What is one surefire tip to find investors and/or making the right impression on an investor?
The following advice around how to find investors is provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
I’ve seen investors decline to invest in startups because their founders were so unsophisticated about legal formalities and/or because there is no documentation about intellectual property ownership. Before you find investors, you need to form a legal entity...
Since 2004, our companies have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs raising capital for their businesses. Over time, this has provided us an incredible vantage point from which to observe how the most successful entrepreneurs prepare for approaching investors. We have also seen firsthand that there are many things most entrepreneurs don’t know about investors, but should. We’ve compiled a list of the 10 things every entrepreneur should know about investors to help prepare them for the process.
#1: There Are a Lot of Investors Out There
According to the Center for Venture Research, there are 8.7 million people who qualify as accredited investors in the United States. However, only a small portion of those people actively invest in deals (a...
Investors help fuel the economy, providing entrepreneurs and thriving businesses with the capital they need to innovate and grow. This leads to economic development, job creation, and break-throughs that change the way we look at the world. The path to becoming a millionaire or billionaire investor does more than put lots of zeroes at the end of your bank statements. It tends to leave you with some hard won wisdom. Here, we’ve put together a list of the top 10 quotes from self-made millionaire and billionaire investors to help guide you on your own path.
“There must be high risk – in fact, very high risk. It’s the key to success. If there is no risk, you have already missed the boat. Your competitors will already be there.”
— Tom Perkins
(n...
Startup entrepreneurs face the daunting task of getting everything in order and taking care of even the minor thing precisely. Ranging from finances, back-end, front-end development to marketing and product launches, a startup entrepreneur has to take care of everything possible. Most of the time and personnel is wasted on administrative tasks which can be completely automated through the use of some powerful tools. Getting your idea developed into a full-fledged business is the primary task of an entrepreneur and a startup is no way endowed with hordes of cash to hire more personnel, unless backed in millions by a VC or angel investor.
Every startup has to operate in the financial constraints imposed on it and has to limit the personnel wo...
Clicking the “Publish” button is one of the highlights of my day.
Working hard on a post and then putting it out there to help others is extremely rewarding. It’s one of the main reasons why I continue to write so much.
But it’s not the only reason….
Content marketing remains one of the most effective strategies to grow a blog – any blog.
Eighty-six percent of marketers in North America use content marketing, and 71% of marketers (overall) are planning to increase spending on content marketing.
Creating great content is an extremely important part of any successful content marketing strategy. But it’s just one part.
If all you do is hit “Publish” and then move on to the next article, your blog won’t grow as quickly as it should.
And if you...
What do Karl Marx and Monday mornings have in common? Considering how most people feel on Monday mornings, Marx and Mondays are more connected than you’d think.
Marx predicted that as skills became more specialized, the personal contributions of workers would become less distinct, leading them to lose sight of the results of their efforts. Without a sense of accomplishment at the end of a task, workers would eventually become apathetic to their roles.
This is a sentiment that’s grown increasingly strong in today’s digital world.
In contrast to the industrial age, the digital age provides a far less structured work environment that often lacks fixed schedules, the need for offices, and tangible products. On top of that, it deals in the curre...
Startups.co, the world’s largest startup launch platform, announced Tuesday, August 11th that they have signed an agreement to purchase Zirtual, the leading platform for connecting fast-growing startup companies with virtual assistants.
This agreement comes on the heels of an announcement by Zirtual on Monday, August 10th that the company would pause operations while it made a transition. The brief outage was due to a capital infusion that the company was counting on for expansion. Startups.co has notified all Zirtual employees, clients and associates that the service will resume normal operations as of Monday, August 17th.
The Zirtual service has grown at a rapid pace, expanding to over 400 Zirtual Assistants (ZAs) in just a few years, ser...
In our work with startup founders, we’ve come to discover that convertible debt is a confusing subject for many. It’s a complicated and nuanced topic, but here are the three things you need to know up front:
Trust us, there is far more to convertible debt than knowing these three things, and we’ll cover them in subsequent posts, but let’s first arm you with the basics.
For many founders, the most meaningful characteristic of convertible debt is around valuation; specifically, the fact that you don’t need one.
If you are trying to raise $50,000 in seed stage capital, chances are you don’t have a lot of traction, and that can make valuation painful. Imagine that the investor values your idea in its current state at $...
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m not that smart, and yet I’m a pretty good online marketer. I am actually probably one of the better ones out there.
So, how’s that possible? Well, you don’t have to be smart to be the best marketer. Instead, you need to be creative, execute well, and continue to learn from others.
Here’s the process I used to become a great marketer, and here is how you can follow in my footsteps:
When I first started out in the world of online marketing, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know how to edit HTML; I thought MSN was a bigger search engine than Google; and I had no idea where to start.
But the one thing I did know is that there are marketers out there who are a...
All entrepreneurs launch with the hope that their businesses will live forever – or at least survive the next hundred years. They develop long-term business plans, chart growth paths, and seek advice from veteran business owners. Those words of wisdom likely don’t advise them to find a way to “cannibalize” their own companies.
But even if your company hits the hundred-year mark, you should always be looking for ways to revolutionize your initial idea before someone else does. No cautionary tale better illustrates this point than Kodak.
Most people would be surprised to discover that Kodak invented the digital camera, but it didn’t commercialize it for fear of jeopardizing its film business. By the time Kodak realized its digital camera prot...