Startups use their elevator pitch to quickly communicate their startup idea and value proposition in one or two sentences.
In our previous idea validation lessons, we focused on the importance of taking your initial idea and defining your problem, particular market, advantages, and customer needs. Now it’s time to refine those learnings into a polished Elevator Pitch and continue our startup idea validation.
The heart of every great Elevator Pitch includes 4 essential components:
As we learned, great business ideas start with a well-defined problem and the ability to identify how painful that problem is. Now, we’ll concentrate on how to effectively articulate it in your elevator pitch.
You’ve zeroed i...
According to the Small Business Association, veteran-owned businesses make up 9.1 percent of all US businesses — and they all need capital to get and keep them going. But securing financing for a startup or a small business is almost never easy. And it can be even more difficult for veterans, who may have gaps in their financial history due to time on active duty.
Luckily, there are a few options for business loans for veterans. Some are government-funded, while others come from the private sector. Let's take a look first at government-funded small business loans for veterans and then dive into the private sector.
The Small Business Association (SBA) administers the most well-known small business l...
A business grant is a sum of money given to a business in order to help them further their business. They’re usually distributed by governments, corporations, foundations, or trusts. Unlike many other types of business funding, grants don’t have to be paid back and business owners aren’t required to give up equity in exchange for a grant.
However, most small businesses probably won’t qualify for a small business grant, as they’re tied directly to US government agencies that have specific goals. There are some categories of business that are an except, though, including research and development companies, as well as some high tech companies.
State level grants are also tied to the direct economic or social needs and...
Imagine getting married to someone you hardly knew just because you "really needed to get this marriage thing going, and they seem qualified enough at the time." Does that sound like the recipe for a healthy long-term relationship? Probably not. But that's pretty much how most of us select our future spouse for our startups (aka "The Cofounder").
At some point, we inevitably step back and ask "Is this really the right person to be my long-term co-founder or did I just do a shotgun wedding with this weirdo?" Which invariably leads to "How can I tell if this is the 'right' co-Founder, and if it isn't — how do I unwind this thing?
To be fair, these are questions most Founders will end up asking, and if we're not, it doesn't mean our co-founder...
If I hadn't been a Founder, I'd be an awful parent.
Now, I'm already giving myself too much credit here because it's assuming I'm not an awful parent, which let's be honest, many of us just might be. But I've definitely come to appreciate over the years raising my 5-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter how my best parenting traits are directly mapped back to what I've learned as a Founder.
Surprisingly, it really has little to do with "building a startup" and more to do with how I've come to think like a Founder.
The day my son Wil was born, I wrote him a long letter. In it, I gave him all of the advice I had in me about preparing him for the world. The one piece that's always resonated the most was "Question every...
What do you do if you have a great idea for a tech startup, but no technical knowledge about how to build it? Well, there are usually three options: find a technical Co-Founder you can work with, outsource to an expensive dev shop in the States or in Europe, or outsource to a cheaper (but often lower quality) dev shop overseas.
Hicham Amine and his company Hidden Founders are out to add a fourth — and better — option to that paradigm.
Hicham describes Hidden Founders as “halfway between an incubator and a dev shop.” Dev shops, for example, traditionally complete the technical specifications of a project — and then leave. They have no investment in the company and, usually, are more like hired hands than member...
Like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, PowerPoint abides. It’s a great tool for assembling presentations and pitch decks. Lively conversations and entire industries surround the PowerPoint – trying to make slides better, helping people prepare materials, debating that the tool is outdated and boring… And at the center, PowerPoint abides.
There is no shortage of templates available online, but the Quickstart PowerPoint Template sticks with the fundamentals, aiming to help people “create amazing powerpoint presentations in minutes.”
Using standard fonts prevents any snags or downloading delays. A trove of images eliminates the need to conduct time-consuming searches elsewhere. 38 ready-made slides put creators close to the finish line before the...
I've failed numerous times and watched countless other Founders do the same. We kept ourselves awake nonstop worrying about the outcome of our failures. We took years off of our life and put ourselves in horrible places mentally and physically.
And you know what we learned in the end? It generally didn't matter.
That's right, our "fear of failure" was always 100x worse than how the failure itself played out. And so we took desperate measures to avoid failure, like clearing the last of our savings, running up debt, and going yet another year without pay. At some point, we became far more intent on "not failing" than succeeding.
What we need is a method for dissecting failure into actionable bits.
If we think ab...
There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups: SBA small business loans, business credit lines, short term loans, invoice financing, and merchant cash advances. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
A SBA small business loan is a loan that is backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). Founded in 1953, the SBA is a federal government program that provides support to small business owners in the form of mentorship, workshops, counseling, and small business loans.
While the loans are backed by the SBA, they don’t come directly from the SBA. You’ll have to find a local lender who provides SBA loans in order to access the funding.
Who qualifies?
There are three main types of SBA small...
There’s the developer’s vision of a mobile app and then there’s the reality of the app in the hands of users. The only way to make sure that the two are one and the same is to conduct beta tests.
If you find beta testing complicated – or you’re not even sure where to begin – then Ubertesters is the tool for you. Ubertesters is a cloud-based platform for managing the beta testing process of mobile apps “to ensure an accurate, fast and cost effective mobile testing process that results in a high-quality, flawless, mobile app.”
Figuring out if beta testing is right for your mobile app, as well as the perfect time for testing, is a good place to begin. Kissmetrics offers excellent recommendations to help make these decisions.
At some point, ho...