders and co-founders in order to ensure your company's success.
A founder is a person who comes up with an idea (hopefully a profitable idea) and then transforms it into a new business or startup. Founders can set up a business on their own, or they can do it with other...
Funding a startup isn't easy, and anyone that has launched a startup knows this to be painfully true. You need money (like yesterday) and raising funds is "a process" — to state it simply. There are so many details to know and questions to ask before a round can even begin, and once the startup funding round is ready to rock, there are additional questions every founder needs to know the answer to before they take the plunge.
One of the most common questions asked — and arguably most important details to know is how much equity do you give away in seed round? With the help from members of our community, we are going to get into this question in further detail to demystify the information about raising seed capital and the amount of equity ea...
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...
So, you’ve decided that you want to hire a company such as Chop Dawg to help build your future iPhone or Android application. That is exciting! With that said, now comes the vetting process that is so critical to the success of your app.
We’ve covered before extensively on our library about what you need to do to prepare for your first meeting with an agency. Some of the essentials are writing out your app requirements, conducting at least preliminary market research, determining your minimum and maximum budgets that you’re willing to invest, and the type of timeframe you’re willing to work around to bring your idea to life, etc.
We typically ask these types of questions to you, but what are the questions that you should prepare to ask the...
While we may not know all there is to know about our business yet, there’s still going to be some good old-fashioned accounting to do. So let’s break out those green visors and add machines — it’s time to learn WTF accounting is!
At its core, in order to be an accountant we need to be able to collect all the sources of income and expenses and translate those into a spreadsheet. When the numbers are small, this is so easy to do we’ll wonder why people get paid to do it. When they get large, we’ll wonder why anyone is willing to do this for any amount of money ever!
Yes! Because accounting for startups in the early days just isn't that complicated yet. Even if we've never seen any financial statements ...
As mentioned briefly above, there are multiple valuation methods to value a startup, and one not mentioned (but worth noting since this is arguably the most common startup valuation approach) is the Venture Capital Method that was developed in 1987 by Bill Sahlman.
If working with a venture capital firm, you should know how they calculate valuations. Venture capital firms use this valuation method to establish an understanding of the value of a startup using this basic framework. In addition to the venture capital method, a VC Term Sheet is used to define the specific conditions of venture capital investments between an early-stage startup company and the venture firm itself.