We’ll dive into the details of the differences between angel investors and venture capitalist below, but here’s a wide angle of view first:
Angel investors are wealthy individuals (or groups of wealthy individuals) who invest their own money into companies.
Venture capitalists (VCs) are employees of venture capital firms that invest other people’s money (which they hold in a fund) into companies.
Now let’s take a closer at the two, before diving into the specific differences.
Angel investors are typically high net worth individuals who invest very early into the formation of a new startup company, usually in exchange for equity or convertible debt. The ro...
Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and individual investors. This approach taps into the collective efforts of a large pool of individuals — primarily online via social media and crowdfunding platforms — and leverages their networks for greater reach and exposure.
Crowdfunding is a rapidly growing industry. Below, we explore key statistics including the average raise sizes, the impact marketing has on average raise, and the underlying demographics driving crowdfunding.
What may have seemed like a niche way to raise money at first is now a major force in fundraising. Worldwide, companies and individuals ha...
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing a large group of customers into smaller groups, based on certain characteristics. It’s also sometimes called “market segmentation.”
Customer segmentation is important because it helps companies market more effectively to their customers. If you want your marketing budget to go as far as it can, it’s essential that you know who you’re marketing to and what they respond to when it comes to advertisements.
For example, if your company had a customer base that included both 14-year-old boys and 45-year-old men, you wouldn’t use the same marketing techniques with the two groups, would you? But you can’t even know that you have ...
Your team can make or break your startup. Seriously. This is so true that is has become a cliché.
Think about it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time together. You’re going to go through a lot of super stressful situations. You may or may not go broke at some point — together. So, when you’re forming your startup team, it’s really important to make sure you’re asking the right startup interview questions.
Sure, we all know the standards. What are your greatest weaknesses? Why do you want to work here? What was your biggest accomplishment in your last job? And a bunch of those standards made it onto this list. (After all, they’re standard for a reason.) But there are other questions you can ask applicants to your startup team that real...
Starting a startup isn’t just about opening your doors or launching your website. Long before that happens, it’s about planning to launch.
There’s a real art form in the planning, and those who have launched a lot of startups — as we have — approach launching a new idea very differently from someone who’s just taking on their first startup.
Simply put — we emphasize spending as little time as possible on chasing ideas that may not work. We’re nuts about efficiency.
We know that time is both our friend and our greatest enemy. And we do everything we can to protect our time so it’s spent in the most efficient way possible.
So what does that actually look like? Here are 10 steps to launching a startup, from someone who’s been there (a few time...
A customer journey map can be an incredibly helpful tool for your business. These maps outline every step that your customer goes through while engaging with your company, from learning about you for the first time to making repeat purchases. A customer journey map helps ensure that your customers are the center of your marketing — it should include touchpoints, frustrations, purchasing motivations, and the like. Creating one can help you identify pain points and keep your customers engaged throughout their buying process.
In this article, we’re going to outline how you can create a customer journey map for your inbound sales funnel.
Before creating your customer journey map, you need to build and defi...
When people talk about the transformative innovations shaping business in the 21st century, you may hear them talk about the influence of automation or the impact of increasing globalization. But one of the most revolutionary aspects of the digital revolution often goes unmentioned: social media.
Because so many of us tweet and post and share day in and day out on our personal accounts, it’s easy to think that social media is… well… easy.
But social media has completely transformed the way businesses connect with their audiences. And as any Founder who has struggled and failed to drum up an online audience for their brand can tell you, effective social media strategy is deceptively hard to get right. It takes a delicate balance of strategy ...
When it comes to building a startup, you are who you hire. Not only do the people you bring onto your team determine the direction and destiny of your product; they also shape what it will be like to come to work every day. So as you get started on the process of “who” your startup is going to be, we want to make sure you’re thinking about something major: team diversity.
Team diversity refers to differences between members of startup team. Those differences can include demographic differences (like age, race, sex, ethnicity), personality (extrovert, introvert, and differing Myers-Briggs types) and functional (as in skill sets, like engineering, design, copywriting, and marketing).
When we think a...
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 (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 7 - Funding
Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets
Part 9 - Traction
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Let’s dive in!
Our Customer Acquisition Slide in our pitch deck details our acquisition strategy for new customers. For many startups, defining a marketing growth strategy will be inherently linked to our customer acquisition cost for new customers and the key metrics in how we convert them.
Daniel Kempe, after a series of careers that ran the gamut — from builder, typist, telecoms engineer and freelance designer — decided to try his hand at content marketing. What he found was a landscape teeming with great content, complimented by some great automation tools. But, while tools like Buffer were great for automating sharing, Daniel found that actually finding content to share was a major time suck.
“It was just a pain in the ass, really, to find really great content to share,” Daniel tells Startups.co.
And so, like so many startup founders before him, Daniel looked this problem in the eye and said: I can solve this.
Daniel teamed up with PR professional Matthew Spurr and award-winning developer Mubashar Iqbal to create Quuu, the...