Recessions breed incredible opportunities for startups, if only us Founders knew where to look and how to leverage them.
At its core, a recession distracts everyone all at once, meaning only a select few will have the fortitude and foresight to find advantages. What we need to do during these times is step back and look at the overall picture to understand not just what's happening to us, but what's also happening to everyone else.
This is where the opportunity begins.
It's really hard for anyone to stay focused on growth when the walls are closing in around us. That's why most of our competition will be circling the wagons and staying completely fixated on internal struggles and survival. This is a gol...
As a startup, customer acquisition is essential for success. It requires careful planning and execution to ensure that your efforts are successful and cost-effective. In this introduction, we will explore key topics such as building relationships with potential customers, tracking success metrics, leveraging digital marketing channels, testing different campaigns, and more. With the right strategies in place, customer acquisition can be an exciting opportunity for startups to grow their customer base and expand their business.
Customer acquisition for startups is an incredibly important process that can mean the difference between success and failure. A...
I had the pleasure of talking to Blake about his ideas and experiences as a social entrepreneur. I started by asking him about how TOMS started.
Blake: I started TOMS after a trip I took to Argentina in 2006. I noticed that many of the locals wore shoes that I learned were alpargata. I also noticed that in rural villages there were many children who were without shoes and how that was affecting their daily lives. I had to come up with a way to help and knew that relying on donations alone was not a sustainable solution, so I used my knowledge of business to come up with an idea. The result was a for-profit business model that empowers customers to help children through their purchases. For every pair of shoes purchased, a new pair is given ...
Pandora was never the darling of Silicon Valley. Ever. It never had the hype of Spotify, the scale of a hot social app, or the vision of Netflix. And yet, what it has always had is a leadership team that would not quit and a passionate user base who wouldn’t quit on the product either.
You hear a lot about the great entrepreneurs not giving up… but you hear less about founders pitching 348 investors before they got a yes, less about founding teams who went years without pay, less about founders who personally racked up half a million in debt trying to stay afloat. It took three acts of Congress to save Pandora at one point… and that was when a grassroots campaign by its users bailed the company out. More people complained that Congress migh...
Today's investors are like the dinosaurs of old, looking up at the sky and saying, "Hey, look at that bright shiny thing cruising right at us..."
Back then it was a meteor that created an extinction-level event for the T-Rex. Today those dinosaurs and their Patagonia vests are watching AI about to make them extinct. What it means to be a VC investor is about to change forever, not because of anything the VCs have done wrong, but because the need for them is quickly evaporating.
For a very long time, building a startup company was insanely expensive and risky. We had to pay for a ton of people, marketing, and infrastructure in hopes that the upfront investment would be worth it. But what happens when those costs plummet? What happens when we...
Now that we have most of our assumptions in place, the fun begins. We can start modifying our assumptions that drive sales revenue or fixed costs that will begin to calculate net operating income.
When we forecast an income statement all of these variables work in tandem to support our net operating income formula. Once we line net operating income up with our assumptions, we can move the conversation with potential investors toward what the assumptions are versus debating the whole income statement.
We've already captured most of our indirect costs, capital expenditures, and other costs incurred within our Fixed Items and Assumptions, so most of the work is done already. We can calculate net income by s...
Historically, the bulk of the Valley’s successful companies haven’t been the rocketship consumer successes like Google and Facebook. They’ve been the steady doubles, base-hits, triples, and home runs of the companies who sell software to businesses.
And in a time when Google and Facebook alone control some 80% of all digital ad budgets, that business model of selling something is starting to look better and better.
One of the few entrepreneurs to bridge these two worlds– selling intuitive, easy to use products to companies– and build a multi-billion public company out of it was Aaron Levie. Unlike a Marc Benioff, Levie didn’t come from the enterprise world. He never worked a day at Oracle or IBM. He came up with the idea in college.
It was ...
Lisa Wang spent four years building SheWorx, a female entrepreneur networking group and community that helped nearly 20,000 women entrepreneurs build and scale their companies. Now, the company has been acquired by the equity crowdfunding platform, Republic, with the goal of expanding their reach even further.
While SheWorx focused primarily on addressing the gender gap in venture capital funding, Republic has traditionally focused on equity crowdfunding. But Lisa tells Startups.com that her thinking about “what it actually takes to close the funding gap” for “diverse entrepreneurs” has changed during her time running SheWorx.
“If you’re going to create any significant change, you can’t keep going down the same old path you’ve always been ...
The old days of having to grow our staff by promoting them into a management pyramid are (thankfully) wasting away. Startups can do way more with fewer people, which means fewer management layers and more empowered staff.
Yet, we're still stuck in the old thinking of "I can only progress if people are reporting to me." It's a dying notion, yet one we struggle with as startup Founders to replace. But we have to figure out how to recast the career paths of our teams if we're going to learn to work in a new world of smaller teams doing 10x more than they used to.
A startup is a company that's in the early stages of development, usually characterized by a small team, fast growth, and limited resources.
Most startups fail, but some create amazing ...
The new mark of a standout Founder is no longer how big they can make their staff — it's how small they can keep it.
Oh, how times have changed, my friends. For hundreds of years, we graded the value and success of a company based on how "big" it had become, and headcount was always the leading indicator. "We've scaled to 1,000 people!" would have been the badge of honor up until the past year, and now it begs the most obvious question, "Why?"
We're entering the Age of Efficiency, where we are rewarded not for a bloated headcount but for a tiny headcount that can produce even greater output. And I've got to say — I couldn't be happier about it because, as startups, this is the dream we've all been waiting for.
Let's star...