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If you’re expecting to get the funding you need to take your startup to the next level, you need to get serious about your business pitch. Without the right amount of preparation, people are not likely to throw money at your “amazing” business idea.

Here are some business pitch tips based on my experience as a CEO and entrepreneur. They will help you impress potential investors and find the right fit for your business.

Getting Ready

Benjamin Franklin was right. “By failing to prepare we prepare to fail.”

Leave your startup business pitch preparation to the last minute and a “thanks but no thanks” is all but a fait accompli. If you think natural charm and some ‘ad-libbing’ will get you through, please think again.

Research your audience

Onc...

SEO. You’ve heard the acronym and you know that a lot of small businesses are seeing great growth from investing in it. But you don’t know how to do it, or what it can mean for your company.

SEO is an ongoing full-company initiative. It involves a very real investment.

But, you’re a small business or a startup. You have very limited resources, a short financial runway, and you’re trying to get something new off the ground. So what does SEO mean for you?

In the next 10 minutes you spend reading this article, my goal is to help you understand what SEO can mean for a small business like yours. We’ll cover:

1. How to invest in it from the beginning;
2. What you can do in the coming weeks to set yourself a solid foundation;
3. How to leverage PR for SEO...

What is a C Corp?

“C corporation” or “C corp” stands for “corporation.” The “C” comes from the fact that C corp income is taxed under the subchapter C of the Internal Revenue Code. That’s the law that responsible for the double taxation that C corps are known for, which we’ll go into more below. C corps are the most common type of corporation in the United States, but they may or may not be the best options for your startup!

Corporations are a business entities that exist entirely separately from their owners. They can be taxed, make a profit, and be held liable. In fact, they offer the highest level of protection from personal liability for the owners.

When it comes to stock, C corps can issue stock and shareholders can sell their stock a...

According to the Small Business Association, veteran-owned businesses make up 9.1 percent of all US businesses — and they all need capital to get and keep them going. But securing financing for a startup or a small business is almost never easy. And it can be even more difficult for veterans, who may have gaps in their financial history due to time on active duty.

Luckily, there are a few options for business loans for veterans. Some are government-funded, while others come from the private sector. Let's take a look first at government-funded small business loans for veterans and then dive into the private sector.

Government-funded business loans for veterans

The Small Business Association (SBA) administers the most well-known small business l...

1984. A novel that probably most folks were forced to read begrudgingly at some point or another while attending english class (also begrudgingly). As a millennial, I can see among my peers that there’s an undercurrent attitude of irreverence towards the old ways of doing things. It’s like we have some weird anti-establishment angst that we just never grew out of and carry with us wherever we go.

A lot of it is just mob mentality — out with the old, in with the new! Down with bureaucracy! Big brother is evil! Overthrow the tyrannical parents!

Attitudes like that, coupled with the enormous success of the irreverent celebrities of our time (think Zuckerberg with his refusal to wear suits) makes us want to do things differently, even if diffe...

So, you’re launching a startup. Big goals obviously aren’t an issue. You want 10x customers! You want to 4x your retention rate! You want to be the next Facebook or the Airbnb of X!

The big stuff is what entrepreneurs are good at. But it’s in breaking those big steps down into smaller, actionable ones where we tend to trip up. I’d even go as far as to say that the inability to break big goals down into smaller business goals and then into short-term objectives is one of the main reasons that the majority of startups fail.

Sound familiar?

So, how do you go from big goal to smaller goal to actionable steps you can start taking right now? The process is going to be different for every startup, of course, but here’s how to start.

Name the big g...

“Think of business as a good game. Lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.”
—Bill Gates

It’s called “competitive landscape” for a reason: competitors are a crucial part of the terrain your company will have to navigate in order to get where you’re going. Who your competitors are, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it – these considerations will impact some of the most important decisions at your company, touching everything from pricing to messaging to marketing.

Doing a solid competitive analysis is like setting up for a game of Battleship with the divider down. When you can see where your opponent is putting their ships, you can be that much more strategic about where you’re placing your own.

For this se...

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...

Paul Teshima, Co-Founder & CEO at Nudge Software, sat down with us to give some great advice on scaling business, based on his own personal journey as an entrepreneur.

1. When in Doubt, Sell Something

You never know what customers really want until they purchase a product and see its value. As a startup, you’ll want to attract a type of luck referred to as Motion Luck.

Motion Luck happens when you’re out there doing things. The more you get out into your industry and try to sell products, the greater the chance (or luck) of selling your product becomes.

That is why it’s important as a startup to harness motion luck – to sell your product and scale your business.

2. Culture is Built Through Storytelling

You won’t be able to execute your str...