As entrepreneurs, time is our most valuable asset. Every moment spent on a time sink is a distraction from the strides that we could and should be making with our core businesses.
But here’s the thing. Early-stage entrepreneurs are also notoriously cheap. Often revenue-strapped, we’re pumping as much money as we humanly can into the products and services that we’ve committed ourselves to developing.
At any given time, we walk a line between two things: spending money and doing more ourselves. As many of us will tell you, this is not an easy line to walk. I once burned through $20K on a vendor that I shouldn’t have hired. I also spent 15 hours a week on administrative tasks when I should have been working with an administrative assistant.
O...
You never see many “consultant” costumes around Halloween time, but it turns out that hiring one can be the source of numerous company horror stories.
First of all, hiring a seasoned strategic consultant is a difficult area to navigate. For example, you might prepare by reading whitepapers to brush up on some knowledge before the hiring process. Then, if the candidate uses the same terminology that you read in the whitepapers, you might assume you two are a great match. But what if the candidate read the same whitepapers and that is the full extent of his knowledge?
It can be challenging to know whether the person in front of you is the real deal or just wearing a mask.
Hiring the right strategic consultant can be di...
During last week’s Startups Live, we talked about developing your pricing strategy, and how asking customers for money is an important step in building an actual grown-up company.
If only it were as simple as flipping a switch on a revenue stream and then watching the sales pour in. That would be a beautiful world to live in. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this world – and in this world, if you want customers, you have to go out and earn them.
We tend to think of lead generation strategies as this very rote, transactional thing: you herd as many people as you can into your funnel, and then you shake the funnel and hope that enough people fall through to paying customer.
“Driving traffic is different than turning someone into a...
There has never been a better time to build an online retail business. For one, shopping landscapes are becoming more fragmented. What that means is that big conglomerates are in danger of losing customers.
And where are those consumers going?
They’re headed to places like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and independent, new-to-market ventures that offer unique, personalized value propositions.
In the coming years, economic researchers expect e-commerce fragmentation to increase in momentum—which means that if you’ve ever dreamed of launching your own e-commerce store, the time to start is now. Fragmentation means lower barriers to getting started and an increased ability to reach customers who will love your store. The market dynamics, opening doors ...
Product design/a> is the entire process of taking a product from idea to customers — and everything in between.
“There’s a widespread misconception that design is all about aesthetics,” product designer Eric Eriksson [writes](https://uxdesign.cc/what-is-product-design-d95cd5339f5c). “Most people don’t seem to understand that it’s about solving problems instead.”
There’s another, more limited, definition of product design which we’re not going to explore in detail here. But basically, that other definition is talking just about how a product looks and functions. For the sake of product design for startups, we’re focusing on the more holistic, process-oriented definition.
Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and individual investors.
This approach taps into the collective efforts of a large pool of individuals — primarily online via social media and crowdfunding platforms — and leverages their networks for greater reach and exposure.
Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the mainstream approach to business finance. Traditionally, if a person want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, they would need to pack up their business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop their idea around to a limited pool or wealthy indiv...
Note: Last updated: July 26, 2018
What are the best startup tools of 2018? A great startup idea is exciting, but let’s be real — if that’s all you have, you don’t have much. If your startup is going to go from idea to reality to acquisition, you’re going to need a lot of help along the way. And while some of that help will come from humans — like, you know, your team and your investors and your mom when you call her, crying — others will come from startup tools.
Startup tools are tools created to help startups (and yes, traditional businesses) succeed. They’re almost all online, as that’s where we conduct most of our business in Startup Land. They’re also almost always startups themselves — the ecosystem of startups that were created speci...
The end of the calendar year is an extremely busy time for most entrepreneurs and business leaders. From the months of October-December, most of us are busy converting new customers, fulfilling last-minute orders, launching special holiday campaigns and offers, and trying to drive as much business as we can before the new year.
In addition, a lot of us spend the last few months of the year evaluating successes and failures, adjusting budgets, and deciding how teams will grow or shrink in the year ahead.
It’s one of the most taxing times of the year for anyone managing a business.
It’s also the time of year when it’s easiest to neglect friendships, personal hobbies, and family life.
When business is booming and you’re quickly approaching...
In the startup world, we like to think of customer experience as this mystical, ineffable thing: a magical alchemy that happens at the intersection of our product and our audience.
And the thing is – it is. When the right product finds the right audience with the right problem at the right time, the result really is magical.
Some people will try to tell you can’t systematize magic. But those people have never been to Hogwarts. Or Startups.co.
To quote the old business idiom, “People make processes. Processes make a business.” Putting a process around your customer journey doesn’t destroy the magic of customer experience – it makes it better. When you systematize your customer experience, you turn customer delight into a process you can rep...
The customer experience. The task of any business is to shape the experience – to decide what it should looks like, figure out how it can be improved, and to listen to your customers. And, as Lara Crystal speaking about her company Minibar Delivery reveals, who you partner with, tech, company culture and more can play both direct and indirect roles in determining the quality of the customer experience that you provide.
…even when the outcome is something as universally appreciated as having wine brought to your doorstep, there’s so much that could go wrong. Or, if you wise up as to how things are done at Minibar Delivery, so much that can go right…
This morning’s Startups Live chat began with Lara Crystal introducing herself: “I’m the co-f...