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Starting a company is incredibly exciting. There’s an amazing sensation the comes along with creating something and sharing it with the world. It’s even better when lots of people are using your product and gaining value from it. What’s not great is when all those feelings and happy product users don’t turn into a viable business. That’s exactly what happened to us.

In 2012, my business partner, Keith, and I started a company called Applits.com. We were best friends from high school and both studying mechanical engineering as sophomores in college. We really didn’t want to do the whole internship thing or work in a big company. That’s also the summer Instagram sold to Facebook for a $1 billion. We kind of looked at each other and said, “da...

The first thing to realize as a founder is that many investors make quick judgements and bucket founders into basic groups: “promising” or “not promising.” Unfortunately, many judgements are influenced by widely held beliefs, and generalizations about someone’s age or gender that may or may not be relevant to the present situation. For instance, an investor may automatically perceive a young white male with a CS degree from Stanford as more qualified than a female founder of equal or greater status even if he has had significantly less experience. According to a recent Babson College Report, only 15% of VC-backed startups have a female founder, and just 2.7% of Venture Capital backed companies have female CEOs. Moreover, the report also co...

“Success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents 1 percent of your work, which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.”

It’s time to talk about something nobody likes to talk about. It’s time to talk about failure.

Failure is one of the most fundamental components of the startup experience – and one of the least talked about. There’s this weird thing that happens when people talk about failure: voices get hushed, people start looking around them, worried that someone might overhear.

Talking about failure is taboo #1 in the startup community – but that’s not doing us any favors. Because here’s the thing: startups fail all the time. And not only do they fail – failing at th...

Ok, so maybe they’re not. They’re not endangered, they’re not that cute, and they definitely don’t have the time to play mascot to anybody’s cause. The analogy is still tempting, however, because finding a CTO seem to be the current “issue” of the global startup trend: founders need them, accelerators like them, and aspiring startup cities are desperate for them to move in.

A Scarcity of CTOs

There are many specific reasons for the scarcity of CTOs in any of these new startup hubs, and most of them have something to do with regional history, legislature, infrastructure or economic context. However, regardless of particularities, all these reasons stem from a simple issue of supply and demand; there just aren’t that many developers out there...

We built our company, Sidebench, without funding because we wanted to and because we could. Our focus from day one was on building a fundamentally sound, multimillion-dollar business.

Giving ourselves a pile of unearned cash and putting ourselves in a hole up front seemed like a bad way to do that. We knew that, for a technology services company, all you truly need when starting a business is a client, a computer, and internet access.

We saw a market opportunity that aligned with our skill set, obtained paying clients on day one, and spent time understanding and refining our business model to ensure that it was indeed viable.

Instead of looking for funding and spending time worrying about investors, we spent all of our time on growing a pro...

Today isn’t just about our new site launch – it’s about why we launched it. For those of you that have been following our story for the past few years, you know that we’ve grown our startup platform quite a bit, helping over a million startups get from idea to launch.

Most of what you’ve seen has focused on our products, whether it’s Fundable for raising capital, Clarity.fm for finding mentors, or Launchrock for acquiring customers.

But behind the scenes, we’ve been working on something far bigger: our community.

Bringing the startup community together has always been our greatest goal. This site launch has given us the opportunity to make it happen, and offer our vision for a new voice and a fresh narrative to the startup journey.

More imp...

You’ve finally secured funding. Phew. You can put that pitch deck to rest — for the time being. For now, you have investors. It’s imperative that you build and nurture a relationship with them, and a key part of that is sending regular investor updates on company performance.

Every investor that owns >=3-5% should be fully in the loop on what’s happening in the company until you are so big you don’t need any capital anymore, or their capital is irrelevant. They deserve this, and you may get burned if they get out of the loop.
— Jason Lemkin

Indeed, informed investors are not only happier but also more helpful. Regular updates set the stage for participation, not just dispersing information. They also may help you secure funding in the futur...

Crowdfunding is not only a popular strategy for getting a product or startup off the ground, but also an increasingly viable one.

New legislation lets startups raise capital from the general public. Companies can now receive up to $1 million from non-accredited investors, prompting many businesses to enter the arena and, ultimately, attract more issuers.

What’s more, equity crowdfunding companies like Fundable make the process really easy for companies to raise money on their platforms, which has led to a big expansion in the space.

If you want to reach and inspire the crowdfunding community, video is a great medium. In fact, campaigns that utilize video crowdfunding pitches garner four times more funding than those that don’t.

While the in...

“I became an investor because I understand how to build businesses. It excites me. I enjoy the startup phases of businesses and enjoy being involved in many at the same time.” says Joanne Wilson, Angel Investor with 95 investments under her belt, otherwise known as “Gotham Gal”. This matches here credo — “Work hard and play hard.” Living in New York City, she is a self-professed foodie who also loves to cook and host and is always up on the latest cultural and fashion trends her city has to offer.

Joanne primarily invests in consumer based products and that covers a wide range with an emphasis on women and minority founders. “I have focused my thesis on female entrepreneurs — a decision that is more practical than philanthropic. She also w...

Every startup launches victoriously — it's the rest of the journey that tends to put an end to it.

How many times do we have to see this same movie before we realize how it ends? Tell me if this sounds familiar: A startup launches with great fanfare — big funding, a "transformative" product, and heaps of early praise only to be nearly extinct in just a few years.

Whether it's the "next great media platform," Clubhouse ($4b valuation in 18 months, now almost defunct) or Bird ($2b valuation in just over a year, now worth $40m), we just keep seeing the same thing happen over and over.

What we're missing is the ability to discount those early announcements in favor of waiting for the actual results. We need to be able to see the early victories...