Rich Aberman and his co-Founder Bill Clerico were making great progress with their payment processing startup, WePay.
The platform – which made it easy for small businesses, organizations and nonprofits to accept credit card payments online – had taken shape over the course of six years. Revenue was growing month-over-month. Customers liked it, the press liked it — and investors had put in a lot of money to keep growing it.
But in 2014, Rich and Bill were getting ready to kill it.
No, it wasn’t the startup equivalent of a suicide pact. They hadn’t given up – quite the opposite. Almost without meaning to, they had landed on an opportunity with the potential to leave the direct business in the dust.
Th...
You’re proud of your startup. From conception to birth, you’ve doted on it. Now, it’s growing and providing tons of data for you to examine. Like a beaming parent, you explore the information eagerly, pleased at your company’s progress. But beware the blind spot all moms and dads face: Your apparent success might not be all that successful.
Entrepreneurs look at facts and figures far differently from investors and board members; consequently, they often overlook or misunderstand the growth metrics at their fingertips. As with anything in life, they must see the company’s data with open and accepting eyes.
Some growth metrics will highlight success; others will cast shadows of doubt. A founder’s job is as much a leader as an interpreter for ...
How could we possibly be "right" as Founders when literally everything we are doing is unknown?
Think about it — we're building a startup that has never existed with a product that's being invented and run by a team that's never worked together delivering to a customer who has never heard of us. Oh, and did I mention as Founders we've probably never done this before?
What about that formula drives certainty?
Let me start by saying this — there is no possible way, NO possible way, that as startup Founders (especially first-time founders) we could possibly make the right decision over and over in our early-stage startup.
In fact, the only way TO make the right decision is going to be to make tons of mi...
In the weeks leading up to the launch of Startups.com in 2012, I was coming off running 5 startups at the same time, 3 of them venture-funded (high stakes), on top of launching this one. I got married, had a child, lost my grandmother, moved across the country, and had nearly every major life event you could have happen — in less than 12 months.
On this specific day, I was at lunch with my co-workers and something about me just felt "off." I couldn't put my finger on it, but I was feeling dizzy for no reason and my body felt like it wasn't mine. After lunch, I hopped in my car and headed home to rest. While I was on the phone with my wife, driving on the highway, I said, "You know, I don't feel right..." and as soon as I said that — my wor...
What happens when our main customer becomes our investor?
This is fundamentally the rabbit hole that nearly every startup goes down when fundraising. At some point, we start to realize that we're no longer building a startup for the needs of our customers; we're building it for the perceived needs of our next investors.
At any given time, our startup needs vastly more cash than we have, so we're always looking for the shortest path toward filling that gap. The very nature of investor capital is that it comes dramatically before customer capital (revenue), so in most cases, our early "customer," as it relates to cash, is an investor.
So what happens? Our investors become who we're building the company for.
T...
What an exciting moment! You’re looking to scale up your startup and need to bring in a growth agency to help you do that. But, it’s a big decision. Choosing the wrong agency will lead to months of delayed growth, thousands of dollars in wasted spend, and difficult conversations down the line trying to understand where it all went wrong.
This means it is vitally important you make the right decision from the get-go. There are hundreds of marketing agencies out there, but if you are in the startup phase of growth I’d recommend going with a startup growth agency that has experience in the earlier stages.
I have done some of the research for you by putting together a list of the top 9 startup agencies I know deliver great results. So, at least...
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Alessandro Daliana, Leadership Coach and Consultant, answered:
Personally, I am a big fan of the consortium, or contractual joint venture, to get projects moving. In your case, the three co-founders write a contract setting out who is responsible for what work, who much they should be paid, estimate the hours, and so on, like any project. They nominate a lead, decide how to contribute any funds that are necessary, and anything else they may need. And, you conclude with a simple—or complex—way of converting all the resources al...
“Our target market is everyone!”
If we had a dollar for every time we heard these words from Founders here at Startups.co, we would have… okay, so we’re not quite sure. But it would be a lot of dollars.
We get it: planting your flag and defining your target market can be scary. It means taking a stand and proclaiming to the world, “This is who we are.” And, maybe just as scary and definitely just as important, “This is who we aren’t.”
But let us give it to you straight: your target market is not “everyone.” At least, not right away. And you know something else? You don’t want it to be, either.
In layman’s terms, a target market is a group or groups of consumers in which a product or service is intended for.
When you meet someone, you know whether there’s a connection. Shared experiences, interests, and values can quickly bond total strangers.
Brands aren’t people, of course, but branding is about humanizing a brand in a way that helps consumers connect with it.
Today, brand authenticity and trust top shoppers’ priority lists. Sixty-four percent say shared values influence their authentic brand relationships, and 63 percent prefer to buy from brands they perceive as honest.
Just look at Warby Parker. “We believe everyone has the right to see,” its slogan proclaims. By selling designer frames with a socially conscious and a frictionless customer experience, the scrappy eye wear brand found friends in an overpriced, impersonal market.
Seemingly o...
Today I’m really excited to share some great news: we’ve just completed the acquisition of Zana.io, a world-class educational platform for startups.
Zana is the brainchild of my friend Shea Tate-Di Donna. While at True Ventures, she created the well-regarded “True University” to help educate their 150 portfolio companies on the best practices for starting a company. That effort led to the formation of Zana as an extension of Shea’s dream to democratize the type of learning often reserved only for venture-funded Silicon Valley companies.
Educating entrepreneurs is one of the most critical initiatives we’ve embraced at Startups.co, and we couldn’t be happier to bring Zana into our family to help drive us forward.
Now 1 million startups on our...