Sat.Nov 04, 2017 - Fri.Nov 10, 2017

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[INTERVIEW] North Aware Founder And Creator Of The Smart Parka, Jamil Khan

YoungUpstarts

Trust a techie to reinvent how we do winter. That’s what former software engineer Jamil Khan has done with his new company, North Aware , in manufacturing its Smart Parka. North Aware’s Smart Parka is a high-tech coat that has everything covered: Your hands and neck, with built in gloves and scarf. Your hips and legs, thanks to an extendable hemline so you can adjust how much of your body gets protected from the cold.

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How to Segment A/B Test Results to Find Gold

ConversionXL

You run an A/B test , and it’s a winner. Or maybe it’s flat (no difference in performance between variations). Does it mean that the treatments that you tested didn’t resonate with anyone? Probably not. If you target all visitors with the A/B test, it merely reports overall results – and ignores what happens in a portion of your traffic, in segments.

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"The Startup Way" is Headed to London

Startup Lessons Learned

“A remarkably useful playbook that every business, government, and nonprofit needs to ignite the spark of innovation and fuel the fire of change.” -Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals , Give and Take , and OPTION B with Sheryl Sandberg Since The Startup Way came out on October 17th, I’ve had a great time traveling with the book, speaking to audiences, and meeting amazing people creating change in all types of organizations.

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Who will be the Stripe for insurance?

Version One Ventures

A few years ago, we began to see SaaS companies integrate payment processing into their software. This push to integrate payments was due to a couple of factors. First, it offers a better user experience – why send somebody off-platform to pay for a product or settle an invoice? Next, adding payments to a platform is very profitable, since the SaaS company gets a cut of the payment revenue.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

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

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5 Reasons Your Product Isn’t Selling — Yet

YoungUpstarts

by Jessica Thiefels, owner of Honest Body Fitness. Whether you’ve been selling your product for years or just a few months, seeing a slow stream of sales, or no sales at all, is disheartening. You start questioning yourself and your product: What did I do wrong? Should I change it? Should I start over? Believe it or not, many entrepreneurs experience this.

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How to Create a Financial Contingency Plan for Your Business

Up and Running

Financial contingency planning is a must—not just for established small businesses, but also for businesses in the earliest stages of formation. If you’re pre-launch or have only recently gone to market, a contingency plan is likely to be the last thing on your mind; after all, your efforts are focused on making your business a success, and not necessarily thinking about what could go wrong.

More Trending

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UsIng a Web Design App to Launch Your Startup Website

The Startup Magazine

As an entrepreneur, your website is your most critical communications and marketing tool that can make or break your product and business credibility. But writing code to build a quality, custom website for your business is the last thing you want to spend your time on. Outsourcing to a web design firm can be costly and also a time drain as it usually requires multiple iterations to capture your vision.

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10 Ways To Promote Your Small Business For Free

YoungUpstarts

by Brian Sutter, Director of Marketing, Wasp Barcode Technologies. There are plenty of ways to promote your small business for free. The tactics listed here are tried and true winners. They’re proven to work by tens of thousands of small businesses. Oh yeah – and they’re all free. 1. Partner with a company that complements your products or services.

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Top 5 Traits That Make Veterans Great Entrepreneurs­­

Up and Running

For many years, veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces were successful at starting and growing small businesses. In fact, almost 50 percent of veterans owned a business after World War II. But today, veteran entrepreneurship is on the decline. The most recent Kauffman Foundation research found that veterans accounted for 12.6 percent of new entrepreneurs in 1996 and that by 2014, this number had fallen to just 5.6 percent.

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They Wanted To Eliminate Gender Bias In Technical Hiring But Ended Up Losing All Their Female Candidates.

Hunter Walker

One of our most recent seed investments recently posed a question to me. They had designed a technical hiring process to try and eliminate gender bias but were losing all the women midway through their funnel when a take-home project was introduced. What was going wrong? I reviewed their current approaches alongside Homebrew’s Head of Talent Beth Scheer and we made a few recommendations, but there was nothing glaringly broken.

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5 Top SEO Tips For Ranking your Site in 2018

The Startup Magazine

SEO is always in a state of flux. Google and Bing are always finding ways to provide users with better results. Great if you’re searching, but no so much so if you are trying to rank a site in a position where people will find it. The factors that help rankings change and you need to keep up with what’s new. So, here are 5 factors in flux for 2018 that you and your business need to keep abreast of.

