The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs.
We’ve chosen to pay for any continuing education, no maximum, that adds immediate value to our client roster. If it’s a service or skill set that will improve our client’s experience with our company, expand our service set or improve the quality of the campaigns we run, then it is quickly approved. We also provide a free book library of management and self-development for al...
There’s a limited number of colours and shapes in this world, so your logo isn’t your whole brand. Your colour could remind a potential customer of a completely unrelated business (I recently thought of a well known auto care shop when looking at the website of a debt refinancer) and you need to rely on more than just that one aspect of your company to raise brand awareness.
If you have a marketing campaign, do you use just one channel? Only one ad image? Of course not, any campaign is more effective with multiple channels. It’s the exact same principle for “startup branding”.
Have you ever answered the phone without looking, heard “hey it’s me” and known exactly who it was? This is essentially what you want for your company. You want your...
A weird thing started happening about five to ten years ago. In cities across the country, coffee shops rapidly made the transition from lively spaces full of chatter, dates, friends, and books to libraries inhabited by intense humans staring into screens, each in their own earphone-isolated world.
I was one of those people; one of the first to start working remotely when I wasn’t able to get a “real job” during the Great Recession.
Back then, even as the coffee shops filled to a breaking point and people waged passive aggressive evil eye wars over the too-few plug points, we were still in the minority.
Today, however, we’ve added coworking spaces in every major city and more than a few minor ones, but coffee shops are still packed to break...
These days, culture is paramount for having a strong team to execute your business’ vision. Ideas are worthless on their own; without a strong team, you won’t succeed. When building a business, you want employees who deeply about the company. A big piece of that is recognizing that, at the end of the day, they’re just people with normal daily stresses and worries.
My company TheSquareFoot is an unconventional business—we’re taking commercial real estate into the digital age—so we’re used to alternative practices. But like our business model, our unconventional ways have a purpose and rely on three major points: team building, nourishment and fun. Throughout our growth, I’ve recognized a few unconventional ways (that anyone could try) to pos...
Founders won't change people's personalities, we can only manage them. And that's where we fail over and over.
How often do we get frustrated by someone in our organization that we just wish we could change? They lack motivation, discipline, or they just don't play well with others. In our Founder minds, we just need this one inspirational heart-to-heart talk, or some Karate Kid montage, where they come out the other end a changed and improved human.
We have a hard time believing we can't "manage" our way into the outcome we're looking for, but what we're actually missing is that there are certain aspects of humans that go beyond what we can manage in the first place. And our lack of recognition of this boundary creates a colossal waste of ...
8 years ago I decided that whatever startup I was going to launch would be the last startup I ever did.
I made this decision after launching 8 startups and realizing that creating a company as a "means to an end" was a shitty way for me to live.
I found myself in this constant cycle of being wildly preoccupied by "the next thing." Raising money for my startup was a means to a quicker exit. Killing myself meant I could finish this chapter faster, more successfully.
I had endless justifications for compromising my life because I could always "make it up later."
This time around I decided to change it up.
I asked myself, "What if I picked what I wanted to do for the rest of my life NOW?" So instead of maki...
Tech has a very obvious diversity problem — and it’s coming out in insidious ways. For example, in April, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter that essentially put users in blackface.
In August, they came out with a yellow face filter, which transformed users’ faces into a stereotypically “Asian” face. These racist releases from a company that boasts 8 billion video views per day had people around the world wondering how, exactly, these filters slipped through the filter.
The answer is simple: They’re not designing for a diverse audience.
It’s one thing to say ‘We’re trying to make tech more inclusive’ but what we’re really trying to do is create places where people feel they belong.
Benjamin Evans is a UX/UI designer who has worked with a...
Paying your dues sucks. When I started my career, I got told by everyone older than me that whenever they handed me shit work I should be thankful because I was “paying my dues”.
I assumed it was some tired colloquialism for getting young people to do work at sub-market rates without questioning their own value.
When I had to do client work for the equivalent of $1 per hour (I didn’t know the value of estimating client work back then) I was told I was paying my dues.
When I was up to my eyeballs in personal debt to build my startup, I was told I was paying my dues.
When I was working every waking hour, not seeing my friends and family and not celebrating Christmas for years on end, I was also told I was paying my dues (in addition to being...
Have a great startup idea? Great! Now you need someone to build it. If you are not technical and don’t want to learn to code, how do you hire a great developer to build your MVP?
For many people the process of hiring the first tech person to build your early-stage startup can be very intimidating but it doesn’t have to be. During my time coding risk systems on Wall Street, I interviewed hundreds of developers for a spot on our team. Below are five things to look for in a promising candidate.
Ask your candidate what was the biggest challenge she faced in her last few projects. If the answer involves anything about finishing the project on time, dealing with difficult clients or havi...
The following answers are 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 BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
How Customer Focused They Are
I ask every founder, “How many sales calls did you make in the last week?” If founders spend more time perfecting features than speaking with potential customers, their focus is in the wrong place. They might have a great product. It might look like a business. But without customers, it’s not a business. If the ...