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 ...
When we want to achieve a certain goal or go somewhere, we plan for it. Why? Simply because taking action and not thinking of the consequences that goes along with it produces chaos and a waste of resources such as time, effort, and money.
For instance, our lives. I’m pretty sure we all have a plan for our own lives. We want to achieve this and that by a certain age. We look forward the next day because we have a plan to fulfil.
Why do we do this? It’s not because we’re bored or nothing better to do but because we value our life. We want it to be meaningful. We don’t just want to survive, we want to live.
And for this same thing, we need to have a startup business plan. We didn’t think of building i...
Founder success is almost never what we picture it to be.
When we think of wildly successful Founders our minds easily jump to billionaires like Branson, Blakely, and Musk, balancing a life of magazine cover story photoshoots with keynote presentations and TV interviews. Our most "successful" Founders often have this air of glamour around their success.
But as it happens, Founder "success" feels way less glamorous. In fact, the most exciting success milestones are often so mundane when they occur that we don't even realize they happened. But this success is a culmination not of a single event, but a series of tiny events that we later look back and realize was when our success was truly defined.
For most of our journ...
Search engine optimization is an area of digital marketing that involves using certain tactics to help your website climb the search engine results pages for queries relevant to your business.
Focusing on boosting your SEO should be a key part of your plan to build an audience, as it can help you to reach a lot more of your target customers.
In this guide, we are going to outline 7 different tips for improving your on-page SEO and improving your site’s search engine visibility. Read on to find out more.
When we talk about on-page SEO, we’re referring to changes you can make to your own website in order to boost your search engine rankings. This can involve writing optimized copy, creating SEO-friendly content, and e...
As the founder of a start-up and new app, I’m in the position of being in a brand new position over and over again.
Pretty much daily, in fact, like all entrepreneurs, I’m confronted with a barrage of new questions that require research, testing, intuition, and unforeseen obstacles that keep me up in the wee hours of night.
“What’s the right minimum viable product? Which feature will drive active users most? How do I get event insurance? Do I have the right ASO? Which marketing spend is most efficient? Can I remain mission-driven while monetizing?”
So many new things to learn, so much to navigate.
It’s those endless beginnings, however, those unknown situations when I’m standing on the edge of foreign terrain with no roadmap that keep me ...