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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 thing yo...

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...

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...

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 through peak productivity is easy. It’s the valleys...

Be sure to catch Part I of this discussion

“The customer is why you exist. Why your company chooses to exist. If you don’t put them on a pedestal, if you don’t remind yourself, your team, your operations why you’re a business, why you’re here, you’re destined for fail.”

–Joshua Davidson, Six Customer Service Principles To Abide By

New, new, new, new…. We tend to grow the most excited over new things and to obsess over them, so it’s no surprise that startups focus tremendous energy on new customers. So much so, that a vey important player in the destiny of companies gets overlooked: existing customers.

Unforgivable as that might be, the good news, according to Dr. Deborah Hecker, is that “respect, empathy, good listening, recognizing that ...

Quick. Grab a stack of sticky notes and come with me. We’re going to help you uncover new value hidden in your next initiative.

But wait. Sticky notes? There are so many software tools we could use instead of pen and paper. And a few of those software tools are really great.

How could a pen and paper possibly be used to help tackle something of any real consequence? Isn’t the sticky note just a crutch of the busy person trying to stay organized?!

Used correctly, the sticky note will help you and your teams uncover incredible new value.

When you’ve mastered the sticky note, I give you permission to return to your software tools — if you still want to!

New value defined

Let’s define new value. New value is an advantage or gain you didn’t i...

After graduating college I was working as a social worker running a foster care program for children with developmental disabilities when I found an ad online for someone selling a business — Amigos Spanish Program. It was a business that contracted with daycare centers to provide Spanish language classes to young children. I contacted them, reviewed a few spreadsheets and bought the business for $8k. I put it all on credit cards and started my quest towards millions… It was going to be great! I was going to own the biggest Spanish Language Class Business in the World…..or so I hoped.

I lost 20k over the year I owned it before I shut it down and closed the company operations for good. I was 22 years old with 22k in credit card debt with not...