Forums Search

Even dietitians know it’s healthy to have a beer or a donut once in a while. Without wiggle room, a strict diet can harm health in other ways, like creating stress or limiting social interaction.

Until a client prescribed otherwise, our company struggled to take a break from something that was supposed to keep us strong: our process. This client loved our work, but he felt that we’d become too married to our own way of doing things.

A look back at our client data showed that we had, indeed, taken our healthy habits too far. We did our best work when we eliminated VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), empathized with our clients as well as their users, and pushed toward consistent shipping.

So we broke our mol...

Starting your own business is not a simple task. As a busy entrepreneur, it’s essential to be able to focus on your business anywhere. Today, mobile technology greatly helps you connect with clients, increase productivity, and sell on the go.

Here are seven of the best apps for business growth!

App #1. Slack

Slack is a neat app to increase work productivity that allows you to communicate quickly with your colleagues.

You can share links, pictures, and files either one-on-one or with multiple people at the same time through different channels.

The app is available as a web app as well as in the iOS and Google Play App store.

App #2: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great social media site for professional networking. It’s a convenient way to keep i...

CHAPTER FIVE: Prep Beautifully

In This Chapter:

-How and why you should auto-confirm every meeting
-Adding smart metadata to each calendar invite
-Our example of a contact dossier

There are only two things cooler than walking into a meeting being perfectly prepared.

1. Moonwalking into a meeting to the song Billie Jean—perfectly prepared
2. The first edition of “Godzilla – King of Monsters”, in mint condition

Short of those two things—seriously—nothing is cooler.

So now that you’re ready to be cool, let’s show you how to prep beautifully for meetings.

Auto Confirm Every Meeting

They say the worst meeting is the one where you’re the only attendee. We’ve all had this happen, it’s not just you. The first step of prepping for meetings is to ...

When you’re starting a new company, customer service is everything. Startups make or break based on their earliest customers and if you can’t get those early adopters to stick around as you’re muddling through the inevitable mistakes that happen in an early-stage startup, you’re going to end up in the huge pile of startups that fail. Additionally, traction is one of the most important factors that VCs examine when they’re deciding whether or not to give a company money. Bad customer support equals lost customers, which means crappy traction.

But good customer support? That can make all the difference.

“At HappyFox, we once won a deal with a Fortune 50 company based purely on the quick response time they received,” HappyFox founder Shalin Ja...

Getting ready to audit your site’s SEO? Congratulations! You’re about to embark towards improving your overall SEO footprint while also finding every single potential wart that your website may have.

The bad news is every site will have things wrong with it – yours included. The good news is that each new issue that you find represents an opportunity to improve. As an SEO, the point of auditing your site is to find areas to squeeze more juice out of.

In my previous article entitled, SEO for Beginners, I outlined how there are both things occurring on page, as well as off page, that can impact your site’s SEO performance. Foundational to a good SEO strategy to the point of almost being a prerequisite is technical and content optimizati...

What if I told you the perfect idea is a myth? We all know what the myth looks like – it’s this moment of inspiration where it’s so obvious that the world will love your idea for the Double Decker Couch. You rush downstairs in your PJs and begin a montage scene going from blueprint to big sale to furniture tycoon by the time the theme song is over.

Perfect Ideas aren’t Perfect (at all)

Perfect ideas don’t exist because—until you put them into the real world—they’re just concepts. In the real world your idea will get beat up a thousand times until it barely resembles whatever is in your head right now.

We get caught up in the notion that if the idea in our head doesn’t check all the right boxes, then ther...

I’ve launched 4 startups so far in my career. And at every other company that I worked for, I treated the role as if it was my own startup. In doing that I found that there are a ton of things that need to be done, but we rarely think about the things that need to NOT be done.

Consider this my gift to you. Most startup advice you read includes more things to add to your to-do list. This is your authorization to reduce and cut back.

1. Stop accepting all the meeting invites

Have you seriously looked at your calendar recently? Unless you’re one of the rare few who already abide by Jason’s calendar practice, then it most likely looks like a train wreck.

Maybe your future genetic clone can attend the double-booked meetings?
In some cases you ...

If you want to compete in the world of high growth startups, you better know how to play the marketing game. Marketing has become a big stakes game where companies are betting fortunes on the success of their products. Nowadays, if you can’t play the big marketing game you may not even get the attention of the customers you need to grow your business.

So how do you compete if you don’t have the cash to run with the big dogs? The answer lies in growing your marketing budget by doubling up on your marketing investments quickly. Chances are the capital you need to compete in this game is right under your nose, you just need to know where to look for it.

Make marketing an investment

The first step to growing your marketing budget is thinking ab...