Before you think about raising capital or growth strategy for your startup, ask yourself this question: “Exactly how much money do I need to feel rich?”
Raising capital implies trying to grow a business, and in many cases, creating a big financial outcome for you and your investors. But do you really need a big financial outcome? How big? Are you sure about that number?
Disclaimer
This article is going to talk about how to spend money. You may want to save it all, you may want to make it rain in the VIP balcony at the club. I don’t care how you spend it. I care that you know exactly how much money you need to achieve your goals, down to the last dollar.
Map Out Every Last Dollar
Before you answer with the typical “I want a $100 million exit...
Putting a value on your business can be a tricky enterprise, but it’s not as puzzling as some would have you believe.
The real hurdles come as you attempt to increase that value. What improvements should you make? Where should your priorities lie?
Steady, dependable growth relies on four interrelated factors: earnings, risk, growth prospects, and transferability.
Earnings
Buyers make purchases to see returns on their investments; existing earnings are the most concrete predictors of potential ROI.
If you’re not making money, your value will generally be lower. Potential money is good, but money in hand goes a long way in proving the viability of your business model.
Risk
The less risk in your business’s future, the higher its value.
A few y...
As Product Managers, building product roadmaps is a crucial part of our job. Yet most of us still use outdated tools and software for roadmapping—Excel, PowerPoint, wikis, etc.—to try and keep several teams on track toward the same goals. It’s painful. The good news is that there’s a better way.
We understand that building a product roadmap is not easy and that your business colleagues always want to know what’s coming next.
It’s time to lead your product with conviction. Take a radical new approach to roadmapping because your company needs it and you deserve to build the future and enjoy what you do.
Executives have a vision of the future and sales and marketing teams want to be heard too. And engineering is waiting for those detailed requ...
“A support network of other entrepreneurs will make any journey a lot more enjoyable—and a lot easier, too! By joining key networking groups, like YEC, and moving into a co-working space, building a support group of like-minded entrepreneurs after starting ZinePak was easier than I would have imagined. I never expected to make so many close friends so quickly!”
— Brittany Hodak
ZinePak
@brittanyhodak
“What I initially believed would be the most difficult part about starting a business for myself, which I would say is the process of coming up with and registering a name, filling out the proper paperwork, and c...
You know how the rest of that sage advice goes. Dreamers can only take an entrepreneurial venture so far, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t vital. However, dreamers need to be balanced with doers.
It’s the doers who get the funding – and without funding, you don’t have a business. In this video by StartupGrind, founders and investors talk about what actually gets a check written.
George Zachary of Charles River Ventures says he’s just recently figured it out after 17 years of being a venture capitalist: “Almost all the investments I wrote a check into, I had to have the feeling, ‘Would I be a co-founder of this company?’” In other words, are you barking up the right tree with investors?
This doesn’t mean a venture Zachary passed on wasn’t g...
Neil Patel’s introduction of the author: When I think about branding, logo design, and designing great products, there’s one person I love working with. He has worked with me for many years and for several of my companies. His name is Ian Main, and this post—based on his latest work helping me rebrand Quick Sprout—is about Ian’s thoughts on how to create a great brand.
When I was growing up in Australia, my family would drive seven hours every Christmas holiday to visit my grandparents. There were five McDonald’s restaurants on that trip, and I knew exactly where each was and the distance between them. The sports teams I played for gave out McDonald’s gift vouchers, and McDonald’s sponsored our team equipment and ceremonies.
The colors, sm...
This interview, conducted by Emily Pope, was originally published on the General Assembly blog.
Raffi Khatchadourian is a Mathematical Economics major and incoming junior at Colgate University. A self-starter and talented entrepreneur, Raffi has established himself as the COO of indify, an emerging music startup, before many of his peers have even declared their major. Back in January, Raffi attended GA’s week-long Business Accelerator program in partnership with Colgate University. Since then, he and his co-founders have gone on to win $10,000 in funding from Colgate University’s Entrepreneur Weekend Shark Tank and $15,000 from Colgate University’s Entrepreneurs Fund. Read on to learn how this young entrepreneur transformed his passion fo...
You’d think that by now nearly everyone would be sold on the idea of SaaS, cloud services, and the power and flexibility of a subscription service to meet their needs.
You’d think.
Unfortunately, not everyone is convinced that SaaS is a legitimate model for software usage and purchase.
I’m going to go through their main objections one by one. What you need to know at the outset is that many B2B decision makers view cloud solutions with a heavy dose of skepticism. As many as 49% of companies are concerned about data and the security of their information in a cloud context.
Let me set the stage for what you’re about to read.
Yes, AI is actually going to change everything, and No, we're not all totally screwed.
Why? Because every time we embrace change as Founders, we create exponentially more value than has ever existed before. And every time things change, everyone freaks out and thinks the "old ways" were the only way things should have been done.
I'm an avid carpenter — I build tons of stuff with power tools. Every time I'm zipping through a piece of lumber with my portable saw I think, "Some poor bastard used to have to do this by hand. I bet the moment he saw an electric saw, he figured he'd be out of a job!"
What we're missing with that line of thinking isn't whether we'll be displaced — it's whether we should have been doing that work by hand, to begin w...
Sweat equity is created when you or others contribute work to a business in the hopes that it will pay off in terms of an interest in the company as opposed to hourly or salaried wages.
You may hear a web designer saying that they took a 2% interest in a company that they paid for in sweat equity. They traded the value of their time for a stake in the company.
Trading time for equity is a time-honored tradition among startup companies and is used very aggressively. While at first it may seem like you’ve printed a whole bunch of Monopoly money that you can start using to pay people with, you’ll soon find out that there is a real cost to offering up stock early on.
With sweat equity, it is critical that you translate effort into...