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According to figures reported in the GEM Global Report, 100 million new businesses are launched annually.

Thats nearly 11,000 startups per hour.

So, how do you beat this competition? By raising more funds? By marketing more aggressively? Maybe. But, I believe that increasing the brand value of your startup can help it not only survive the competition but thrive.

When it comes to marketing your business, branding is an old concept. Unfortunately, it’s one that few startups utilize properly. Review these 7 tips to improve (or build!) your startup’s branding:

Tip #1 — No persistence, no brand

For example, what are the labels you would associate with the Nike brand?

You’re probably thinking somewhere along the lines of sports, Michael Jordan,...

As your business grows, so does your need to scale sales efficiently. Scale can be your best friend, or the elephant in the room threatening to knock your growth off course. Your sales team needs special attention to scale efficiently. They’re a huge part of why your company is successful, don’t lose the magic that makes you special. Here are the areas to pay attention to when it’s time to scale your sales team.

Sales Training & Mentorship

Training a small team is easy. You know exactly what works and how to communicate it. Communicating the skills and strategies your team needs as a big organization becomes much more difficult. You won’t always get 1-on-1 time with each rep who talks to your customers.

It’s important to develop internal...

In 2008, the world got a new music streaming service named Spotify. It was developed in Stockholm, Sweden, and provided digital rights management-protected content from record labels and media companies. It may have started out as a local thing, but the freemium service quickly expanded. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million monthly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Andreas Ehn, who was Spotify’s first employee and CTO. Andreas was responsible for the product and platform architecture as well as hiring a world-class engineering team, of which many have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs on their own.

After Spotify, Andreas founded Wrapp — a mobile online-to-offline customer...

Why the hell would anyone quit a stable, successful, six-figure job at a global company? A job where you work with fun, intelligent colleagues, get heated covered parking (crucial in Chicago), and can travel the world almost any day you choose. A career that helps support a family, pays the mortgage, and still leaves a few bucks left over for all the protein bars you can eat. You’d have to be an idiot, right?!

Hi — I’m Dennis. Your typical idiot entrepreneur.

My sources of motivation: family, friends, sports, and a startup. (Dennis Timpanaro)

Truth is, some days I do feel like a real dumb dumb for starting my own business. Those days I tend to focus on my shortcomings and failures. I vividly relive getting cut at the Olympic Trials, being ...

As the founder of a start-up and new app, I’m in the position of being in a brand new position over and over again.

Pretty much daily, in fact, like all entrepreneurs, I’m confronted with a barrage of new questions that require research, testing, intuition, and unforeseen obstacles that keep me up in the wee hours of night.

So many new things to learn, so much to navigate.

It’s those endless beginnings, however, those unknown situations when I’m standing on the edge of foreign terrain with no roadmap that keep me ...

When I (Jonathan) read the book Exponential Organizations 3 years ago, a whole new world opened up for me. Up until then, I didn’t know Salim Ismail that well—just like a lot of other people, I guess.

Today, Salim Ismail is one of the hottest names in the business world. He has spent the last 7 years building Singularity University as its founding executive director and current global ambassador. Prior to that, Ismail was the vice president at Yahoo, where he built and ran Brickhouse, the company’s internal incubator. His last company, Ångströ, a news aggregation startup, was sold to Google in 2010.

Salim Ismail has founded and/or operated seven early-stage companies, including PubSub Concepts, which laid some of the foundation for the real...

I have a confession to make: I’ve left my one-time beloved SoulCycle for a younger bike. For a Peloton.

It’s fitting that the two places I keep seeing Peloton ads are on cable news commercial breaks and in my social feeds: Because that’s where all my unhealthy election angst is generated, and there’s no greater way to deal with that angst than 45 minutes of balls-to-the-wall intense cardio.

“Y’all came to slay!” my favorite Peloton instructor likes to say as if he can see my sweat through the tablet screen. Yep, slay my workplace stress and slay my fear of Donald Trump being president—all in one spot. That marketing can’t be an accident.

Peloton– in case you don’t spend as much times in those mediums as I do– is the in-home answer to the...

When you’re working on an early-stage startup, figuring out what your business goals should be — like what you should be achieving and at what stage — is difficult. It’s not like school, where there are clear steps that lead to the next level. Or even like traditional businesses, which have clear business goal templates. No — early-stage startup founders often struggle with the nebulous nature of their business goals.

Lucky for you, there are experts in this who have great advice about what should be achieved — and when — for early stage startups.

Here are seven business goal posts you should be aiming for as you grow your early-stage startup.

Business Goal #1: Minimum Viable Product

TIMELINE: AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

Your minimum viable produc...

One of our favorite interviews we’ve done was with Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Not just because of what he’s done, but because of the time we did it.

There are a lot of interesting moments in history to interview Yang — ours was just after Alibaba went public in the largest global IPO in tech history.

This was a massive vindication for Yang, who originally brought the deal to Yahoo!, and argued against Yahoo! selling half of its stake off years later. He needed the vindication: Yang was supposed to be the Steve Jobs founder hero coming in to save Yahoo! back in 2008. He initially turned down a $40 billion acquisition by Microsoft, was eventually ousted as CEO, and Yahoo!’s long slide continued.

It’s hard to assess his legacy: On the one h...

In my tech career, I had the opportunity to experience hackathons from many different angles: as a participant, an organizer, a sponsor; a process advisor and technology provider; in plenty of cases as a winner or leader of winning teams; with both startup and corporate contexts.

I’ve experienced the challenges in leading talented teams under the time pressure of a hackathon; the stress levels of pitching ideas to leadership teams. Here is my advice to those ambitious hackathon participants:

No matter the type (corporate or public one) a hackathon is always a great opportunity to showcase your talent and skills: yes, hackathons are also about team spirit, collaboration and fun but the primary motivation of the typical participant is to win...