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Some people dream of starting a successful startup so they can strike it rich, sell the company, and retire on a beach sipping mojitos. Others entrepreneurs nurture their one big idea and dream of creating a stable company that they guide through its growth for many years to come.

But the serial entrepreneur is a person with dozens, hundreds, even thousands of business ideas, who relishes the challenges and excitement of starting a new venture. Many serial entrepreneurs start one company after another, waiting just a couple of years for it to become stable before passing on the reins and diving headfirst into another startup.

The popularity of serial entrepreneurship has spawned a new business trend: the startup factory, or startup studio.

Kelly Cornell, Founder of the clothing and accessories line Seaton Cornell, never had to wonder what it was like to be a entrepreneur. The youngest son of April Cornell — who made her name in the ‘90s and early aughts with her lines of watercolor and travel-inspired clothing and housewares — Kelly grew up in a household bustling with the energy of a burgeoning business.

But while some kids might have felt deprived or left out growing up with parents who had so much else going on, he took it as an inspiration and an opportunity.

“I grew up with a lot of nannies,” Kelly says, laughing. “But that was a good thing! They exposed me to a lot of different people and cultures.”

India as inspiration

In addition to the people who helped raise him, Ke...

Do you have a million-dollar business Idea in mind and don’t know HOW to proceed? Whether it is worth, investing time, money and effort?

This is the question that haunts many entrepreneurs and demotivates them from working on their business Idea. The best way to start when you have a business idea in your mind is to think of the problem it is trying to solve.

In this blog, you will figure out the WHAT of problem, WHO of problem, HOW of identifying and validating the problem. I will be explaining this with the help of interesting examples and correlations.

This blog gives an in-depth view of the first step mentioned in my previous article: Came up with a great Business Idea? What Next?—Which is about 6 steps to validate a Business Idea. Here...

Coming up with a great business idea isn’t a problem. The problem is in actualizing that idea and turning it into a profitable business. The next thing that follows is the million-dollar question: “Where do I get capital to turn my idea into a profitable business?” Unless you have ready cash laying in the bank or a wealthy relative ready to come to your rescue, raising capital to start or grow your business isn’t the easiest thing to do. Resourceful entrepreneurs will always find ways of bootstrapping their ventures. However, depending on the nature of your business, there is a limit to which you can do that. It reaches a time when you need hard cash to move forward. In that regard, you need to find ways of raising capital.

The source of yo...

The benefits of being productive are obvious:

Sweat equity is created when you or others contribute work to a business in the hopes that it will pay off in terms of an interest in the company as opposed to hourly or salaried wages.

You may hear a web designer saying that they took a 2% interest in a company that they paid for in sweat equity. They traded the value of their time for a stake in the company.

Trading time for equity is a time-honored tradition among startup companies and is used very aggressively. While at first it may seem like you’ve printed a whole bunch of Monopoly money that you can start using to pay people with, you’ll soon find out that there is a real cost to offering up stock early on.

Valuing Input

With sweat equity, it is critical that you translate effort into...

Question: What is one critical thing I should consider before starting my first business?

The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.

Marketing Plan

You should have a written marketing plan in place before starting your business. This is the most overlooked puzzle piece in modern business. You outsource your accounting and your legal, but most companies think they can do their own marketing without experience. While your business will evolve, why not get there quicker with a strategic marketing plan by a professional?

— Steven Newlon
SYN3RGY Creative Group

Unique Factor

Make sure your business concept can stand out in the crowd. If ...

In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create web products that are helpful in the development process, and that we would use ourselves for building websites for clients.

From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.

In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all...

People are hardwired to value transparency. From an evolutionary perspective, transparency has always been essential for survival. Our safety has depended upon determining whether other humans are trustworthy. Complementing this need to understand is the psychological desire to understand and be understood. Transparency is an integral part of the need for belonging, which Maslow ranked next to safety in importance.

When you first meet someone, there’s little transparency, and little trust. Over time, as your new friend shares experiences, opinions, and insights, transparency — and trust — increase.

We, as humans, like transparency. And not just in friendships. Transparency makes business sense because we like companies and brands that are ...