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Streamline Your Sales Process With These Five Proven Techniques

YoungUpstarts

by Lewis Robinson. A lot of startups fail within the first few months due to some commonly acknowledged culprits – picking a bad time to scale, running out of operating capital, lack of a steady customer base, high customer acquisition cost, and low to nonexistent repeat business. All of these problems can often be traced back to an ineffective sales approach.

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More Tech Startups are LLCs

Austin Startup

Background Reading: When LLCs Make Sense for Startups Not Building a Unicorn If you have spent almost any time reading about the basics of startup legal issues, you know that Delaware C-corps are the default organizational structure for a “classic” tech startup (software, hardware) planning to raise angel/VC money and scale. I’m not going to repeat what you can read elsewhere, so I’ll summarize the core reasons in 2 sentences: Delaware because DE is the “english language” of corporate law and al

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Part 2: How To Not Lose Female Engineering Candidates

Hunter Walker

Like I said yesterday, I’m thankful for my smart friends. After Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson provided some feedback on how Take-Home Code Projects might impact gender ratios in hiring pipelines , another amazing woman sent me her perspectives. Kieran Synder is CEO of Textio , an innovative Seattle startup which helps companies understand the language of their job listings.

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Weekend Favs November 4

Duct Tape Marketing

Weekend Favs November 4 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

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6 Lessons From Navy SEALs For New Venture Founders

Startup Professionals Musings

You have to be extra tough mentally to start a new business venture. While thinking about it, I realized that it’s really not that different from the toughness required and trained into America’s elite military force of Navy SEALs, who are known to be cool under fire, able to sense danger before it’s too late, and never give up on achieving their objective.

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Why The Best Young Entrepreneurs Are Purpose-Driven

YoungUpstarts

by Zach Mercurio, author of “ The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose ”. You’ve heard it all before. Good entrepreneurs have discipline. They are risk-takers, adaptable, persistent, and self-motivated. They don’t fear failure and are tenacious. Yet there is a quieter characteristic that separates great entrepreneurs from good ones.

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Salesforces Open Tent

deal architect

Dreamforce always has a feel of a political convention. You almost expect to see signs directing crowds to the LGBT or Pacific Islander caucus room. This year, watching it streamed I have been navigating through sessions titled with words like.

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Transcript of Get Rich Today by Teaching

Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript of Get Rich Today by Teaching written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Back to Podcast. Transcript. John Jantsch: You want to know how to get rich today? Teach. That’s right, teach and grow rich. In this episode with Danny Iny, we’re going to talk about Teach and Grow Rich, and how to build courses to grow your business.

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3 Key Success Factors Drive Business Strategies Today

Startup Professionals Musings

Your business can’t be all things to all people, and excel at anything. Every entrepreneur and every business needs a strategy to keep them focused. In fact, in this new world of pervasive interactivity, it’s time to rethink even how to develop a strategy. Strategy used to come from the inside looking out, but now it must come from a dialogue and engagement with constituents.

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Outside The Box Investors: 7 Ways To Fund Your Business

YoungUpstarts

by Jenny Kassan, author of “ Raise Capital on Your Own Terms: How to Fund Your Business without Selling Your Soul “ Startups are part of the American Dream, and small businesses play a key role in economic growth. Between 2009 and 2013, 60% of the jobs created were from small businesses. Yet too many entrepreneurs think of their businesses as outside the traditional funding model.

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Raising the Bar - for clouds, renewables and digital - Part 3

deal architect

My blogs, now 12+ years old, my 6 books and much of my consulting in those years have cataloged and celebrated cloud computing, renewable energy and digital transformations. I have been a big booster of each, but think we are.

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7 tips for first-time startup investors

The Next Web

Have you considered investing in early stage startups? But you don’t know how to do it? There are questions you need to think about: How much do you invest? Where do you find startups? How do you balance your portfolio? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, don’t worry, you are not alone. There are many investors who want to become a business angel and invest in startups, but don’t know where to start.

