“…especially in the early days of your startup when you are less likely to reject work, when it’s done and dusted, and you assess your invested hours, more often or not you will find you have been underpaid. It is always hard to walk away from a job, but sometimes it is the necessary thing to do to maintain your a) business and b) soul.”
– Stephen Moore, Startup Pricing: It’s Not Always Right
Charging more can earn you less, underpricing can leave your company undervalued… The laws of nature seem to go haywire when we talk about pricing.
An exploration of why we tend to underprice by Stephen Moore, Co-Founder of Roots Furniture, triggered a discussion on how to best approach startup pricing. Did the Startups Live community pin down this sli...
In programming, there’s a concept called “technical debt.” It’s the idea that you can build something well or you can build it quickly — but not both. A site or an app that’s built super fast is going to be buggy; that’s just the reality of the limitations of human creation. But sometimes — especially in the fast-paced world of startups — it’s worth it to release something quickly, bugs and all, with the knowledge that you’ll fix it (i.e. pay off your technical debt) in the near future.
Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, borrowed the concept of technical debt and created the idea of “diversity debt.” It applies to hiring practices in any company, where every time you make a new hire, you’re either incurring more diversity debt or paying it...
Every startup dies a few deaths before it lives forever.
But that's not what they tell us in the startup Founder brochure. Instead, we make up this fairy tale that our startup must be a great idea that instantly takes off, leaving customers and investors standing in line to hand us their cash. We keep making great decisions while we struggle to stay on top of our meteoric rise. Our days are jam-packed between photo shoots for magazine covers, headlining major conferences, and giving powerful speeches at company retreats.
Sound familiar?
No, of course it doesn't. Because that's not how any of this shit goes. The real version of a startup involves failing incessantly, sometimes to the brink of shutting down, until we rise back up and finally ...
Working as a leader for a start-up is not for the weak. It requires a “rare unicorn” type of leader to see it through to stable profitability. The success of a business is how many unicorns you have on your team and how well they sparkle. What traits do I look for when seeking out the most sparkly unicorns of them all?
Hustling unicorns run long and fast, they work with a sense of urgency, and they do it with a smile. They have an extra comb in their pocket and come prepared with water and snacks for the ride. Unicorns are prepared, work hard and look GOOD doing it. 🙂 There is no complaining of long weeks or long hours….in fact, they enjoy the hustle.
Sparkle Indicator: Horses act “put out” by a workload. Unicor...
Living in an overpriced is now a choice, not a requirement.
That wasn't always the case, as startup Founders like us would flock to cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York to find the capital and people we needed to build something incredible (I lived in all of them). We'd convince ourselves that our 800 square foot apartment (with roommates!) made sense because if we weren't here, we would never have a shot a startup glory!
And we were mostly right — for a time.
But the requirements of being in a big, overpriced city have changed dramatically. For the first time in startup history, we can do nearly all of the things we once did in a big city from the comfort of our own (much cheaper) home. In a new era of Slack, Social, and Z...
Fresh from graduating at the bottom of my class in high school, I packed my $800 orange Datsun and moved to some weird place I'd never heard of before called "Ohio" to go to college. Back then the Internet didn't exist as we now know it, so when you left the state (unless you called someone on their home line) — you no longer existed.
I went ghost for almost 4 years — no trips home, no holidays — nothing. I lost touch with most of my friends and family. But while they were wondering what prison I was incarcerated at, I was busy building one of the first Internet companies.
The company did well, and when I returned, I was a millionaire. Little did I know that from that point on none of my relationships would ever be the same. Here are the ha...
How much time do we spend preparing our spouses for our startup journey?
Do we assume they somehow magically understand the path we've chosen to follow? Do we know for sure that our sacrifices align with their goals? When is the last time we sat down and made ourselves 100% sure that we're still on the same page?
In a business where we spend so much time recruiting talent, pitching investors and selling customers, we often overlook the most important person we should be convincing to join our cause — our spouses.
Often the single most important person in our life hasn't been afforded the same time and attention as everyone else to understand exactly why we're going down this crazy path. Or perhaps they do, but they haven't been reminded in...
Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another or to catch new Pokémon, and numerous companies were able to cash in on quick marketing wins.
There’s a lesson here, though. It’s most likely been a while since Pokémon GO was part of a recent conversation. Chances are that businesses are also no longer investing a significant portion of their marketing budget into the app’s in-game advertising opportunities. Short-term wins absolutely exist, but instead of spend...
Becoming a Founder is often the first time our lives where the advice of others — even our parents — may not necessarily be useful advice.
That isn't to say getting feedback on our idea isn't important, it just means that we have to be hyper-aware about how we get feedback and who we're asking to evaluate our idea.
The first mistake we make in letting others evaluate our idea is determining whether they are in fact qualified to be making this evaluation.
Let me put it this way: I'm Wil Schroter, Founder & CEO of Startups.com. I've started 9 startups and helped over 1 million Founders on our platform. If you come to me with an idea about how to take a screen-printing business to market, I'...
Here at Startups, we hate the term “free money.” But, it’s one that people throw around a lot when they’re talking about grants. The reason we don’t call small business grants “free money” is because they take a lot of work to get. And there’s a lot of competition, so oftentimes that work doesn’t even result in a payday. Sure, you don’t have to pay back a small business grant the way you do a business loan — but it’s certainly not “free money.”
However, we also understand that small business grants can really boost a startup, if they qualify. And it’s not like other forms of startup funding — like venture capital, angel investment, and even crowdfunding — don’t also take a lot of time and effort. So we thought we’d throw together some reso...