The worst advice Founders get consistently comes from their hometown.
I call these the "local yocals" and every hometown has them. They are well-meaning advisors who try to guide a Founder through the startup stages but instead fill their head with irrelevant, outdated, and in many cases straight-up bad advice.
Every single time I talk to a Founder that's been clearly led astray, I ask where they got that advice. And in almost every case, it's from someone that simply isn't relevant to the startup ecosystem. It's their well-meaning uncle who made a boatload of money in commercial real estate, or a local angel investor who has no idea who YCombinator is, or the "startup guru" who had the one exit in town but has never left the state.
From a ...
We can all agree that bringing qualified customers to a new website is no easy feat. To add to that, most of your customers won’t be willing to pull out their credit card the first time that they reach your site.
Yeah, we know. It sucks to hear, especially since half of the people who stumble upon your site probably won’t come back for a second visit.
So how do you actually sell to these online customers?
Well, you don’t.
You give them insane amounts of value for free and make it easy for them to buy when they’re ready.
That’s right. The days of bombarding your potential customers with sales tactics and TV commercials are coming to a close. The secret to winning customers is to offer them exactly what they’re looking for when they actively ...
You'll hear the terms “founder” and “co-founder or cofounder” thrown around a lot in Startup Land. But what, exactly, do they mean? What's the difference between the two? And how do you find a good one? It's not very easy to find cofounders that properly fill the business needs and help in the early stages of a startup. So, where do founders even start?
We'll answer the above questions and six more in this breakdown of everything you need to know about founders and co-founders in order to ensure your company's success.
A founder is a person who comes up with an idea (hopefully a profitable idea) and then transforms it into a new business or startup. Founders can set up a business on their own, or they can do it with other...
Funding a startup isn't easy, and anyone that has launched a startup knows this to be painfully true. You need money (like yesterday) and raising funds is "a process" — to state it simply. There are so many details to know and questions to ask before a round can even begin, and once the startup funding round is ready to rock, there are additional questions every founder needs to know the answer to before they take the plunge.
One of the most common questions asked — and arguably most important details to know is how much equity do you give away in seed round? With the help from members of our community, we are going to get into this question in further detail to demystify the information about raising seed capital and the amount of equity ea...
Getting equity back from an existing stakeholder isn't easy — but it is possible.
It's a situation that very few Founders have ever been through before, so no one really knows how to go about it. Let's talk a bit about how the situation develops and what we can do to get some of that precious equity back into our coffers.
More than anything, equity isn't just a stock issuance. It's a promise that at some future point that stock will be worth cash money — maybe.
When we think about pulling the equity back, we have to think in terms of how to redeem that promise of payment in some capacity. It's not just a matter of "taking it away" per se, it's a matter of trading the terms of the initial agreement ...
Out of the hundreds of thousands of people using my company Open Listings to shop for and buy homes, I thought I knew who our worst users were — even by name.
There was Sarah* in San Diego who went on 134 home tours before finally buying one. Then, there’s Dan in San Francisco who’s asked our in-house agent team questions about nearly 1,000 properties but hasn’t submitted an offer on a home yet. And, there was Chris, who tried to negotiate our already low fee down to zero by blackmailing us with negative online reviews.
As CEO, I cared deeply about all users and every shred of feedback. I read every review, internalized problems, and prioritized solutions. I felt confident that we were super customer-centric and solving the most important p...
All startups face the same issue when launched: Each strives to create the best product and achieve market compatibility, but not all startups are created equally. Without a doubt, focusing on product development and market entrance is important, but too much emphasis on these areas tends to eclipse broader foundational issues.
I’ve met hundreds of founding teams over the years. Some were ready for venture capitalist funding while others needed to keep percolating a bit longer. In order for startups to reel in venture capitalist backing, building and scaling a fundable founding team is paramount from the start.
There’s an expression: “Choose the right tool for the team.”
When that idea is flipped, it becomes a more inspired guideline that c...
So, you’ve decided that you want to hire a company such as Chop Dawg to help build your future iPhone or Android application. That is exciting! With that said, now comes the vetting process that is so critical to the success of your app.
We’ve covered before extensively on our library about what you need to do to prepare for your first meeting with an agency. Some of the essentials are writing out your app requirements, conducting at least preliminary market research, determining your minimum and maximum budgets that you’re willing to invest, and the type of timeframe you’re willing to work around to bring your idea to life, etc.
We typically ask these types of questions to you, but what are the questions that you should prepare to ask the...
After almost two decades of decline, music industry revenues are finally starting to recover again and a lot of the credit goes to one guy: Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify. Ironically, Spotify was backed by the guy who helped enable all that piracy to begin with: Napster’s Sean Parker.
It was no small thing for the Recording Industry to learn to love Spotify… or any Internet music company for that matter. It was also no small thing for Ek to start Spotify with the stance of not wanting to “Disrupt” music labels—he wanted to help them.
It took Founder Daniel Ek two years to get his first deals in Sweden, and another two years to launch in the US. He and his partner invested largely their own money until they showed traction, and likely would h...
While we may not know all there is to know about our business yet, there’s still going to be some good old-fashioned accounting to do. So let’s break out those green visors and add machines — it’s time to learn WTF accounting is!
At its core, in order to be an accountant we need to be able to collect all the sources of income and expenses and translate those into a spreadsheet. When the numbers are small, this is so easy to do we’ll wonder why people get paid to do it. When they get large, we’ll wonder why anyone is willing to do this for any amount of money ever!
Yes! Because accounting for startups in the early days just isn't that complicated yet. Even if we've never seen any financial statements ...