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8 Creativity Traits That Will Improve Your Leadership

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting a new venture is all about being creative, not just in the initial solution, but in tackling the daily challenges of every new and innovative business. In my role as business advisor, I find too many people still looking for the right answers in the back of the book. Most of what you learned in school is already obsolete. The winning answers and strategy has to come from your creativity.

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Want To Accelerate Small Business Growth? Then Turn To The Cloud.

YoungUpstarts

by Zakir Ahmed, General Manager of Asia at Oracle NetSuite. Started by a young entrepreneurial couple, Haresh and Dolly Balani, Treknology 3 set up its first small bicycle concept store in Singapore almost 30 years ago. The mission was clear: promoting a healthy lifestyle for customers and their families through the passion of cycling – while expanding access to its products supported by exceptional personalised customer service.

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Entrepreneurs Can Access 17,000 Online Classes For Free — Start With Our Top 10 Picks

YFS Magazine

Invest in your career. Invest in your passions. Try over 17,000 online classes. Redeem two whole months of Skillshare Premium membership for free.

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20 Reasons Why You Need a Business Plan

Growthink Blog

Below are our top 20 reasons why you need a business plan. Reference our proven business plan template to most quickly and easily complete your plan. 1. To prove that you’re serious about your business. A formal business plan is necessary to show all interested parties -- employees, investors, partners and yourself -- that you are committed to building the business. 2.

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6 Ways Of Thinking To Put Your Innovation Into Orbit

Startup Professionals Musings

Real innovation in the business world is still rare. As I’ve said before, everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of new business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with more features, another smartphone app for marketing, or one more platform for faster e-commerce. Historic changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

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How To Prepare Your Business For A Natural Disaster

YoungUpstarts

by Jesse Wood, CEO of eFileCabinet. Whether it’s a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, natural disasters can strike at any time and with very little warning. Though many people worry about and prepare for the effect these events can have on their homes and personal lives, very few business owners put the necessary thought and preparation into dealing with the effects these disasters can have on their businesses.

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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We’re tired of hearing how small software companies usually fail. The data show that the two most common causes are: (1) Product isn’t useful to enough people, and (2) Problems with the team. But what about the companies that die even though they did sell some copies of software, and where the early team isn’t dysfunctional? I don’t have data for that cohort (tell me if you do!

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3 Business Apps To Improve Operations And Workflow

YFS Magazine

What if you could free up more time, get more done, and create more–in less time? Would that make life and business easier? Of course, it would.

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Niche marketing works. Here’s how.

Berkonomics

Close. How many of us throw away marketing dollars because our paid efforts reach an audience that is much larger than the target or niche audience we need to reach? Whether it be for publications, social marketing, or even those once-necessary postal mailers, we have tools now that were not available just a few years ago. So, let’s up our marketing knowledge first with a few short answers to marketing questions….

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5 Tips For Creating A Black Friday Email Marketing Campaign

YoungUpstarts

Year after year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday amass billions in sales. In 2016, Cyber Monday sales increased 12.1% to $3.45 billion , breaking records in the process. Consumers begin looking into Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales weeks before they begin, and many shoppers reserve the bulk of their holiday purchases for this particular weekend. What’s great about this unique shopping extravaganza is that, no matter what type of business you run – startup or corporation, e-commerce or bri

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Productivity Hack: Read One Chapter of a Book to Get 90% of the Value

Hunter Walker

Here’s a fairly reliable productivity hack if you’ve picked up the latest self-help, management theory or sweeping sociological interpretation of our times: only read the second chapter because it routinely contains 90% of the book’s value. Here’s how these books usually go: Forward by Influencer – obviously SKIP. Chapter 1: Author’s Credentials – author introduced themselves, makes case for why they’re qualified, and evangelizes their path to disc

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6 Ways To Ensure Your Website Is Holiday-Ready

YFS Magazine

Now is the time to get the ball rolling for the holiday selling season. Here’s what you can do to get your website holiday-ready.

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How We’re Building and Launching a New Product, Step-by-Step

Up and Running

Starting a business and launching new products is a ton of work. From figuring out what exactly your customers need to nailing down your company name, you’ll encounter hurdle after hurdle. Here at Palo Alto Software, we’re going through this process right now. And, yes, it’s a bunch of work. No matter how many projects we work on, there’s nothing like building something from scratch.

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