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During last week’s Startups Live, we talked about developing your pricing strategy, and how asking customers for money is an important step in building an actual grown-up company.

If only it were as simple as flipping a switch on a revenue stream and then watching the sales pour in. That would be a beautiful world to live in. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this world – and in this world, if you want customers, you have to go out and earn them.

We tend to think of lead generation strategies as this very rote, transactional thing: you herd as many people as you can into your funnel, and then you shake the funnel and hope that enough people fall through to paying customer.

“Driving traffic is different than turning someone into a...

It’s one of the oldest truths in marketing: in order to get customers’ attention, you have to live where your customers live. And today more than ever before, where customers live is on social media.

According to a study by marketing firm MediaKix, the average person spends 2 hours per day on social platforms. As the post helpfully points out, that amounts to 5 years and 4 months over a lifetime – enough time to fly to the moon and back 32 times or run 10,000 marathons.

With numbers like that, it’s no wonder that paid social media advertising has supplanted radio and possibly even television as the new darling of the advertising world. Mediakix predicts that social media advertising spend will hit close to $36 billion globally in 2017, and ...

The graveyard might be the last place on Earth you’d care to visit, but, if you don’t want your company to go under, it’s a good idea to pay attention to what killed other similar companies.

Grab your flashlight, Founders, and head to the Startup Graveyard. “This site is a resource for entrepreneurs to avoid making the same mistakes as failed startups. We hope that this project can help de-stigmatize failure, increase transparency, create a community and improve the information on the site.”

Of course projects have unhappy endings. Call them failures if you will. But if you believe in process, take the long view of life, and have the courage to look at startup corpses – then the stories of failures become instructional lessons more so than...

Some entrepreneurs sail blissfully into the sunset after their first big payday. Others — like us — can’t imagine anything more boring. Instead, we thrive on constantly risking it all to build something out of nothing. This condition of serial entrepreneurship is what I call “one-and-not-done” syndrome. We know it will be hard, if not seemingly impossible, and there will be times when we will be overwhelmed with frustration. In spite of that, we know the journey is worth it.

If you’re this special breed of entrepreneur, I feel both sorry and happy for you. More than anything, I welcome you to the club.

There is a magic to what we do as entrepreneurs. We can create a thriving business almost out of nothing. Is there anything more...

Startup conferences can be a great choice for both learning more about your business and meeting more like-minded entrepreneurs. Because when it comes to most things in life — dating, business, and yes, startups — who you know makes all the difference.

While some people are lucky enough to be born into families with connections or go to highly ranked schools, others have to activate that hustle to get in front of the people who will change their lives. And a big part of that startup founder hustle can be found at startup conferences.

But conferences are an investment, of your time and your money. And there are a lot of startup conferences and events these days.

So how do you know which ones are worth it?

Some things to consider are:

1. Does ...

As a startup founder, one of the biggest keys to success is being able to leverage marketing to garner awareness and grow your business. This means taking stock of all potential marketing channels and deciding which ones are the best fit for you.

Chances are, especially if you’re bootstrapping, that digital marketing is the first thing that came to mind. In general, the barrier to entry with digital marketing is much lower and there are many ways for you to market yourself for free—if you’re willing to dedicate the time and energy.

SEO For Beginners

Enter SEO — One of the most cost-effective ways to get your startup some exposure

If you’re new to SEO, or if you are needing to brush up on your skills, you’re in the right place. Our SEO for b...

Productivity is no easy feat, and that’s speaking from personal experience. I’m constantly on the go, and despite working my butt off around the clock and even sticking to a solid routine for productivity, I still have that rare day where it’s a bit of a struggle to stay productive.

It’s an unusual person who can resist the urge to procrastinate from time to time, but those moments can be overcome with some serious determination.

I recently sat down with John Rampton, founder and CEO of Due.com, a service that helps small business owners create invoices and capture payments. He is also a frequent contributor for numerous publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company. Aside from a hectic conference schedule, he’s also a family...

Entrepreneur Philip Wilson provides clean water to over 300,000 Guatemalan families by doing one thing no one ever thought to do — sell them the very products his own mother’s foundation was previously giving away for free. Because of his radically different thinking, he’s on track to provide access to clean water to 1 million Guatemalans by the year 2020 through his company, Ecofiltro.

But Philip’s idea to charge for a product that was previously free wasn’t always so popular. In fact, when he told his sister — a social worker who had been working on water purification in rural Guatemala for years — she was so upset by his proposal that she stopped talking to him for three months.

“My sister was like, ‘You know, that’s not in the spirit of...

With Amazon disrupting and dominating more and more industries, how can your business thrive? Unless your name is Walmart, I don’t recommend competing directly against Amazon. Instead of going head-to-head with Amazon, I suggest focusing on how you can out-flank them.

Start by defining Amazon’s strengths so you know what areas to avoid. For example, price.

Due to Amazon’s massive scale and efficient distribution channels, it is generally the low-price leader.

And it has demonstrated its willingness to sell products below cost for an extended period of time in order to kill off competitors that engage them in a price battle. So trying to compete with Amazon by charging less is probably a recipe for disaster.

Another area where Amazon domina...

We’ve spent a lot of time on the blog talking about the early stages of planning a company, so let’s flash forward a bit. Say you’ve built out your product. You’ve validated your idea to death, formulated your pricing strategy, built out social channels and put out press releases.

You flip the switch, launch your product, and… crickets. Not a customer in the pipeline, not a signup on your website. Nothing.

So what now? Is that it? Do you throw in the towel, pack up and go home? Not by a long shot.

“If you build it, they will come,” is great and all, but sometimes in the startup world, if you want customers, you have to go out and get them yourself. So grab your email lists and your spreadsheets, folks, because we’re going sales prospecting....