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If starting a company is a race (and it is – it really, really is) then launch day is the starting line.

Everything you do before your product launch is the warm-up. (The very essential, very unskippable warmup). Everything that comes after? It’s the frantic, mad dash to the finish line, whatever and wherever that might be.

Your product launch is the inflection point. It’s the point to which everything before it leads up, and everything that comes after comes out of. And a successful product launch starts with a successful product launch strategy.

We all want our product to start out of the gate strong. But what exactly goes into a successful product launch? Stuart Brent, Co-Founder of MapPlug, has an idea or two on the subject. Not only h...

The conventional wisdom in the startup community these days is that to create a successful startup, you need to move at breakneck speed in everything you do.

And, to facilitate this, you should consume as much money as you can get your hands on along the way to make sure you’re removing all obstacles from getting to market. The perception is that if you move too slowly at the beginning, you’ll miss the market and, even worse, you won’t get funding.

But, is this correct?

While we completely support the idea that getting a great product to market as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of startup success, we just don’t buy that frenetic speed is the best way to do it. It’s not what has worked for us, nor for any of the successful startups we’...

Ninety to ninety-five percent of startups fail within the first five years. A large majority fail within the first 12 to 18 months. The failure of a startup shouldn’t be a big deal. In fact, finding the hard edges is what startups are all about.

Ideas should be pressure tested to find the ones that don’t survive, the ones that do, and most importantly the ones that could scale.

The problems begin when we conflate startup failure with “this is really bad”.

It’s only bad if the founder and team are over-extended, underwater, out of runway, or whatever analogous phrasing you choose. When all of the resources are marshaled in the wrong direction. When nobody stopped to do the critical work over the urgent. When the founders believed the same s...

What is an elevator pitch?

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a Founder and a VC walk into an elevator…

In all seriousness, if you’ve spent any time swimming in the startup waters, you’re probably familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch. But in case you missed that day in Founder School, the scenario is this:

Say you got in an elevator, and standing in that elevator was the one person that could make or break your business. You have the length of that elevator ride to convince this person to get on board. And no, the electricity can’t suddenly cut out and leave you with a couple of hours to fill instead of a handful of seconds.

Well — What the @#*! do you say?

We’ll get to that.

Why are elevator pitches important?

There’s a reas...

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for individuals and businesses alike to raise much-needed capital. The relatively low cost of entry and accessibility of popular crowdfunding platforms have fueled this revolution in funding.

But while it might look easy — and seem like a no-brainer — to launch a crowdfunding campaign, there are strong pros and cons to consider.

Founders considering launching a crowdfunding campaign might wonder:

1. Is it worth it?
2. How hard will it really be?
3. What are the true pros and cons of crowdfunding?

To answer those questions (and a few more that people might not have even thought of), we reached out to our network of crowdfunding experts.

Our list includes founders of crowdfunding platforms, serial...

A lot of people want to start a startup — but they don’t know where to start. And where there’s plenty you can do to get the ball rolling, there’s actually one place that everyone has to start: The idea.

But, what are the best startup ideas? What are the worst?

Before we dive into that big question — one disclaimer:

This is not a plug-and-play list of startup business ideas that you can cherry pick from in order to create the next unicorn startup. (That doesn’t exist. If it did, everyone would actually be killing it, all the time.)

Instead, we’re going to talk about some general categories of startups that are more or less difficult to start, help you figure out how to pick your best startup idea, and talk to some founders about their expe...

It’s hard to think of an innovation that has had a more transformative impact on the business landscape than the rise of crowdfunding.

Once upon a time, the only people who could bring new products to market were the ones who already had the capital and connections to make it happen. Now, thanks to crowdfunding, anyone with an idea and an Internet connection can mount the next big crowdfunding campaign – and the next must-have product can come from anywhere.

Crowdfunding is a great way to raise the funds you need to make your vision a reality. It can also be an awesome way to test a pricing strategy or validate demand for your product.

But crowdfunding campaigns aren’t (just) a fast track to capital or product validation. A successful crow...

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....

We’ve spent the last couple of sessions at Startups Live talking about idea validation: how do you know if an idea you have is an actual viable business in the first place? How do you go about learning about your idea from the people whose opinions matter most – customers?

For this session, we’re staying on the idea validation theme, but we’re taking it a bit more tactical, focusing on actual, concrete methods you can use to validate your ideas. Joining us for this conversation is Stuart Brent, founder of userinput.io, a service that provides on-demand feedback for websites and business ideas. Stuart has shared his favorite startup idea validation techniques with us in the past, and he added his insights to this conversation as well.

The ma...

It’s one of the classic phrases of the startup universe. We’ve all heard it a million times. It’s so ubiquitous, it inspired a Cards Against Humanity card:

“I have a great idea for a startup.”

If you’re anything like the Startups team, chances are you’ve caught yourself saying this more than a few times. If you’re really like the Startups team, you find yourself saying it a few times a day.

But what exactly is a “great idea?” How do you know when that idea you scribbled down on a cocktail napkin or a post-it note has the makings of a full-blown business? Is it really just a matter of “you know it when you see it”? Or is there more to it than that – something structured and systematic, a template of sorts that you can follow, time and time a...