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At age 17, Noor Siddiqui co-founded Remedy, which provides instant consults for clinicians. She also forewent the traditional route to college and was chosen as a Thiel Fellow, where she was one of 20 entrepreneurs under 20 years old who received a $100,000 grant to bring an idea to life. If anyone can help you execute an idea, it’s Noor.

The below video and write-up are the first in a series of 10 where Noor helps explain how to bring your own startup business idea to life – and how to make it stick.

1. You Must Validate your startup business idea

According to Noor, the first thing you need to do when you have a startup business idea is validate it. Not everyone will see what you see when looking at it. To her, the most important th...

Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.

The below video is the first part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:

Before you make a few modifications to your same, old, boring presentation and click “Save As” thinking you’re ready to go…think again. Take a step back and take an empathetic approach to your delivery of information. When creating a...

We all know what it means to give equity away. But what does it take to get it back?

There are a few different methods we can use to begin clawing back some of our hard-lost equity, but all of them require quite a bit of effort — and aren't nearly as easy as giving it away!

Will investors incentivize us with additional stock?

When we look at future funding rounds, if things are going well, we may be able to negotiate some additional stock awards based on the next financing.

This is only an option if the company is doing well and we can point to a significant track record that we've demonstrated to get it there. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen.

Oh, and if we don't negotiate hard for it, no one is ever going to suggest it for u...

Creating a healthy sales organization is imperative for startups that want to eventually scale-up. Mastering the ups and downs of sales cycles requires that you get a lot of important factors right –from hiring and managing, to prospecting and pitching, to reporting and pipeline analysis, and much more. Throw in the fact that you’re selling at a startup and you end up with a lot of unknown factors that you, as a sales leader, and your sales team have to account for and plan against.

So how can you get really good at sales? How can get your sales organization to a place where it’s the department you worry about least? How can you get through this quarter with flying colors? More importantly, how can you set yourself up for success all year r...

Brand promotion through email marketing is a crucial tool for customer acquisition and engagement. Many businesses waste precious effort and resources because they don’t plan their brand promotion properly.

Traditionally, retailers have been able to just post huge signs and distribute flyers making consumers aware of the sale in the back. Their storefronts could remain nicely decorated.

Ecommerce retailers face a new challenge. They promote multiple product categories, various CTAs, and a sense of urgency practically daily to customers. While it may be efficient in the short-term, it dilutes the value of the brand.

Consumers aren’t curious to see new advertisements or flyer graphics, but they might be curious about new products and discount...

Determination, according to Paul Graham’s essay, is the best predictor of startup success. Determined people, he says, have three qualities: discipline, ambition, and willfulness.

The Anatomy of Determination in Startups

Successful startups are extremely rare compared to the number of startups ever started. It means that at least one of these three qualities is rare in people. Which one? Let’s look at them one by one.

Discipline

Discipline is simply doing what you’ve planned to do. It requires a plan, any plan, and your execution of it. Discipline is straightforward. So why would it ever be a problem? It is not difficult to make a plan. Most people get that far. But the doing part is more difficult—it requires something less than what we n...

So, you’ve got an idea for a new web-based business venture and you’re looking to get started on product development.

You don’t know a lot about the direction you’re going to take when building your product or what to do when it comes to market validation. But, you think your idea is a good one. After all, you’ve got some early anecdotal feedback reassuring you of this.

Before you approach investors, focus on building out and maturing your web-based business idea—which can be faster and cheaper than you’d think.

This is the exact situation we found ourselves in with The Audio Hunt around 2 years ago. We adopted the Lean Startup methodology and utilized SEBLOD—A web application builder for Joomla!—as our platform of choice to build and launc...

What's more fair than a 50/50 equity split?

Well, chances are a 50/50 split is a bad deal for one person - the person who will contribute more value over the long haul. The problem comes when we make those determinations of future contribution based on the least we will ever know - where we stand before we start our startup.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to address the split differently, focusing on what our contributions may be over time.

Why should I be concerned about a 50/50 split?

Because the likelihood that both parties will contribute the exact same amount of value over the course of the startup’s life is incredibly low, especially in the formative years.

One person may be contributing a ton of value relative to the moment in t...

The Situation

Brad is a newly hired analyst for a mobile payments startup, Cash.io. He joined the startup ready to help conquer PayPal, Visa and anyone else in their way.

When talking about the company to friends, he gushed, and often referenced it as his company. To prepare for the role, he read books and articles about the importance of innovation and not being afraid to fail.

Brad vowed he would never let the fear of failure stand in the way of his creativity and his desire to innovate. Yet as the first quarter came and went, Brad had not found a chance to flex his creativity. He reassured himself with thoughts about the virtues of patience.

As the days wore on, he found himself spending a lot of time doing what his predecessor, Alan, no...

When people visit the Startups.co office and see hockey sticks leaning against a wall, or members of our team wandering through the woods, they might wonder if we’re one of those Internet companies that plays too hard to really work hard enough.

We do love to have fun here at Startups. But the truth is we’re also militant about our productivity. There’s a reason we’re doing plenty of fun activities in any given week. We’re not just enjoying our lives, we’re optimizing for productivity.

Productivity in Waves

Like many people, we see our productivity peak and valley like a wave. It’s not linear – we don’t just wake up in the morning with constant peak productivity throughout the day.

Working thr...