Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 7, 2012

We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. From recent survey feedback, it seems evident that the urban legends leading to success are wrong. The average entrepreneur is not the one who dumped a promising career, sketched his idea on the back of a napkin, and accepted millions from an investor to make billions of his own. I was just perusing an older but still very relevant report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, titled “ Making of a Succes

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2012

I’ve noticed that most young entrepreneurs are more socially conscious today than ever before, which is a great trend. Unfortunately, some are so focused on this principle that they forget that every business, even non-profits, have to practice the basic principals of capitalism (build a business model to make money) to cover their costs to do good things another day.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2012

Your marketing launch is the most important element of startup success these days, to get customer attention in this world of information overload. Yet it is the one element that too many entrepreneurs focus on only as an afterthought. Everyone assumes their product or service is so great that “word-of-mouth” will carry the day for them. Even great products need great marketing “content” to fuel the ascent of their online message.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 4, 2012

Managing and motivating a team in a startup is more than just using the right interpersonal skills. It’s more than providing recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. A key influencer of satisfaction and motivation, top-ranked by employees, is positive progress and the completion of meaningful work. Sometimes you have to manage progress, not people.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 5, 2012

When you have been on the startup firing line, you quickly learn that any insight from experts and entrepreneurs who have been there before you can make the difference between failure and success. Yet, many new entrepreneurs brazenly assume they are bulletproof, and march blindly into the fray. The result is that half or more of startups fail in the first two years.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 6, 2012

As I visit the websites of many startups, as well as more mature businesses, I still too often see a “contact” page offering nothing but a sterile form for customers to submit, never to be heard from again. Social media connections, if they exist, are buried elsewhere or reserved for monitoring purposes only. Social media is here, and is the preferred mode of communication by a large segment of your customers, so make it a positive differentiator for your business.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 3, 2012

The popular view of a real entrepreneur is someone with a big vision, and a stubborn determination to charge straight ahead through any obstacle and make it happen. The vision part is fine, but successful entrepreneurs have found that the extreme uncertainty of a new product or service usually requires many course corrections, or “pivots” to find a successful formula.

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