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In the early years of your startup, you may feel like a one-person show. You have infinite faith in your product or service, but how do you translate that commitment to investors and stakeholders? How can you raise brand awareness before you have the funding necessary for marketing and PR?

Despite these obstacles, you must find a way to gain traction in building a community or generating sales. Otherwise, you risk stalling or, worse, folding. Fortunately, this is where “strength in numbers” comes into play. Find out how you can get your show on the road with a strategic startup partnership.

Getting ahead with a strategic startup partnership

1. Instant Street Cred

Validation by large enterprises generates the credibility and exposure you ne...

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...

Enlisting the services of a PR firm can put a big dent in your marketing budget. Despite that, many startups will front the money because they believe that getting media attention is the golden ticket to success. It’s that mindset that allows PR agencies to get away with charging a huge chunk of cash.

Publishing is also not always going to drive the readership or conversions that your company wants. As someone who spent 5 years working for major publishers and media houses, while also being immersed as a leading mentor for top tech startups in Silicon Valley, I can tell you that there are only a...

You never hear of anyone winning an award for Best Receipt Keeper, because you’d never find enough entrants to make a contest in that category. Most of us struggle with keeping expenses in order, personal and business. Add frequent work travel to the mix? We’re toast.

About the only thing that we do find a way to manage reliably when we’re traveling is email, which is why Fyle is such a handy new tool.

Fyle is a Chrome extension that lets you track business expenses from your email, automatically capturing expense data and e-receipts from within Gmail and Outlook. You’re off the hook when it comes to manually entering data on your own, submitting expenses late – and for the inevitable loss of receipts while on the road.

Using what Co-Found...

When Amazon released Alexa, a speech recognition interface, many saw a great potential in this revolutionary technology. What is even greater about Alexa is that it is changing every single day, in better, as new features and new abilities are added to it. Due to this, new technologies are emerging and people around the world enjoy different exciting experiences. The idea of having intelligent personal assistance under the shape of revolutionary technologies is very attractive to more and more people. One of the most recent updates that concern the range of tasks Alexa can perform is to allow its users to check their finances and even manage money by just using voice commands. This skill was developed and released by Welto.IO, a financial ...

In 2002, when Craiglist, Friendster, and MySpace were the popular social networks, Divya Narendra was a Harvard College student who identified with the idea of online social networking.

“Its usefulness was obvious to me as a student, because I felt like I was in this campus with a lot of students, 6000 undergrads, but I didn’t know that many,” said Divya. “In Boston, there are around 50 colleges within 50 square miles — it’s very dense city as far as universities go, and I had no real great point of contact between the various universities, so I felt like bringing that community together was sort of a no brainer. When I thought about the scaling opportunities, it was pretty obvious as well — this was a use case that would be ap...

Preparing to pitch investors is all about getting your pitch materials in order. Most investor introductions follow a common sequence of events that will require you to provide different versions of your business plan throughout the process.

Investors want to find the right fit. They want to see the right location, market size and traction, among other things.

In many cases, it’s the same information simply repackaged to fit the right method of communication. For example, providing a couple sentences makes sense to explain your business in an email, but won’t cut it in a presentation. Conversely, sending a 50-page business plan attached to your introduction email is surely the wrong approach toward making a good first impression...

Working as a leader for a start-up is not for the weak. It requires a “rare unicorn” type of leader to see it through to stable profitability. The success of a business is how many unicorns you have on your team and how well they sparkle. What traits do I look for when seeking out the most sparkly unicorns of them all?

A “Hustler” 💪

Hustling unicorns run long and fast, they work with a sense of urgency, and they do it with a smile. They have an extra comb in their pocket and come prepared with water and snacks for the ride. Unicorns are prepared, work hard and look GOOD doing it. 🙂 There is no complaining of long weeks or long hours….in fact, they enjoy the hustle.

Sparkle Indicator: Horses act “put out” by a workload. Unicorns will ask fo...