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Most startups don’t fail because they lose money. The downward spiral starts much sooner when entrepreneurs let managing their financials fall by the wayside. In fact, a CB 2018 Insights report found that 29 percent of small businesses failed because they ran out of cash, perhaps a result of poor money management by leadership.

Not everyone has the aptitude for financial management. Still, startup owners agree it’s a necessity.

Why your bottom line could bottom out

Over the years, my company has seen a pattern with startups: Just as they hit their stride and growth takes off, they begin struggling with financials. There are many reasons for this paradox, including expanding into new verticals too quickly and failing to acknowledge the fina...

Toward the end of Season 1 of HBO’s incredible Silicon Valley, there’s an amazing scene that this writer has legit watched on YouTube about a hundred times.

The Pied Piper team is at TechCrunch Disrupt, coming off the high of unveiling their compression algorithm to a veritable whos-who of the tech world. Then, disaster strikes. Mega-corporation Hooli is there, and they’re presenting a technology that is identical to the product Pied Piper is building.

Panic inevitably ensues among the Pied Piper ranks. Then, a notably manic Jared, fresh from the traumatic experience of being kidnapped by a self-driving car, has a brainwave.

What Pied Piper needs to do, he thinks, is pivot.

“A lot of successful startups launched with a different business mo...

Running a non-profit can be a tremendous challenge. Those who are deep in the planning and execution of campaigns understand the magnitude of their efforts – and the consequences of poor execution.

Day in and day out, organizations are struggling to move the mission forward, encouraging their volunteers to raise donations and bring in more support. It’s an uphill battle, as evidenced by the steady decline in charitable giving since 2015, per the Blackbaud Index.

Growing an organization in our digital age, when contributions are down, is a challenge that requires a more tactical approach than just marketing. It requires a complete audit of operational processes, while also looking at ways to streamline donor outreach.

Because so much of what...

Virtual reality (VR) is a term and technology that has garnered a lot of buzz, especially in recent years. But while VR is a phrase many are familiar with, that ubiquity hasn’t translated into widespread use, despite some notable advancements to make it more accessible.

When Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, many felt the move would usher VR into the modern era. It took another two years of development before the merger’s first consumer shipments went out, but even after that lead time, most customers still don’t consider VR a must-have. Content producers and hardware manufacturers are chock full of ideas for home-based systems with hardly anyone to buy in to them.

The good news is that those who have tried VR can vouch for its potential. It ...

With Amazon disrupting and dominating more and more industries, how can your business thrive? Unless your name is Walmart, I don’t recommend competing directly against Amazon. Instead of going head-to-head with Amazon, I suggest focusing on how you can out-flank them.

Start by defining Amazon’s strengths so you know what areas to avoid. For example, price.

Due to Amazon’s massive scale and efficient distribution channels, it is generally the low-price leader.

And it has demonstrated its willingness to sell products below cost for an extended period of time in order to kill off competitors that engage them in a price battle. So trying to compete with Amazon by charging less is probably a recipe for disaster.

Another area where Amazon domina...

Like a lot of ambitious young women, Lisa Wang, co-Founder of the female entrepreneur networking group and community SheWorx, didn’t think that her gender was holding her back — until it did. Lisa’s first career was as a US National Champion Hall of Fame gymnast, where she was surrounded by talented, competitive women. This was followed by a short-lived career as an equity research analyst right after college, but chafed in that highly-structured environment. So, like so many talented millennials before her, she turned to tech.

“I realized that the work I was doing in finance was simply not aligned with my values,” Lisa tells Startups.co. “Having creative ownership, autonomy, and making a clear impact that aligned with my personal mission w...

After almost two decades of decline, music industry revenues are finally starting to recover again and a lot of the credit goes to one guy: Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify. Ironically, Spotify was backed by the guy who helped enable all that piracy to begin with: Napster’s Sean Parker.

It was no small thing for the Recording Industry to learn to love Spotify… or any Internet music company for that matter. It was also no small thing for Ek to start Spotify with the stance of not wanting to “Disrupt” music labels—he wanted to help them.

It took Founder Daniel Ek two years to get his first deals in Sweden, and another two years to launch in the US. He and his partner invested largely their own money until they showed traction, and likely would h...

As mentioned briefly above, there are multiple valuation methods to value a startup, and one not mentioned (but worth noting since this is arguably the most common startup valuation approach) is the Venture Capital Method that was developed in 1987 by Bill Sahlman.

If working with a venture capital firm, you should know how they calculate valuations. Venture capital firms use this valuation method to establish an understanding of the value of a startup using this basic framework. In addition to the venture capital method, a VC Term Sheet is used to define the specific conditions of venture capital investments between an early-stage startup company and the venture firm itself.

A lot of people confuse crowdfunding with crowdsourcing. While they are similar in that they both allow people to primarily leverage mass-community collaboration, they relate to two different things entirely.

So, what’s the key difference?

The short answer:

Crowdfunding is the process of sourcing money or funds from a group or groups of people.

Crowdsourcing is the process of sourcing information or skills or end products from a group or groups of people.

The long answer:

What is crowdfunding?

In a crowdfunding campaign, a person, business, or organization raises a relatively small amount of money from a large group of people. Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and indiv...

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...