Forums Search

Truly, it has been a busy and productive year! Here at Startups.co, we will be taking it easy, spending time with our families and drinking way too much ‘nog until the New Year.

While we are on this short hiatus — lets take a stroll down memory lane and review the top 17 articles that we published in 2017.

Read them all at once, or portion them out like a kid trying to make Christmas candy last until Easter. Either way — we won’t judge. Enjoy!

1. How to Write a Business Plan For Investors (That They Will Love)

A good business plan should do more than explain what your company does, how you earn money and what you want to do. It should also tell a persuasive story and illustrate the many ways that your company and product are Grade-A Awesom...

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...

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...

I often see entrepreneurs searching for domains that enable them to stuff their URLs with keywords. Thanks to William Shakespeare, most people don’t think a name is worth much as long as their businesses do what they’re supposed to.

But think about it: The titles of books, movies, and bands are all representative of the things attached to them. Names mean something, and they shouldn’t be slapped on as mere afterthoughts.

Tips on Establishing a
brand identity for startups

For a decade, our business was called Domainsatcost.ca. It followed all the “best practices” we commonly see — it was rich in keywords, search-friendly, short, straightforward, descriptive, and geographically situated. Yet it lacked something very important: an identity. R...

Starting a business is not as easy as it might seem on the surface—and launching a startup can be even more challenging! This is because a majority of entrepreneurs have little to no earlier experiences in the business world. Save for an awesome idea, there are other things to consider—like recruitment, finance, legal issues, management, and so on.

We’ve all heard that that 9 out of 10 startups fail, but what are these stats based on? The Huffington Post claims that 95% of startups fail—Does that mean that almost all new businesses fail? I hope not.

However, not all statistics are discouraging. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—over 55% of all newly-created businesses cross a 5-year threshold. Small Business Administration (SB...

For busy startup teams, the name of the game — today more than ever — is productivity.

FitStars CEO and co-founder Mike Maser sums it up perfectly: “When you’re building a vision, a team and a product all at once, time is your ultimate currency. Every day presents both the opportunity to break ground and the risk of losing ground. At the end of the day I’d trade anything for an extra hour to ensure we’ve taken a step forward.”

And when you’re a startup, working at the breakneck speed of startups, it’s only natural that things start falling through the cracks. Social media gets neglected, correspondence goes unresponded-to. Every startup has a laundry list of items they should be doing but aren’t — or things they are doing, but could be doi...

CHAPTER FOUR: Block Out Time Proactively

In This Chapter:

-How to control your calendar
-How to create a schedule that works for you
-Our example Productivity Calendar template

Your calendar shouldn’t be an open season free for all of appointments. Each of us have a special cadence in our day that involves times when we’re most productive, time we want for personal reasons and time when we’re least productive. These are often the same times day in and day out – so why not create a calendar template that aligns your scheduling with your lifestyle?

But wait, I can’t control my Calendar!

It’s true, life throws lots of stuff at us daily. Our client calls for an immediate meeting. Our one co-worker strangely schedules meetings at stupid early t...

We all dream about it. Cashing out, getting The Big Check™ and going on a shopping spree with “Bentleys and Benjamins”. But, once the fanfare wears off — What actually happens to all of us?

Do we walk away with a perma-smile until the day we die? Or do we just trade one set of problems for another? Are we actually happier?

As a Founder with a few exits of my own, I’ve had this conversation with dozens of Founders post-exit who have had anything from a $1 million exit to a multi billion dollar exit. What’s fascinating is that all of our outcomes tend to tell roughly the same story — and it’s rarely what anyone thinks it is.

Everyone has their own version of their outcome, but if I were to generalize my observations after some very deep ...

How to build startups through social media in short time.

As startup Founders, we are constantly focused on making sure our fledgling companies have enough runway to grow. We believe that if the company’s bank account runs out, the company goes bankrupt and it’s game over.

But that’s not always true. It’s often not until your personal bank account runs to zero that your startup is truly done for.

The fact is that startups don’t truly go bankrupt until their Founders go bankrupt. The problem is that Founders are often so focused on the startup’s finances that they overlook their own ability to stay afloat in the process. I call this ability your “personal runway,” or the amount of time that you can stay alive and fed, regardless of the health of your business.

Back to Basics

I learned all abou...