There’s a limited number of colours and shapes in this world, so your logo isn’t your whole brand. Your colour could remind a potential customer of a completely unrelated business (I recently thought of a well known auto care shop when looking at the website of a debt refinancer) and you need to rely on more than just that one aspect of your company to raise brand awareness.
If you have a marketing campaign, do you use just one channel? Only one ad image? Of course not, any campaign is more effective with multiple channels. It’s the exact same principle for “startup branding”.
Have you ever answered the phone without looking, heard “hey it’s me” and known exactly who it was? This is essentially what you want for your company. You want your...
Tech has a very obvious diversity problem — and it’s coming out in insidious ways. For example, in April, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter that essentially put users in blackface.
In August, they came out with a yellow face filter, which transformed users’ faces into a stereotypically “Asian” face. These racist releases from a company that boasts 8 billion video views per day had people around the world wondering how, exactly, these filters slipped through the filter.
The answer is simple: They’re not designing for a diverse audience.
It’s one thing to say ‘We’re trying to make tech more inclusive’ but what we’re really trying to do is create places where people feel they belong.
Benjamin Evans is a UX/UI designer who has worked with a...
Here’s a basic truth about founding a startup: You don’t know everything you need to know. In fact, you probably only know a fraction of what you need to know to be successful. But don’t worry — you don’t have to go it alone. This is where a startup mentor comes in.
“For a really early stage company, mentors are a great source of industry advice and expertise, particularly if you don’t have direct expertise in that particular area,” Sapna Shah, Principal at Red Giraffe Advisors and startup mentor for XRC Labs, The Monarq Incubator, and TrendSeeder, tells Startups.co. “As well as executive coaching advice — perhaps you’ve never been a CEO before, and you’ve never had to manage people in this way.
Knowledge is one of the greatest things a sta...
Google AdWords is a heavyweight when it comes to understanding and monitoring the desires and questions of Google searchers, and ultimately understanding what affects the overall decision making that drives clicks.
By digging through and analyzing data, one can find explanations for budget leakage, and reasoning for campaign renovation. Using AdWords, in combination with multiple tools, users can conduct an accurate analysis of a campaigns current performance, both to discover strengths to continue taking advantage of and areas to improve.
For those of you looking to discover new ways to analyze your campaigns and make large and small scale changes to your account, join us for this ultimate PPC account analysis.
I...
Fail fast. Fail forward. Those are just two of the mantras you’ll see hanging in startup offices and incubators across the globe. In the startup world, a failure is considered a learning opportunity, at the least; a feather in the cap of the Founder, at best. We fetishize failure. We normalize it.
But as much as we talk a good game about failure, the reality is that failing sucks. Just as no one goes into their wedding day planning for divorce, no one starts a company thinking, “Yeah, this one will just be my starter. I’ll get it right next time.” No wants to fail, and yet the majority of startups do fail.
According to an examination of startup businesses (by which they mean new companies in general) in the United States conducted by Stati...
I started angel investing almost by accident, which sounds strange to say. Who “accidentally” invests tens of thousands of dollars into highly speculative ventures? Well, I did.
A friend introduced me to Clayton Christopher who was raising money for his new liquor company Deep Eddy. Their first product, a sweet tea vodka, was amazing and he was an experienced entrepreneur, so I went in.
Investing was an exciting, interesting process. Then the company took off, and I got to tell everyone I know that I invested in that new vodka that everyone in Austin was drinking. Winning is the ultimate intoxicant, and from there, I was hooked.
I started investing in companies left and right. I became a huge cheerleader for angel investing. I wrote about h...
If Product A & B are identical, what could cause Product A to sell 5x more than Product B?
I love button up short sleeve shirts, I usually buy them at $15-$30. I came across one I loved, but it costs a whopping $85! How can one mimic their bold pricing positioning to become a premium brand vs. a mid-range brand?
Randy Tucker, Startup Founder, answered:
Purchase decisions are made based on presentation and then need. The same products presented in different methods will sell drastically different. Think about this, shirt A & B are identical, Shirt A is presented in a comfortable nice store with a well dressed sales person and Shirt B is neatly folded and laid out in a street vendors trunk. At the same price, shirt A will sell better. The on...
A “go to market strategy” outlines how your startup plans to deliver your product to your customer. While similar to a business plan, a go to market strategy is narrower in scope. A business plan covers everything about the business, while go to market strategy zeros in on exactly how your startup will deliver a product or service to your customer.
This one might seem painfully obvious, but you have to know what you’re selling before you can sell it. With that in mind, take a little time to clearly define your product before you dive into the rest of your go to market strategy. You need to be able to say exactly what the product is as well as what it does.
Granted, much of the info...
Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:
Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise
Phase Two - Investor Selection
Phase Three - The Pitch
Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch
Part 2 - Market Size
Part 3 - Revenue Model
Part 4 - Operating Model
Part 5 - Customer Definition
Part 6 - Customer Acquisition
Part 7 - Funding ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets
Part 9 - Traction
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Welcome to part 7 of “The Pitch” — where we look at the funding ask section of our pitch deck or plan and how to get potential investors excited about our business idea.
Let’s dive in!
Most business plans and pitch decks are a long preamble to one question - will you fund me?
Ah, the age-old question. 🙋 It'...
If you'd like to see some samples - we've got 4 awesome business plans for you here.