The Price Ain’t Right.

As a startup company, pricing a project, your work or your time, is a difficult task, and one you will face from the get go in your business adventure. From experience, it is easy to underprice, and for whatever reason, easy to underprice regularly, again and again, and believe me, you will tire of concluding that “we are too fucking cheap!” after a while.

WHY STARTUPS UNDERPRICE WORK

Pricing work correctly is no easy feat, when you have to consider questions such as the following; What is the rate you want to earn? Should you charge day rates, rather than hourly rates? What would your wage be? (Note: you will want to write ‘ten million pounds’ here, unfortunately it is probably some way short of that.) What do your ...

If idea validation is about taking your business idea for a test-drive, then pricing your product is where the rubber really hits the road.

This is it. You’re done piloting. You’re done validating. You’re really done living on Ramen in an apartment you share with five roommates. You’re ready to come out and tell the world: “I have a product or service that provides value – and this is how much my product is worth.”

Needless to say, product pricing strategy is an essential piece of the startup puzzle – and it’s a notoriously tricky piece to get right. There are about a dozen moving pieces you have to take into account. Getting them all aligned just right is like unlocking the most complicated combination lock ever.

Britt Crawford knows a thi...

Startups and venture capitalists are so closely linked in the tech world that it can be hard to think about one without the other.

We certainly wouldn't have our tech giants, like Facebook or Twitter or basically any other startup-gone-big you can think of without VCs. But, finding and getting venture capital for your startup can be daunting. Where do you start? How do you start?

Don't fret — we've got you. Keep reading for more information on how to get venture capital funds for your startup.

Before we dive in, let's make sure we understand a few terms:

VC Funding

VC funding is the process in which a company or individual invests money into a business in exchange for equity. This type of investment is most commonly used by startups and small b...

When you start to raise venture capital for your company you’ll quickly find there’s a common process each venture firm utilizes.

Once the partners have agreed to make an investment in you, their offer will come in the form of a term sheet.

You have to appreciate the fact that these firms are constantly pitched by every entrepreneur with an idea, so their first order of business is to separate the serious entrepreneurs who want to raise venture capital from the crazy ideas they want to run away from!

Every entrepreneur looking to raise venture capital goes through roughly the same process. They start with an introduction to the firm, get invited to pitch, make their way through a few successive meetings, and eventually wind up pitching the ...

The first article in this 3-part series (How to Design a Killer Sales Compensation Model) introduced the concept of behavioural theory and how it affects sales compensation design. This second article discusses how compensation packages suit different stages of company and product evolution.

The main challenge with designing a sales compensation program is the primary sales role constantly evolves as the company grows and the market matures. The following diagram, courtesy of The Alexander Group, explains the four phases of growth and how this impacts the business.

Phase 1: The Start-Up Phase

In the Startup phase, brand awareness is low, and companies strive for a foothold in the market. The salesperson must have an entrepreneurial drive ...

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 ...

We've all been there.

Sitting at our desk as this dark cloud of guilt begins to swirl — yet again — knowing that we're about to choose whether we're going to finish this one critical project at work or make it on time for dinner. Or a soccer game. Or any event that our families are counting on us for.

Do we fail the startup or do we fail the family? We're going to fail someone. Guilt is a constant, the only variable is the source of the guilt.

If this sounds familiar, it's because nearly every startup Founder wrestles with this problem on a daily basis.

We're not just working at jobs — we're trying to survive long enough to even get a paycheck. Everything we have is on the line, including the welfare of the very people we're running hom...

Founders, when we look in the mirror what do we see?

I don't mean that haggard shell of a complexion that looks like a time lapse video of decaying fruit. I mean do we look in the mirror, squint really hard through bloodshot eyes and say:

"Welp, that's it. Today's the day everyone is going to find out how big of a Founder fraud I really am!"

That's right.

Today's the day our investors find out we have no clue how we'd ever grow this company to an exit. Today's the day our customer calls us and says "There's no way I should have put my faith in you!" It's the day we finally admit to our staff that we were never 100% certain we should have told them to join this company.

Yep, today is the day that everyone reveals us for the fraud that we tr...

When I started my first company, we were operating on a bare-bones budget and hadn’t purchased a backup server. It was too expensive, and there was no such thing as the cloud at this point.

I’ll never forget walking through IKEA one weekend when my tech guy called me. He told me that our server had failed and couldn’t be fixed. My heart dropped; I thought it was the end of my company. That one server represented the entirety of the business — the very real possibility of losing the business, too, was terrifying.

Entrepreneurs know about obstacles. Startups fail 90 percent of the time, so determined entrepreneurs know that failure is something they’ll have to confront regularly.

Turning a concept into a reality isn’t easy, but true entrepre...

Having interviewed hundreds of people in positions ranging from developers to sales reps, there are some interesting patterns that emerge.

LEVEL +0

There are a number of things that candidates focus on which are in the “cannot hurt” category. To be competitive as a candidate these won’t suffice.

Dress for success?

So cliché. Your mom probably told you to “dress for success” but she also reminded you to be yourself. Come to an interview as yourself, if you’re comfortable in ‘business casual clothes’, wear those, if you’re only comfortable in jeans and t-shirt, great. If your confidence in a sales situation is strongest when dressed in a suit, bring it. Be yourself.

Follow-up letter?

“That candidate sent a great follow-up email so they have ...