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Ah, the age old question: “What are investors looking for?”

Unfortunately, there is no universal answer here. The obvious response is “a return on their investment,” but that’s just an outcome — it’s not what helps you determine how to pitch your business today.

By understanding each of the key areas that investors react to, you can be better prepared to position your deal to be more attractive. You can also begin to understand why they may not be reacting the way you would expect them to.

Location, Industry, and Stage

The easiest way to see how you’re a fit for a potential investor is to align with the type of investments they typically make.

Are you starting a cookie company? Great, but you don...

Equity investment means you’re trading funding for a stake in your company. Unlike a debt provider like a bank or lender, an equity investor isn’t looking for a simple interest payment on the money they’ve provided you. They are exchanging more risk for more reward – a lot more.

The “more reward” part is what you should be paying attention to. Equity investors aren’t interested in earning 8% on their money with these types of investments. They are looking for 50%, and most likely a lot more. That means you’ll need to prove that your investment can yield a massive return on their capital.

Not Every Business Makes Sense for Equity Capital

Equity capital tends to follow businesses and industries that c...

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a Founder and a VC walk into an elevator…

In all seriousness, if you’ve spent any time swimming in the startup waters, you’re probably familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch. But in case you missed that day in Founder School, the scenario is this:

Say you got in an elevator, and standing in that elevator was the one person that could make or break your business. You have the length of that elevator ride to convince this person to get on board. And no, the electricity can’t suddenly cut out and leave you with a couple of hours to fill instead of a handful of seconds.

Well — What the @#*! do you say?

There’s a reason the elevator pitch has become such an icon of entrepreneurshi...

What is customer segmentation?

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing a large group of customers into smaller groups, based on certain characteristics. It’s also sometimes called “market segmentation.”

Why is customer segmentation important?

Customer segmentation is important because it helps companies market more effectively to their customers. If you want your marketing budget to go as far as it can, it’s essential that you know who you’re marketing to and what they respond to when it comes to advertisements.

For example, if your company had a customer base that included both 14-year-old boys and 45-year-old men, you wouldn’t use the same marketing techniques with the two groups, would you? But you can’t even know that you have ...

When Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann introduced himself to Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber turned on his heel and uttered the now-infamous words, “See you in the trenches.”

On the surface, the Silicon Valley feud seems misplaced: Postmates is a logistics company that connects couriers and consumers, and Uber’s bread and butter is transportation for humans.

But Uber has been trying to establish its own competing delivery service, and both companies are using big brands to fuel their explosive growth. Uber has partnered with the NFL, Capital One, and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Postmates recently inked deals with Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill, McDonald’s, and Apple.

Pursuing big brands has been a smart way for Uber to expose more ...

Planning to raise some capital for your startup? Well, before announcing your intentions to the world, take a step back and remember that investors are a notoriously skittish bunch. According to a Fundable study, venture capital and angel investors pour money into less than 1 percent of new enterprises, meaning it may be best to raise money away from the public eye.

A more low-key business fundraising approach isn’t as tough as it sounds, as most entrepreneurs unknowingly do it to some extent. If you’ve read about a startup that’s “killing” or “crushing” its fundraising goals, that’s usually a calculated effort to build the kind of buzz that entices on-the-fence investors to take the plunge before it’s too late.

To combat potential investo...

Recently, I hosted my eighth Marketplace Dinner. Marketplace Dinners are a series of happy hour-esque meetups that bring together founders and leaders at startup companies growing, you guessed it, marketplaces.

So far, we’ve gathered over 1,117 founders and leaders over eight events hosted at the offices of Thumbtack, Shippo, and DogVacay. In attendance were entrepreneurs and executors from Lyft, Airbnb, UpWork, eBay, Uber, InstaCart, and many more “unicorn” business marketplaces as well as burgeoning startups.

Each event is three hours of eating, drinking and telling tales of what it took to build a marketplace.

Why the need for Business Marketplace Dinners? Two reasons:

1 — Startup founders are incredibly collaborative and thoughtful.

As...

Daniel Kempe, after a series of careers that ran the gamut — from builder, typist, telecoms engineer and freelance designer — decided to try his hand at content marketing. What he found was a landscape teeming with great content, complimented by some great automation tools. But, while tools like Buffer were great for automating sharing, Daniel found that actually finding content to share was a major time suck.

“It was just a pain in the ass, really, to find really great content to share,” Daniel tells Startups.co.

And so, like so many startup founders before him, Daniel looked this problem in the eye and said: I can solve this.

Daniel teamed up with PR professional Matthew Spurr and award-winning developer Mubashar Iqbal to create Quuu, the...

From startups like Allbirds and Harry’s to larger companies like Tesla, the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business model is becoming increasingly popular.

Today, the supply of consumer products greatly outstrips the demand that exists in the market. As a result, consumers are demanding a new experience that big box retailers and other “middlemen” simply can’t provide. Companies want a way to reach consumers directly and control every aspect of that experience.

The rise of D2C companies follows off the back of what General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja refers to as “economies of unscale.” Modular services have greatly reduced the barriers to launching a D2C strategy. Back in the early 2000s, it was difficult for an e-commerce startup to build and man...

When making hiring decisions, many startups with limited resources choose sales talent over customer service, aiming to scale and grow their consumer base as quickly as possible. But considering that it costs companies five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing client, this tactic doesn’t really add up.

You only need to look at companies like Amazon and Apple to see that top notch customer service is a key driver of success. But you don’t need to be a multi-billion dollar multi-national or have a huge customer service team to provide the best support possible.

If your startup is growing, first you need to assess how much you need to invest in customer service per client. Then you need to look into the strengths and...