People are hardwired to value transparency. From an evolutionary perspective, transparency has always been essential for survival. Our safety has depended upon determining whether other humans are trustworthy. Complementing this need to understand is the psychological desire to understand and be understood. Transparency is an integral part of the need for belonging, which Maslow ranked next to safety in importance.
When you first meet someone, there’s little transparency, and little trust. Over time, as your new friend shares experiences, opinions, and insights, transparency — and trust — increase.
We, as humans, like transparency. And not just in friendships. Transparency makes business sense because we like companies and brands that are ...
We’ve spent a lot of time on the blog talking about the early stages of planning a company, so let’s flash forward a bit. Say you’ve built out your product. You’ve validated your idea to death, formulated your pricing strategy, built out social channels and put out press releases.
You flip the switch, launch your product, and… crickets. Not a customer in the pipeline, not a signup on your website. Nothing.
So what now? Is that it? Do you throw in the towel, pack up and go home? Not by a long shot.
“If you build it, they will come,” is great and all, but sometimes in the startup world, if you want customers, you have to go out and get them yourself. So grab your email lists and your spreadsheets, folks, because we’re going sales prospecting....
We’ve all been to networking events where we’re bored to tears by the same mindless conversations. You swap credentials (and probably a few not-so-humblebrags), but the connection never goes beyond skimming the surface.
Networking is the first step of building a professional community, but you need to develop meaningful relationships to actually make an impact. In their book, “Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships That Matter,” Young Entrepreneur Council co-founders Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh advocate for a move beyond the typical boring, dead-end interactions.
In the chaos and noise of the social media age, the demand for authentic, credible voices — otherwise known as superconnectors — is at an all-tim...
Mergers and acquisition–commonly referred to as M&A–can be an exciting and even critical part of a company’s growth strategy. When done right, a successful M&A can help two companies gain valuable market share, expand their product portfolios, increase profits and inject more equity into their brands. But when M&As go wrong, it can be quite a different story, involving cultural clashes, litigation, epic losses and even bankruptcy.
Way too many companies rush headlong into these professional marriages without spending the time to first carry out their due diligence. Yet, an M&A is one of the most important decisions you can make for your company’s future and sufficient research needs to be conducted.
M&A...
Who cares how fast we can scale if we're not around long enough to do it?
That was our motto at Startups.com since Day One. While it's a ton of fun to think of grand growth strategies to take over the world, it kinda helps to be solvent enough as a company to see them through (at least that's what we've heard). What we've developed over the past decade are essentially two strategies for every major initiative — a "Downside Strategy" where we plan out the worst that could happen and an "Upside Strategy" which considers growth.
Most startups don't actually do this. Instead, we have basically a growth strategy and then in the back of our minds, we sort of formulate this "Oh Shit! Strategy" which loosely envisions what could happen if this does...
…when I started StartupList, I didn’t know where it would lead or even that I was actually creating a startup. It was just a project I was working on to learn more about startups and how to build a website. It evolved into something I never could’ve imagined at the time.
There is no better way to hear the story of how Nick Frost came to champion startups than to hear it straight from his mouth. Startups Live was incredibly fortunate to have such an opportunity.
Often this collection of Founders turns over nitty gritty details of building startups, examining a particular question or aspect of the work. This talk does some of the same, but it also brings the role of fortune into the field of play – not luck, or the unexpected influence of out...
The business startup costs that are the least complicated for startups tend to be our "fixed costs" like office space, utility bills, or software expenses incurred. While these start-up costs grow with any new business, they don't scale the way our variable cost projections do when starting a business.
The reason we separate our fixed costs versus our variable costs is that we want to isolate our startup cost categories to focus on what will truly drive our business plan. Things like scaling our advertising costs will have an exponential effect on our revenue, for example.
But our fixed costs don't have nearly this impact.
Our fixed expenses do "grow" over time, but not exponentially. Therefore we tend to separate...
We can't win every battle, so sometimes we just need to live to fight another day.
I learned this lesson early in my startup career (the 90s), at a time when everything was going "up and to the right" for absolutely everyone. During the boom times, our biggest problems are staffing up, raising capital, customer acquisition, and scale.
And then one day they go the other direction. The markets dry up, "How fast can we staff up?" is replaced with "How do we make payroll?" and suddenly we're talking survival versus strategy.
We don't talk much about "survival" as a startup strategy, partially because it's not fun to talk about, and partially because we hope never to think about it. But lo and behold, if we plan o...
Founders have to learn so many new skills when they're launching a startup, and writing a business plan is a big one. When you're writing your business plan for the first time, things can get… intimidating.
What do you include? What kind of wording should you use? What do you make sure not to include? Is a mid size business plan different than an enterprise plan or a scalable startup? Do I need to include financials like cash flow statements? What do investors want to see?
It's enough to make even a stalwart startup founder and management team throw in the towel before they've even begun.
Lucky for you — we've created a complete guide to writing your business plan. Check it out if you haven't already. (And if a link from there brought you here...
Building an online community is no easy task, but the reward in doing so is worth the effort put into it. If you have built one before, you already know that online businesses not just should be, but NEED to be monetized. Online communities are a lot of work, after all, and nobody wants to work for free (right?!).
Facebook Groups are a great way to create an online community and build trust with potential customers. In this article, we are going to dive into how to start a group (for those ready to jump in) and offer all the different avenues of revenue that can be utilized on the platform with helpful insight from members of the Startups.com community.
Starting a Facebook Group is the easy part — especially if you are alre...