As your business grows, so does your need to scale sales efficiently. Scale can be your best friend, or the elephant in the room threatening to knock your growth off course. Your sales team needs special attention to scale efficiently. They’re a huge part of why your company is successful, don’t lose the magic that makes you special. Here are the areas to pay attention to when it’s time to scale your sales team.
Training a small team is easy. You know exactly what works and how to communicate it. Communicating the skills and strategies your team needs as a big organization becomes much more difficult. You won’t always get 1-on-1 time with each rep who talks to your customers.
It’s important to develop internal t...
When we talk about building startups, we talk about lots of costs: Staffing costs, the cost of capital, cost per acquisition, and opportunity cost.
But we never talk about the biggest cost – the emotional cost.
Imagine if we could put a numeric value on how much “emotional capital” we have in the bank. The amount of stamina, the amount of positivity, the amount of physical wellness we have left. Startup Founders don’t just run out of financial capital – we run out of emotional capital.
Running out of emotional capital isn’t something we talk about, and that’s a problem. That’s because the cost of capital in this case is our well-being, our relationships, and ultimately the startups we sacrificed it all to build.
This needs to be a more...
Making the choice between equity financing versus the use of convertible debt when raising capital can be a tough one. Below are six of the most common differences between the two. Read on for help deciding which is the best method for you.
There are many advantages to using either structure. For an in-depth article check out this post. We hope this gives you the information you need to make an informed decision on what is right for your company. Have any more questions? Let us know @startupsco.
Your website is like a car: if you fail to get routine oil changes, the vehicle’s performance will continue to drop until the engine stalls. Don’t let this happen to your website after all the hard work you’ve invested in getting it up and running. You, your web developer and your hosting company should follow the website maintenance checklist below.
We spend most of our time living in terror of things that never come to pass.
I call these "Paper Demons" because they are shallow, flimsy evils that we make up in our heads but somehow pretend they are entirely true. It's the many awful fates we consider of our startups and our careers if things go wrong or the knockdown, drag-out arguments we're going to have with investors if we crater this thing.
Our Paper Demons come in many flavors but they all share one trait — they are imaginary outcomes that we treat as if they are absolute. The problem with this thinking is that it consumes an insane amount of real energy and focus, which, ironically, is exactly what we need to conserve in order to avoid those fates.
Ah y...
Just a couple of weeks ago, I closed my first ever investment in a private Silicon Valley startup. I didn’t go through the standard procedures though: while I did conduct my due diligence, I did not get pitched face-to-face in a nice conference room, negotiate deal terms, or seal the deal with a firm handshake.
Instead, like many other educated folks who are excited about startups but don’t quite have the wealth to be accredited investors, I invested through a crowdfunding campaign.
There’s a storm of hype building around this new equity crowdfunding model, which allows middle and even working-class people to invest in a startup by the tens or even hundreds of thousands, without many of the onerous regulatory and accounting issues that so ...
I often see entrepreneurs searching for domains that enable them to stuff their URLs with keywords. Thanks to William Shakespeare, most people don’t think a name is worth much as long as their businesses do what they’re supposed to.
But think about it: The titles of books, movies, and bands are all representative of the things attached to them. Names mean something, and they shouldn’t be slapped on as mere afterthoughts.
For a decade, our business was called Domainsatcost.ca. It followed all the “best practices” we commonly see — it was rich in keywords, search-friendly, short, straightforward, descriptive, and geographically situated. Yet it lacked something very important: an identity. R...
One of the most common recruiting tactics over the past few years has been to entice young, hungry talent by highlighting some unique company perks like nap rooms, unlimited paid time off, and ping-pong tables. While those benefits will certainly turn some heads, are they really the heads you want working for you?
The point of any recruitment effort is to find talented, qualified individuals to help your company grow and move forward. Talking about ping-pong tables won’t help you find them — unless, of course, you manufacture or sell ping-pong balls, paddles, or tables.
Instead, you should be thinking about your core values, your company’s mission, and the aspects of it that you and your current team are passionate about. Shifting your focu...
The Airbnb pitch deck from 2009 has become an increasingly popular reference for entrepreneurs around the world. The company founders, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk used this pitch to raise $600K from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures. The company has since become a giant in the Travel industry, closing a round in early 2015 on a valuation of over USD $20 Billion.
Originally recovered from a 2011 talk by Blecharczyk on Startup Bootcamp in Boston, we got a glimpse at the exact slides that they used to pitch investors on their original fundraise. The deck was incredibly successful at summarizing the company vision and the huge market opportunity they had before them.
We’ve added all the original slides in this article along wit...
Can’t figure out how to beat your lower-priced competitors? Don’t let predatory competitor pricing strategy destroy your business.
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
There’s one thing a client will always privilege over low cost, and that is specialization. If a client has the choice between a cheap offer and an offer that is specifically geared towards them, they will choose the latter nine times out of 10. Find a way to tailor your product or service to sub-groups of customers. You can still hit the entire ma...