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When it comes to building a website for your business, it's important to choose the right type of website that will meet your needs and goals. There are several different types of websites to choose from, each with its own set of features and benefits. And choosing which website is best might be a litter overwhelming.

Some websites are more useful than others, depending on your business's industry. Some are easier to maintain while others are just plain confusing. That's where we come in. We've put together a quick guide that will help you figure out what type of website is best for your business.

Read on for tips on choosing the perfect website for your business model with insight from our community members to help you along the way.

Most Co...

If our startup sinks, everyone else gets a life raft — but Founders go down with the ship.

There are a million stories about how other entrepreneurs were able to scale successfully, but what we rarely hear about is what happens when things aren't so rosy, which is ironic since most startups don't have that picturesque outcome AND this is a great learning opportunity.

The reality is most Founders find themselves inextricably tied to their startup baby at a very personal financial level.

This means when things go sideways, it's not just the startup that's in jeopardy — it's our personal lives that get pulled into the mucky-muck. And if this is your first startup — this may not be apparent at all.

Most Big, Successful Businesses of Today Were ...

Next we're going to analyze our financial statements and operating expenses to see if they accurately reflect all of the financial transactions we just inputted. If you're using your own accounting software to update your company's income statement that works too.

The nice thing about our handy Income Statement is that once we plug in all the values, the story from there is essentially told. All of our columns add up and ultimately tell us the honest truth – “did we make any money?”

Did We Make Any Money?

How we use this information is key. The Analysis step here is about getting all the troops rallied (assuming we have troops to rally) and ask:

“What did we just learn, and what changes do we need to make?”

Unlike a Profit and Loss Statement, ou...

We're going to update our financial statements using a simple accounting process that requires zero professional accounting experience or accounting software — it's just our income statement spreadsheet.

Click here to download our template to follow along.

The next step after we've captured all of our financial transactions in our spreadsheet accounting system will be to process each of the financial records in order. Earlier we began recording transactions from our bank accounts and credit card statements, so now we'll drop them into the Tabs we set aside for business expenses and revenue.

What Tabs will we Populate?

We've broken our spreadsheet accounting system into a handful of useful tabs to populate.

Here's the quick list, then we'll go ov...

Building solid financial statements starts with digging through all of the financial transactions in all of our accounts. In our example, we'll do this with a spreadsheet but you can use your accounting software to comb through your financial records and do the same thing.

Once you've done a little bit of startup accounting you'll realize that keeping good financial records is just about process. You don't need complicated accounting software or a finance background, just a dead simple accounting system you can repeat monthly.

What we use at Startups.com

In our own business at Startups.com, we've managed the company's financial position for over a decade using the same basic accounting methods for an 8-figure growing company. We use a basic fi...

Now that we know how to set up our income statement and what the major parts of our financial statements look like, let's create a little monthly accounting system to manage the financial records of your own business.

This is where most people freak out and shout “Good God! It’s Accccounnttttinnnnng!”

Yes, friends, it is indeed the sneaky devil that we call "business accounting". But guess what? Accounting for startups, or just keeping track of basic financial health isn't that hard because initially it'sj ust basic bookkeeping. Our bank accounts aren't exactly processing "millions" (yet!) so we can stick to some startup business accounting that's easy.

A Simple Accounting Method

We like to keep startup accounting easy, so that as the business ...

The business startup costs that are the least complicated for startups tend to be our "fixed costs" like office space, utility bills, or software expenses incurred. While these start-up costs grow with any new business, they don't scale the way our variable cost projections do when starting a business.

Fixed Costs vs. Variable Costs

The reason we separate our fixed costs versus our variable costs is that we want to isolate our startup cost categories to focus on what will truly drive our business plan. Things like scaling our advertising costs will have an exponential effect on our revenue, for example.

But our fixed costs don't have nearly this impact.

Our fixed expenses do "grow" over time, but not exponentially. Therefore we tend to separate...

All startup financial projections are based on a few key assumptions about how we feel the business will perform.

In this section, we're going to explain what key assumptions drive our financial forecasts and how to adjust them to create a financial model that works.

Download our Income Statement Template here to get started and follow along.

What’s the Goal Here?

The Assumptions tab in our income statement template gives us a worksheet to help determine what the right values will be to populate in our projected income statement. The tab itself is just a worksheet that drives things like our revenue projections, cost assumptions, and ultimately net income.

We’ll walk through each of the assumptions in this worksheet one by one to give a little m...

Startups create financial projections in the form of a "Pro Forma Income Statement" — which simply means a financial forecast. Early-stage startups are still building their financial models with assumptions, forecasting everything from sales revenue to marketing costs to a basic cash flow projection.

We're going to explain exactly how to build financial projections for your startup even if you have no idea where to start!

Financial Projections are just Assumptions

Most businesses that have been around a while have historical financial statements that detail how operating expenses, direct costs, fixed costs, and their sales forecast have worked all along — startups have none of this.

Therefore instead of working from real-world data to build our...

Startups live and die by financial projections — yet we tend to suck at creating them!

That's because we're so busy trying to create the "perfect" financial statements, when in fact what we should be working on is identifying what key assumptions will drive our projections at all!

Assumptions are the raw materials that make up our financial statements and tell us whether we're headed toward gross profit or total disaster! Here we'll be taking a beginning inventory of the 3 most important financial assumptions that tend to drive most startup company projections.

Assumption #1: "How Many Customers Will We Acquire?"

Our first step is to construct a series of assumptions that tell us how many paying customers we will get through the door. All of th...