Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 15, 2016
There is much talk these days that startup valuations have decreased and may continue to do so and that the amount of time it takes to fund raise may take longer. As I have pointed out in previous posts , 91% of VCs surveyed believe prices are declining (30% believe substantially) and 77% believe that funding will take longer than it has in the past.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
The average length of a funding pitch to Angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.
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YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
by Donovan Janus, founder of 17hats. When food and shelter are a freelancer’s two heaviest expenses, a conversation about “costs” sounds absurd, no? Unless you breakfast on caviar, truffles and Dom Pérignon in a Mediterranean villa tended by your manservant Basil, your costs can’t be that bad. Most freelancers build a business with gear they already own and write off whatever expenses arise.
ConversionXL
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
As an optimizer, it’s your responsibility to understand the implementation and analysis of digital analytics. Gone are the days of relying on the IT department to help you with basic analytics tracking. [Tweet It!] Fortunately, Google Tag Manager makes it easy. Still, many optimizers don’t use Google Tag Manager (or any tag manager, for that matter) because it looks daunting.
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
Up and Running
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
One important thing to remember from the earliest days of your startup is that its success won’t rest solely on your own abilities. As soon as you start pulling together your first leadership team, you’ll be making big decisions about how to push your business to the next level and will be relying on others to share your vision and your passion. You’ll probably have limited resources —and you may have limited experience—which means it’s crucial to make each hire count.
Duct Tape Marketing
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
The Significance of SEO in Web Design written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. photo credit: SEO Scrabble via photopin (license). People go online to search for different types of information and this means that your company needs a strong online presence. Many users need to carry out searches before they make a purchase. Your business thus requires a website that will be ranked on the first page of search results.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
ConversionXL
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
You’d think conversion optimization and SEO should play together nicely, right? In theory, conversion optimization aims to improve the user experience, which, conveniently, is what Google wants to do as well with their top search results. Therefore, the more you test and improve your site, the higher it should appear in the rankings. You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
Every year at Upfront we try to analyze the venture markets. We try to look at the sources of capital, the valuations, exits and trends. We use this try to draw some context that informs our funding decisions. Of course we fund companies in good markets and bad. In venture our goal is to fund companies over a 10-year+ time horizon, which is the time it takes to build truly transformational companies.
Hunter Walker
FEBRUARY 15, 2016
My business is about investing in extraordinary founder talent so it pains me that I can’t write a Homebrew Term Sheet to Laura Weidman Powers. But alas, she’s changing the world through another awesome channel right now, CODE2040. I’ve gotten to know CODE2040 as a Mentor, Panelist and Donor. And here I get to know her a little better via Five Questions: Hunter Walk: We met during CODE2040’s first class of students.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 13, 2016
Entrepreneurs who are looking to attract investors need to develop and pitch a plan -- preferably written -- that answers every potential investor question about your startup before it is asked. You may be quick on your feet with answers, but if investors have to ask any of these questions, you raise the specter of hiding something, or of not being astute enough to know what’s important.
ConversionXL
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
Watch this trailer of The Hateful Eight , and then fill in the blanks: K I _ _. Because of priming, you’re most likely to spell k-i-l-l because of the violent images in the video clip. You’re highly unlikely to fill in the blanks to spell k-i-s-s or k-i-n-d, or anything else really. Priming is a popular strategy to influence human behavior, and it’s one that has been studied extensively for quite a while.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 14, 2016
by Alex Kurrelmeier, Director of The Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur at Culver. Lemonade stands and car washes aren’t enough for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Starting as young as middle school, experiential learning rooted in real world business scenarios is helping to shape the entrepreneurs of the future. It’s advantageous to develop these skills at a young age – our economy depends on it.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Oh what’s in a name? Your startup’s name and branding become objects that represent your passion, pride, and determination. But startups change their names more often than their founders or teams might like, despite all the love for their current incarnation. So … why? What causes that? What influences should you listen to as a founder?
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 14, 2016
Investors will tell you that they love to put money into startups that are scalable, and ready to scale. But what does that really mean? Simply stated, it means that your business has the potential to multiply revenue with minimal incremental cost. Ready to scale is when you have a proven product and a proven business model, about to expand to new geographies and markets.
deal architect
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
An exec at a failed on-premise ERP project told me he was delighted the project crashed. I thought he was joking. No, his later SaaS project alerted him to the fact that even if his on-premise software had worked, he.
Brandanew
FEBRUARY 15, 2016
Writing product stories, case studies and content in general around your product has one overarching purpose- convince and convert. You want the customer to read, get wowed and be interested to contact you if you’re a B2B player. Or simply be convinced to buy if you’re offering a product for direct sales. This is what you need to make your product story successful.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
By Ross Sapir, founder and CEO of Roadway Moving. Most successful individuals don’t start their career off daydreaming about working under their bosses, they’re daydreaming about being the boss. It takes a specific type of person to be able to make this daydream a reality though, regardless of the industry you’re in. Perseverance, persistence and potential are three important words every entrepreneur must have engrained in their psyche when first starting out.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 14, 2016
Every entrepreneur has to be a decision-maker, even with information overload, emotional employees, angry customers and competitors hovering from every direction. Making a decision without thinking or over-thinking things to the point of no decision are both deadly in business. The challenge is to find the right balance and make good and timely decisions every time.
deal architect
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
The German SAP user group, DSAG morning emailed this morning the results of its 2016 investment survey. I also read a ComputerWorld article about migrating custom code as SAP rolls out S/4HANA. The DSAG report says “DSAG asked for assurance.
