Michel Feaster is not a woman you’d expect to be scared of anything. Her company, Usermind, is taking on the massive market of customer relationship management (CRM) software by providing a truly personalized customer service experience. Their focus? Millennials.
“Millennials have zero tolerance for companies that are not personalized,” Michel tells Startups.co. “Pretty much every business is facing this world where they’re going to win these hearts and ears — or someone else is going to win the Millennials.”
But Usermind isn’t Michel’s first time on the startup merry-go-round. Her first foray into the startup world was as employee #19 at Apptio. She joined Apptio with the goal of learning firsthand the ins and outs of building a company fr...
We're going to update our financial statements using a simple accounting process that requires zero professional accounting experience or accounting software — it's just our income statement spreadsheet.
Click here to download our template to follow along.
The next step after we've captured all of our financial transactions in our spreadsheet accounting system will be to process each of the financial records in order. Earlier we began recording transactions from our bank accounts and credit card statements, so now we'll drop them into the Tabs we set aside for business expenses and revenue.
We've broken our spreadsheet accounting system into a handful of useful tabs to populate.
Here's the quick list, then we'll go ov...
Our most broken assumption in Year 1 is that anyone will stick around for Year 2.
Spoiler Alert: They won't, and the cost of giving away a ton of equity and responsibility to people who won't be around for long is incredibly expensive.
I see this play out all the time, especially with First Time Founders who naively think that everyone who promised to help launch their startup in Year One will actually stick around to do it. It’s easy to make that mistake — when everyone’s talking a big game and acting just as excited as we are to build something amazing, we can’t help but believe them.
But all of a sudden, people stop showing up. That Co-Founder CTO whom we thought was going to build the whole product for "free" goes MIA. That mentor who ...
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
Part 7 - Funding
Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets
Part 9 - Traction ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Let’s dive in!
Startup Traction is your opportunity to tell investors how far you've taken the business up until this point. Just having a great idea is wonderful, but generating traction is what truly differentiates you from the pack. Especially in the early days, the only thing better than traction is more traction.
I’ve covered Max Levchin and the Web properties he’s built pretty much since I arrived in Silicon Valley in the peak of the dot com bubble. In fact, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing him for my first book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.” I continually try to get him on stage— despite having plumbed so many of his thoughts for so long— because he’s genuinely one of my favorite people to interview.
Not only does he have one of those iconic immigrant stories that should convince everyone why immigrants make this country stronger, but unlike so many other wealthy success stories, he’s never forgotten where he came from and what it felt like to be an outsider with nothing. Nothi...
While the novelty of creating the next Facebook sounds amazing, the truth is we don't need to necessarily invent a product to bring a new innovation to market.
If we look closely, we'll see that some of the fastest-growing companies out there — Uber, Casper, Dollar Shave Club and dare I say it, WeWork — are all based on ancient business models with a new twist.
Look, Uber didn't invent taxis — they just simply asked, "What's broken about the taxi business?" (Well, the limo business initially but who's tracking?) Any of us would be hard-pressed to find an existing product or service that couldn't use a ton of improvement.
What customers care most about is the improvement. Maybe that's ...
RightGIF is an easy Slack integration that serves up better GIFs.
If your startup/company/team of you and your best friend isn’t on Slack yet, you will be soon. They’ve hands-down won the team management wars with their ridiculously rapid growth and super easy integration. However, one of the initial things that I loved about Slack — the GIF integration with Giphy — sucks.
Like, majorly sucks. Like, you end up sending out GIFs that will, best case scenario, confuse and, worst case scenario, get you fired. On our work channels, we’ve abandoned GIFs altogether, because the only humor we were getting out of them was laughs over how terrible they were. Now, I’m not a Giphy hater by ...
Say you’re invited to dine at Buckingham Palace with monarchs from around the world. Would you show up wearing a bathrobe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable, right? Yet, app creators do it all the time. After all their hard work, at last about to go live on the App Store and Google Play and join the company of app royalty, they hurry their app into terrycloth screenshots and expect to be fed like a king.
Not gonna happen.
Choosing to give your app anything less than outstanding screenshots on your app pages is a big mistake. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Understandably, plenty of Founders press forward thinking I can’t pay a developer any more to design screenshots or every time there’s a new release and I need to make updates,...
A market analysis is an assessment of any given market that includes both qualitative and quantitative research. Conducting a thorough market analysis as a key piece of your business plan ensures that you know everything there is to know about your market.
Coincidentally, it reassures any current or future investors that you know what you’re doing, that you’ve done you’re homework and that you’re the right entrepreneur to address the gap in this particular market.
But — in order to conduct a thorough market analysis — you need to cover a wide range of topics. Before diving into the specifics, remember that at its core, a market analysis is about learning the most you can about your market.
You’ll discover w...
Think of big companies like the Death Star.
On the outset, it's a planet killer. But its weakness, (other than a really questionably-architected ventilation system), is that it moves at a glacial pace.
I spent 10 years running a digital agency working with these Fortune 500 giants like BMW, Best Buy and Eli Lilly.
What we don't see on the outside is how impossible it is for these companies to move internally and how we can use that lack of mobility to our advantage versus worrying about our home planet of Alderaan getting blown up.
The first thing we need to know about big companies is that their culture is almost always faced entirely inward.
That means their staff, unlike ours, spends more time co...