As a startup founder, one of the biggest keys to success is being able to leverage marketing to garner awareness and grow your business. This means taking stock of all potential marketing channels and deciding which ones are the best fit for you.
Chances are, especially if you’re bootstrapping, that digital marketing is the first thing that came to mind. In general, the barrier to entry with digital marketing is much lower and there are many ways for you to market yourself for free—if you’re willing to dedicate the time and energy.
If you’re new to SEO, or if you are needing to brush up on your skills, you’re in the right place. Our SEO for b...
For as much as we startup Founders love to innovate business models, we sure have done a lousy job of innovating on the employment model. Our salary lines tend to be our single largest expense in a company, and yet the biggest innovation we've had to date has been moving to a remote work system.
We've agreed that we don't need offices or "40-hour work weeks" anymore, so why haven't we agreed that we don't need the "full-time salaries" that came with them?
(Gasp!)
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, I'm about to be exponentially less popular. And, well, I wasn't that popular before, so… But seriously, why haven't we reconsidered compensation in an era where everything has become fractionalized?
Very few people actually work full-time an...
Not so long ago, the word “outsourcing” had a bad rap as being synonymous with lost local jobs and greedy CEOs looking for dirt cheap labor. Today, however, busy entrepreneurs and companies everywhere are considering the advantages of virtual outsourcing.
There are many reasons for outsourcing to a virtual assistant, but it can be difficult to determine if the benefits outweigh the negatives. Here are some pros and cons of insourcing versus virtual outsourcing to consider before you decide if a virtual service is right for you.
Lower Cost: With all of the expenses that go into hiring an in-house employee, such as recruiting costs, healthcare and other benefits, parking, office space, and supplies, outso...
Getting ready to audit your site’s SEO? Congratulations! You’re about to embark towards improving your overall SEO footprint while also finding every single potential wart that your website may have.
The bad news is every site will have things wrong with it – yours included. The good news is that each new issue that you find represents an opportunity to improve. As an SEO, the point of auditing your site is to find areas to squeeze more juice out of.
In my previous article entitled, SEO for Beginners, I outlined how there are both things occurring on page, as well as off page, that can impact your site’s SEO performance. Foundational to a good SEO strategy to the point of almost being a prerequisite is technical and content optimization.
B...
In 2008, the world got a new music streaming service named Spotify. It was developed in Stockholm, Sweden, and provided digital rights management-protected content from record labels and media companies. It may have started out as a local thing, but the freemium service quickly expanded. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million monthly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers.
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Andreas Ehn, who was Spotify’s first employee and CTO. Andreas was responsible for the product and platform architecture as well as hiring a world-class engineering team, of which many have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs on their own.
After Spotify, Andreas founded Wrapp — a mobile online-to-offline customer...
The first article in this 3-part series (How to Design a Killer Sales Compensation Model) introduced the concept of behavioural theory and how it affects sales compensation design. This second article discusses how compensation packages suit different stages of company and product evolution.
The main challenge with designing a sales compensation program is the primary sales role constantly evolves as the company grows and the market matures. The following diagram, courtesy of The Alexander Group, explains the four phases of growth and how this impacts the business.
In the Startup phase, brand awareness is low, and companies strive for a foothold in the market. The salesperson must have an entrepreneurial drive ...
Welcome to Phase Four of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.
Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes
Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works
Phase Three - How to Split Equity
Phase Four - Part 1 - Equity Management ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 2 - Recovering Startup Equity
Let's continue!
Splitting startup equity is only half the challenge for early-stage startups — managing startup equity is a whole different issue! How much equity we split and the founders' ownership percentage is generally determined by what we expect each founder to contribute.
But the problem is once ...
The mobile internet has been both a blessing and a curse for startups and small businesses looking to build their brands from the ground up.
Never before in history has achieving awareness and influence been so democratized. Truly any brand can have their 15 seconds of fame – or more. However, that’s also the curse. There is more noise than ever before to stand out from and drive awareness.
Therefore it’s not a surprise that when we recently asked over 500 startup & small business owners what their primary digital marketing objective was — their number one priority was to increase company and product awareness. It even beat out driving inbound leads and customers — go figure.
In order to achieve brand awareness in this new mobile-driven, ...
From Mark Twain to Mark Zuckerberg, some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century were renowned for their lack of organization. Indeed, Einstein famously said that “a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,” permanently cementing, for better or worse, the association of brilliance and disorganization in the popular imagination.
This dynamic seems to have carried over to the theater arts as well. Aspiring writers, performers, and producers won’t find a single, clear avenue for proceeding from proof of concept to execution. Unlike other industries (such as publishing), the theater arts don’t have an effective progression for stories to grow from an idea in a writer’s mind into a fully-fledged musical ready for the public.
The sol...
Starting a company is downright difficult and anyone that has done it before will tell you that is an understatement. What they also might mention is in our day and age, Founders don't have to jump off the proverbial cliff head first without a parachute anymore.
The world of podcasting has opened a door into the minds and experiences of many thought leaders and seasoned Founders that offer a "tell-all" experience into their startup-building journey. It's like getting first-hand mentorship without paying a dime, and with the number of entrepreneur podcasts increasing in recent years, there's no shortage of information to take advantage of.
For startup founders embarking on the entrepreneurial journey for the first time, or even for the serial ...