“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
~Bill Copeland
It’s not exactly a groundbreaking claim to say that setting business goals is crucial to the success of any company. But sometimes, as Founders, we get so focused on the big-picture goals we have for our company, we forget about another set of goals we should be setting: goals for our team.
Trying to run a company without setting team goals is kind of like a football coach sending their team onto the field without a game plan. You may score a touchdown, sure – but the more likely outcome is chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of hurt.
The big-picture goals you set for your company may be the roadmap that shows yo...
When you’re starting a new company, customer service is everything. Startups make or break based on their earliest customers and if you can’t get those early adopters to stick around as you’re muddling through the inevitable mistakes that happen in an early-stage startup, you’re going to end up in the huge pile of startups that fail. Additionally, traction is one of the most important factors that VCs examine when they’re deciding whether or not to give a company money. Bad customer support equals lost customers, which means crappy traction.
But good customer support? That can make all the difference.
“At HappyFox, we once won a deal with a Fortune 50 company based purely on the quick response time they received,” HappyFox founder Shalin Ja...
The Pitch Deck Traction Slide helps showcase early traction when we pitch investors. But what kind of traction metrics matter to investors? Let's walk through some common pitch deck traction slide examples showcasing user growth, growing revenue, and scaling active users.
Also, if you're concerned about showing traction in your pitch deck, don't sweat it. We'll show you how to position your traction slides even if you're pre-revenue.
The perfect traction slide pitch deck formula incorporates three investor questions into a single slide:
Product Progress + Customer Acquisition + Visible Growth = Traction
The most stunning pitch deck examples incorporate all of these factors into their traction slides. Let's look ...
The web has made it possible for everyone from prospective customers to business partners to potential employees to see at the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen what companies have to offer. If upon first glance they see unhappy customers or poor reviews, there’s a very real potential of permanent damage to a business’s bottom line.
Companies’ online reputations reflect how the businesses conduct themselves and how they operate on a daily basis. Increasingly, customers are turning to the information they find online when deciding whether to engage with a brand.
To cultivate a healthy online presence, companies need to constantly demonstrate why people should come to them as industry leaders and trustworthy partners — both in daily cus...
All startup financial projections are based on a few key assumptions about how we feel the business will perform.
In this section, we're going to explain what key assumptions drive our financial forecasts and how to adjust them to create a financial model that works.
Download our Income Statement Template here to get started and follow along.
The Assumptions tab in our income statement template gives us a worksheet to help determine what the right values will be to populate in our projected income statement. The tab itself is just a worksheet that drives things like our revenue projections, cost assumptions, and ultimately net income.
We’ll walk through each of the assumptions in this worksheet one by one to give a little m...
A startup business loan is any type of loan that helps businesses with little to no business history. It's one of many financing options for founders who are looking to either get started or improve their young companies.
Yes, it is possible for startups to get business loans.
However, startups may face more challenges in obtaining financing than established businesses because they often have limited credit history and may not have a track record of profitability.
Startups should carefully research and compare the various financing options available to them and choose the one that best meets their needs and goals.
It's also a good idea for startups to work with a financial a...
It’s hard to think of an innovation that has had a more transformative impact on the business landscape than the rise of crowdfunding.
Once upon a time, the only people who could bring new products to market were the ones who already had the capital and connections to make it happen. Now, thanks to crowdfunding, anyone with an idea and an Internet connection can mount the next big crowdfunding campaign – and the next must-have product can come from anywhere.
Crowdfunding is a great way to raise the funds you need to make your vision a reality. It can also be an awesome way to test a pricing strategy or validate demand for your product.
But crowdfunding campaigns aren’t (just) a fast track to capital or product validation. A successful crow...
I think it’s really important to have someone who can complement you and balance you, and we’ve definitely found that in each other.
It’s a good thing that there’s a lot of outdoor space next to Mike Koranda and Aaron May’s office, because their actual office is basically a closet.
“You don’t even want to know,” says Mike when I ask exactly how much square footage they have. “Twelve-by-five?” he estimates. “Six-by-ten?” Aaron offers.
So, yeah. It’s small.
Working in that close of quarters has its virtues, though. When you work, as Mike puts it, “literally on top of each other,” it’s hard not to check in with what the other person is doing.
And checking in is important for Mike and Aaron. A little over eighteen months ago, they co-founded a ...
Imagine stumbling across a Glassdoor review of your company filled with damaging declarations and seemingly unfounded statements. You’d be shocked, right? I know I was.
Our former employee’s description seemed so foreign, I didn’t recognize the company being described. According to the review, we were growing too fast, too furiously; we were operating in a knee-jerk manner.
It was clear the past employee wasn’t aware that we look to hyper-vet everything we do. Decisions are hardly made on whims; they’re quite nuanced. Of course, none of that matters to employees if they’re not hearing the truth.
What had happened? To make a long story short, complete miscommunication on our part.
We’re not the only business that’s dealt with miscommunicati...
Up to this point, we’ve made sure that there is a problem in the market for your business idea to solve through idea validation research and notable experts have verified that you’re on the right path. Now we begin the last test of the business idea validation process — customer discovery.
We’re using customer discovery as a methodical approach to ensuring the product idea you’ve identified aligns with what potential customers actually want at a price they are willing to pay.
Use idea validation to confirm that the problem, solution, and revenue model aligns with what potential customers really want.
Customer Discovery centers around 3 critical pillars of your business model ...