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Research done by professors and their grad students in U.S. universities labs are being turned into commercial products and life saving drugs and devices thanks to an act of Congress – and the efforts of technology transfer offices in schools like Stanford and Columbia. How this research is transferred outside the university, and why this “tech transfer” process is important was the focus of an interview with two of the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio s
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Image credit: Bootstrapping from Shutterstock. by Brian Pontarelli, CEO of Inversoft. “One of the earliest and most critical decisions an entrepreneur must make is whether to self-fund a startup by bootstrapping, or raise outside funding through venture capital.” – Forbes. The majority of bootstrapping content is centered around being overly frugal – not paying founders and pinching pennies.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, and having graduated from a big company myself, I talk to many people who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder who dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. I typically suggest that the grass always looks greener on the other side, and the move from employee to entrepreneur is very risky and not for everyone.
Brandanew
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
The importance of headlines can hardly be overstated. Newspapers and channels have already shown us the importance of sensational and attention grabbing headlines. The same principle also applies for any kind of online content targeted at potential customers. As this is the era of information overload, people have far too many options to choose from.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
This post originally appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission. NextView is also an investor in thredUP. There’s a lot of negativity out there. From the public markets to the private markets, everyone is feeling valuations and optimism contract. Many will say “it’s going to be another 2009 vintage!” publicly and privately lament “my portfolio is hurting…” Mark Suster over at Upfront has a great deck on this.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
The year 2016 will see so many startup companies coming forward with great idea, with the many startup helps and conferences held worldwide. Fighting it out is the key factor. The first thing will be a well written business plan. Here we bring forth some over- the-tradition points to include in your plan: 1. Competition Review. In most business plans, it would contain only the basic plans about the company, without analyzing the competition scenario.
For Entrepreneurs
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Intro Sales compensation is a more complex topic for SaaS/subscription revenue companies. Unlike traditional software sales, the job of sales doesn’t end when a new customer signs a contract. Instead, it is crucial to retain customers over many years, as that is how you maximize your revenues. In this blog post we will explore how.
Rembrandt Communications
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
If so, you are losing sales and stories to the competition, right now! If you took the time to set up a News Room on your Website, good for you! It’s a great way to give media-members the information they need at any time and place in the world so they can write about your […]. The post Did You Forget Your News Room? appeared first on Boost sales with BtoB Content Strategy and PR here.
Version One Ventures
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
We’ve all talked about the consumerization of enterprise apps for several years. Yet while it’s been a popular trend, there still aren’t many enterprise apps out there that can rival the user experience of the best consumer ones. Most enterprise apps are still plagued with clunky, form-driven interfaces; require too much data entry from the user; and don’t offer much in the way of automation.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
Image credit: Tool kit from Shutterstock. by Lewis Robinson. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), a whopping 627,000 businesses launch annually. But an estimated 595,000 businesses also go out of business each year. Perhaps most pertinently, only about half of new startups will make it for five full years and just 30 percent will make it an additional five years.
Feld Thoughts
FEBRUARY 15, 2016
A few weeks ago I noticed my post How Can This Be A Billion Dollar Company? getting a surprising number of new Twitter shares. Since I wrote it in the summer of 2014, it must have been picked up somewhere and hit a new chord. I wish I had titled it what was in my mind when I wrote it, which was “How Can This Be A Billion Dollar Company and other b t VCs ask early stage companies” – that would have been more fun to see in my Twitter feed.
YFS Magazine
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
It’s time for you to change your money story and grow your business! You can change the game. You can see the financial success and independence you want to have in your life.
For Entrepreneurs
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
This post provides an in-depth look at how SaaS companies can approach setting sales quotas and commissions. It is a companion piece to our how-to guide on SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan. We recommend starting with this first post. When setting specific comp targets, you’ll want to start by figuring out your quotas –.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
Being the owner of a small business is no easy job and can be downright stressful at times. If the business you run is in the production of goods, then finding a way to be more productive and efficient should be your top goal. There are a number of things a business owner can do in order to help in the increased production and distribution of goods.
The Next Web
FEBRUARY 14, 2016
The number of new startups is rapidly increasing. According to the 2015 Kaufman Index, which measures startup activity, for the first time since 2010, the U.S. saw an upward trend in startup company activity. While that’s great news for the overall economy, for new entrepreneurs it means more competition for media attention, investors, and customers.
YFS Magazine
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
When you look at Samantha DeBianchi today, you see a young, successful and driven female entrepreneur dominating the luxury real estate space. But her life wasn't always picture perfect.
For Entrepreneurs
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
This post is a companion piece to our how-to guide on SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan. We recommend starting with this first, broader post. When to pay commissions Another important consideration in your plan, in addition to what you pay, is when you pay commissions.
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