No marketing budget to speak of. At best, basic video, photography and editing skills. This doesn’t sound like a winning recipe for launching a successful ad campaign. Not by a long shot. But, if you fit the profile, you’re probably not at so great of a disadvantage as you might think.
Thanks to StoriesAds.
StoriesAds is a tool that lets you make Instagram Stories ads in just a couple of minutes. It’s currently free to use, and pretty much anyone capable of uploading a video has sufficient design chops for success.
Created by online video maker Shakr in collaboration with the inbound marketing and sales platform HubSpot, StoriesAds supplies templates that make building a stories ad extremely easy. You select a template, then customize visu...
A lot of people want to start a startup — but they don’t know where to start. And where there’s plenty you can do to get the ball rolling, there’s actually one place that everyone has to start: The idea.
But, what are the best startup ideas? What are the worst?
Before we dive into that big question — one disclaimer:
This is not a plug-and-play list of startup business ideas that you can cherry pick from in order to create the next unicorn startup. (That doesn’t exist. If it did, everyone would actually be killing it, all the time.)
Instead, we’re going to talk about some general categories of startups that are more or less difficult to start, help you figure out how to pick your best startup idea, and talk to some founders about their expe...
Software startups, especially in their early stages, can be rough. As a founder, it’s easy to get lost in a world of opportunity. You could build anything — but you need to build just one thing. When you finally figure out what that one thing is, you know that you’re a million iterations away from that magical product/market fit moment.
“It’s interesting because I think there’s an obligation as an entrepreneur to always have to say that we’re killing it—but the reality is always, always, always very different. In the same day you’re taking over the world, then going bankrupt, then taking over the world, and then going bankrupt again. You’re going back and forth between and that low three or four times a day. It’s quite bizarre. Every positi...
Matter has always set out to create a more informed, connected, and empowered society, and that mission has never been more important than today. Media is an integral part of democracy, but it faces unprecedented opposition. Even the core idea of truth itself is under attack.
When Matter launched in 2012, media was already struggling with falling revenues. We were inspired by Clay Shirky’s call — “now is the time for lots and lots of experiments” — and we built a place where those experiments could happen. But today, these existential problems are joined by new ones. Just 32% of Americans say they trust the media — an all-time low. Our media discourse is now dominated by fake news and even direct attacks from the gover...
In today’s world information spreads so quickly that it changed the way companies compete. We, at the Standuply team, believe that for an online company the most crucial thing is the product’s quality. And therefore, one of the most important persons in a company is the Product Manager. Being fans of Slack, we decided to investigate.
It turns out that managers can satisfy almost all their needs using Slack and its apps. Some of the apps are still raw, others are just plain integrations with 3rd party services. But there are already a lot of well made, useful products designed purely for Slack, for example Growbot, and we too are doing our best with Standuply to be among the best as well.
Here is ou...
A comprehensive, step-by-step guide - complete with real examples - on writing business plans with just the right amount of panache to catch an investor's attention and serve as a guiding star for your business.
So you've got a killer startup idea. Now you need to write a business plan that is equally killer.
You fire up your computer, open a Google doc, and stare at the blank page for several minutes before it suddenly dawns on you that, Hm…maybe I have no idea how to write a business plan from scratch after all.
Don't let it get you down. After all, why would you know anything about business planning? For that very reason we have 4 amazing business plan samples ...
Time and time again, I run into mid-continent entrepreneurs who think sales should be a personal experience. Out in Silicon Valley, I have found that a lot of startups stick to self-service platforms rather than human salespeople.
So who’s right? Well, it depends on what’s for sale and who’s buying.
Both approaches can work, but the key factor isn’t where your startup sits on the map. Instead, to choose the right sales strategy, take two things into account: customer acquisition cost and annual contract value.
Let’s start with CAC, or Customer Aquisition Cost, which describes the cost of acquiring a single customer. To calculate CAC, divide the cost of acquiring customers by the number of customers acquired. For...
They say nothing worth having comes easy – and that definitely holds up when it comes to acquiring customers for your startup.
Customer acquisition doesn’t just happen. Customers don’t just fall into your lap, ready to hand over their money. A customer’s business isn’t something that is owed to you – it’s an honor that has to be earned.
In a lot of ways, says growth marketer and Ghost Influence Founder Brian Swichkow, customer acquisition is a lot like going on a date. “The internet is the bar. Your website is your house. Your email list is your bedroom. Customer acquisition is, well… you know,” he says.
Cue the Marvin Gaye song.
So what does it take to, ahem, close the deal with respect to acquiring customers? Brian joins us to explore jus...
Startup equity is one of those things that it's fair to say every startup founder without an MBA struggles with, and even those with a high degree of financial modeling education won't have been through this before. Most people don't have to think about this stuff until it's really important. But if you're starting to freak out about who gets what slice of your startup pie, take a deep breath, calm down, and get ready for Startup Equity 101 (your official startup equity guide).
Equity. Stocks. Shares. Vesting. Fair market value. The minute you dive into figuring out startup equity compensation, you're slammed from every side with a bunch of words that you might have heard in the past and you might be able to fake knowledge of at a dinner par...
There are weapons, and there are weapons made with plutonium. Well, there is competitive intelligence, and there is the competitive intelligence made by Knowlium.
Knowlium is the maker of the competitive intelligence software called Reveal – a product that “accelerates your digital strategy with real-time competitive insight.”
Which is to state matters very very simply. You must have a look for yourself to appreciate the comprehensiveness and sophistication with which Reveal processes data. If you want simple scores to understand your market position com...