Duct Tape Marketing
JULY 11, 2013
'Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Peter Sandeen – Enjoy! photo credit: OutofChicago. If you’re not getting the customer referrals or repeat business you hoped for, something’s wrong. Maybe your product doesn’t deliver the benefits customers expect. Maybe your service doesn’t meet the standards they expect.
Up and Running
JULY 11, 2013
'As your business grows and begins to make a name for itself within your industry, you might need to start making decisions about which path toward further growth to follow: Is it better to continue to concentrate on your main business, or should you focus on certain aspects of your company and grow those as their own ventures? Going with the latter option can be a risky decision, as you are essentially creating a sub-company underneath your main business, but it could also make it easier to fin
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Seeing Both Sides
JULY 11, 2013
'I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment. Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.
Up and Running
JULY 11, 2013
'I am a non-profit board member, and I will tell you: For the most part, I pull my hair out at board meetings when we get to the budget. Usually there is a series of QuickBooks reports, presented in PDF, in teeny-tiny font. The line items don’t always make sense, and it is often very hard to tell if a particular initiative is actually financially healthy for a non-profit.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
Startup Professionals Musings
JULY 11, 2013
'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.
Up and Running
JULY 11, 2013
'I am a non-profit board member, and I will tell you: For the most part, I pull my hair out at board meetings when we get to the budget. Usually there is a series of QuickBooks reports, presented in PDF, in teeny-tiny font. The line items don’t always make sense, and it is often very hard to tell if a particular initiative is actually financially healthy for a non-profit.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
YoungUpstarts
JULY 11, 2013
'Small businesses know that social media today is an essential component in their marketing mix, but the important question remains – which aspects of social media is the most relevant to their business? After all, it is not advisable to simply join a few social networking sites and then hope for the best. One way is to look at how other small businesses use social media to grow their presence.
Mike Michalowicz
JULY 11, 2013
'Analyzing your competitor’s revenue is a helpful tool in measuring your own progress and potential. Duh. It’s not rocket science. You won’t beat ‘em if you can’t find the finish line. So how much are your competitors taking – or raking – in, and how the hell do you find out? If your competitors are public companies, than you get to read all about their top line and bottom line in the annual audit report available to investors.
YoungUpstarts
JULY 11, 2013
'The term “life hacking” originally arose in the 1980s among computer programmers devising and employing tricks to cut through information overload. Today, that definition has extended to include any productivity trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase productivity and efficiency in all walks of life; in other words, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way.
Feld Thoughts
JULY 11, 2013
'I’m doing a one hour CEO roundtable on an “about weekly basis” with each of the Techstars classes. Yesterday I did a face to face with the Techstars Boulder CEOs (they are across the hall from my office) and then I did my meetings with the Techstars Chicago CEOs and the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator CEOs by video conference. This is a new experiment for me.
YoungUpstarts
JULY 11, 2013
'by Tuhin Ghosh, co-founder of PrepGenie. Graduation is not just a day where your independence and freedom is acknowledged, it is also a joyous occasion filled with recognition, anticipation of what awaits, and reflection on your life and your future. One thing to realize is that, while you should enjoy your graduation to the fullest, you are about to step into the real world.
Version One Ventures
JULY 11, 2013
'Every venture capital firm narrows its investment focus one way or another…perhaps by geography, sector, and/or stage. In some cases, it’s the result of conscious planning; in other cases it’s a natural evolution as a fund starts making investments. For example, at version one ventures, we’re focused on early-stage (seed and Series A) opportunities in e-commerce, SaaS, and marketplaces/platforms across North America.
Growthink Blog
JULY 11, 2013
'There are many mental and personal blockages that can hinder you from achieving your full potential in business. Blockages in business can be compared to fatty deposits around your arteries that impede blood pumped from the heart from reaching its destination. For you to succeed in your business, you must identify and eliminate such blockages promptly.
SiliconHills
JULY 11, 2013
'By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News Ever wanted something from the store – a sandwich, milk, batteries – but didn’t have time to get it? If you’re in central Austin, you can now use Favor. Favor is an app based delivery service that gets customers food, drinks, or whatever else they need delivered [.] The post A Slice of Silicon Hills Discusses App Based Delivery with Favor appeared first on SiliconHills.
The Equity Kicker
JULY 11, 2013
'Apple’s app store is five years old today, and it is hard to overstate the impact that it has had on mobile and web services. Apps have replaced URLs as the dominant method for accessing many online services and its dominance is such that people have rushed to apply the app paradigm to other mobile OS’s and other industries. You knew all that though.
Berkonomics
JULY 11, 2013
'There is such leverage in high gross profit margins once a company is past breakeven. Every dollar of gross profit falls to the bottom line, increasing net profit faster with each transaction. A ten percent increase in revenues for a company with 50% gross margin and 5% net profit before the increase would double net profit for the period with that ten percent increase in revenue.
Jeff Hilimire
JULY 11, 2013
'A few months back a few of my friends who have great blogs ( this one and this one ) wrote posts about their “five truths” Then Drew challenged me and some others to write our five truths, so here we are. My Five Truths: . Truth #1: I wanted to be a professional tennis player. From age 12 until age 21, that’s all I wanted. I went to college for one reason and one reason only: to play tennis.
Business Plan Blog
JULY 11, 2013
'Barriers to Market Entry. Entry into any market by a startup business is in some way possible, though it is often constrained by some sort of economic, procedural, regulatory or technical obstacle. Such obstacles are often referred to as ‘barriers to entry.’ Some examples of barriers to entry include high startup costs, strict laws and regulations, inability to access resources, economies of scale, high tariffs, high switching costs, zoning, distributor/supplier/vendor agreements
Bryce Dot VC
JULY 11, 2013
'“Those who will be trusted will not be those with an engineering degree, but a humanities degree. The stars of tomorrow will be thinkers. Who will build their followings, which will migrate from platform to platform. Just like you discarded your Palm for your BlackBerry for your iPhone…you’re gonna abandon platforms continuously, until it’s no longer about platforms but content.
Early Growth Financial Services
JULY 11, 2013
'When your company is in its early stages, presumably you’ve thought through your offerings and done the hard work of choosing a company name. You may even have a logo or website. In terms of building your brand, these steps are a good start in the right direction—but these things alone do not add up to your brand. Your brand, like your company culture, is everything.
Rob Go
JULY 11, 2013
'I was asked recently how NextView evaluates such early stage companies for investment. The reality is that pretty much all investors looks for the same core things. It’s some combination of great teams , attractive markets , and promising products. As a seed fund, we tend to layer in “ capital efficient beginnings ” to the mix given our investing model and belief about the best way to build internet and software businesses.
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