Forums Search

For those of us who have never raised capital or built a startup before, there's a commonly-held myth that startups get funded with great ideas.

If the idea is so wonderful, an anxious investor will jump at the idea to get rich with an early investment. It must be true — we saw it on Shark Tank!

The truth is, startups get funded at all different stages, from the initial idea all the way up through proven traction. The problem is that the uninitiated don't quite understand what the difference is.

What if we had the idea 9 seconds ago?

If the idea is just that — an idea — and there's no other development or traction to the business, the only likely funding sources are going to be our credit cards and perhaps an incredibly supportive relative....

Last year, when we launched our team building company HeyTaco!, my business partner Blake and I knew we wanted to build a customer first company. Both of us are inspired by the success stories of customer-centric companies like Costco, Zappos, and Trader Joe’s. We knew that putting customers first and a focus on customer experience would be the foundation of our business.

As the Chief Taco Officer at HeyTaco! (Yes, that’s my real title), I’m constantly obsessing over new ways to improve the customer experience.

Over the past year we’ve discovered five ways that help us create lasting relationships with our customers.

1.) Be Responsive

In the fast paced world we live in, customers expect quick responses. They don’t want to wait for answers....

Let’s face it. Bootstrapping sucks. In theory, it should be liberating to be self-funded and self-sufficient at the early stages of running a business. But reality is much less glamorous. For one, we’re small peanuts surrounded by unicorns: our presence in the media, as a result, is almost zero. We’re competing with 10-figure marketing budgets and grinding our teeth to get there. We spend more time scratching our heads than making actual decisions.

Then, we see success stories like Basecamp, a company that could have been a unicorn but chose not to—growing to 50 employees and a customer base of hundreds of thousands along the way.

Holy shit, maybe it is all worth it.

While founders in the VC world are chasing their burn rates, Basec...

Creativity is the name of the game. Think about your favorite brands — are they creative? Are they above average on being original? I bet they are.

From Apple’s creativity in engineering and marketing, to Hubspot’s creativity in creative (pun intended) and Coca-Cola’s creativity in advertising — all the successful brands rely heavily on creating uniqueness and being original.

In these years where creativity is a must for every company, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain and optimize creativity for yourself and your teammates.

Coming from this thoughts, I’ve delved in the topic of “sustainable creativity” (as we know “sustainable” is a buzzword and should be used everywhere). Through my research I’ve identified two very very po...

As a business owner, you’ll need to make an important distinction every time you hire paid help: Is the worker an employee or an independent contractor?

In this guide we’ll show you how to determine if workers are employees or independent contractors. But first let’s look at why you need to classify your workers at all.

Classifying Workers: A Taxing Situation

One of the most important reasons to classify your workers is to determine which taxes get paid at which time, and by whom.

In the eyes of the IRS, there are four classifications for workers:

1. Employee
2. Independent Contractor
3. Statutory Employee
4. Statutory Non-Employee

The two classifications that are most common to small business owners are Employee and Independent Contractor.

If your ...

Friends — today I’m excited to share two very big announcements and to give you a peek at what’s in store for 2015.

We’ve Acquired Clarity.fm

Yep, the family just keeps growing.

Clarity was founded by well-known serial entrepreneur Dan Martell to help Founders get personal advice from startup experts in every field, from marketing to fundraising to product development.

Over 4,000 experts have joined Clarity, and last year alone they spent more than 181,026 minutes on the phone helping entrepreneurs. To put that in perspective, that means that 1 out of every 3 minutes of the day (or night) someone on Clarity is on the phone helping a Founder. It’s awesome.

They’ve also created a fantastic Q&A product where Founder...

One of the things that makes running a startup so tough is that you have to attract some of the best and brightest employees, and get a heroic amount of productivity out of them, all while bigger, better-funded companies are offering them more money and better benefits.

In this environment, it’s tempting to spend a lot of money on perks — like yoga classes, fitness bootcamps, and gym memberships — to entice employees to not only work for you, but work longer hours. A corporate wellness program for a ten-person startup can easily end up costing two or three thousand dollars a month. At that point you’d be better off just hiring another employee.

However, it is possible to provide fitness & wellness service to your employees at an afford...

Startup failure statistics vary widely, but even the rosiest numbers show more than 50 percent failing within five years. Startup founders often have obligations to many stakeholders, including family, employees, investors, and perhaps customers. So when they are forced to face the reality of their business’s failure, they have a responsibility to these groups to do everything in their power to optimize the process of exiting. This starts with understanding the various paths available to you before you have $0 cash in the bank. By that point, many potential exit opportunities will be off the table.

It all starts with communication. It is critically important to communicate regularly and consistently with your stakeholders from the day you l...

If starting a company is a race (and it is – it really, really is) then launch day is the starting line.

Everything you do before your product launch is the warm-up. (The very essential, very unskippable warmup). Everything that comes after? It’s the frantic, mad dash to the finish line, whatever and wherever that might be.

Your product launch is the inflection point. It’s the point to which everything before it leads up, and everything that comes after comes out of. And a successful product launch starts with a successful product launch strategy.

We all want our product to start out of the gate strong. But what exactly goes into a successful product launch? Stuart Brent, Co-Founder of MapPlug, has an idea or two on the subject. Not only h...

Your typical angel investor is going to have been a successful businessperson or entrepreneur that is looking to put some of their earnings to work in an investment they really feel passionate about.

Since angel investors were often successful in their own careers, having access to their experience and rolodex is sometimes even more valuable than the capital they invest.

Make no mistake, the business of an angel investor is to make money. But there is a very personal attraction to each deal that makes working with an angel investor different than going to a nameless, faceless bank.

High Net Worth Individuals

The typical angel investor is someone who’s net worth is likely in excess of $1 million or who earns over $200,000 per year. Incidenta...