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Entrepreneurs know the truth of the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” The right relationship can make the difference between a struggling startup and an overnight success.

But there are a lot of people in the world, and most of them don’t know who you are. You can’t sit back and wait for your audience to find you. To help your company succeed, you need to make the first move.

Savvy founders know that thought leadership is the first step to earning trust among a specific audience. And the trust you earn through a thought leadership strategy can help you build valuable partnerships, attract amazing talent, secure funding, earn press, increase sales, and more.

Grow Your Business Through Thought Leadership Content

Thought lea...

Stories are always part of any successful marketing including social media. At the heart of all social media best practices lies the customer experience. In particular stories around their experience. So in producing social media content for your business, you need to look out for:

• What matters to your customers?
• Why do you matter to them?
• What is it that you do or sell that fascinates them?

In other words, stories that further the customer experience are ones which serve as enablers of brands. They help brands to build personality and create a connection with their customers.

But is it possible to narrate a visual story on social media?

In case you are wondering about the power of visual content on social media the infographic below sho...

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...

When we think of marketing it can sometimes be hard to look past buzzwords like “engagement” or “virality.” However, these factors don’t get at the true objective. The real factors to be considered are those directly impacting the company’s bottom line in a clear and measurable way.

To put this into perspective, in a study conducted by Econsultancy, only about 22 percent of businesses were satisfied with their conversion rates from online marketing campaigns, indicating that standard factors, such as clicks, likes and shares, do not necessarily translate to earnings. Moreover, another study found that if marketers had a greater ability to track return on investment (ROI), over 75 percent would increase their marketing spend.

Therefore, in ...

You have an idea but how do you make sure that it works? And people want to actually buy it? And would want to use your service?

How do you know that you’re actually solving their problems before you get started? How do you make sure that you’re not wasting your time building something that no one will give a shit about?

The answer is fairly simple: validate your startup business idea first.

I say “fairly” simple because none of this startup stuff is that simple or easy, but making sure your idea has some potential of working before you proceed certainly helps. When startups fail, it’s often because they built something that the market didn’t want.

Don’t be like that.

Here are four easy but powerful idea validation techniques to help substa...

Looking at startup news publications such as TechCrunch or Mashable, a new entrepreneur might think that every startup raises capital and walks away with MILLIONS in their pockets after a quick and easy overnight success followed by an acquisition by Google or Facebook. These sensationalized stories are actually very misleading and do not represent the daily grind of startup life.

Here are some of the common startup myths debunked:

1. You MUST Be Technical

Being technical is pretty important if you’re planning on starting an internet startup. So if you’re not technical, it is a good idea to learn at least some technical skills. Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, was non-technical before he founded his first startup, Dodgeball, later sol...

When I first heard about DogVacay, it struck me as one of those “Airbnb of X” or “Uber of X” derivatives that swept through startup-dom over the last few years. I liked the founders, and I got the problem. There are millions of dogs and most owners leave them at some point. Current solutions to finding care for them is expensive, risky, and unsatisfying. But I wondered if this was one of those pitches that begins with a “This is a fill-in-the-blank billion dollar market…” but it’s a market so fragmented, so hyper-local, so hard to scale that there is a reason it’s so large and no one owns a meaningful percent of it.

Add to that, most of the venture-funded pet-related companies I’ve been pitched over the years, have wound up being financial...

What is a business grant?

A business grant is a sum of money given to a business in order to help them further their business. They’re usually distributed by governments, corporations, foundations, or trusts. Unlike many other types of business funding, grants don’t have to be paid back and business owners aren’t required to give up equity in exchange for a grant.

However, most small businesses probably won’t qualify for a small business grant, as they’re tied directly to US government agencies that have specific goals. There are some categories of business that are an except, though, including research and development companies, as well as some high tech companies.

State level grants are also tied to the direct economic or social needs and...

What do startup hiring and a Broadway production of Hamlet have in common? No, it’s not the murder, the Oedipus complex, and the existential crisis. (If it is, what kind of company are you running?)

In startup hiring, as in the theater, casting is everything.

When it comes to building a startup, you are who you hire. Not only do the people you bring onto your team determine the direction and destiny of your product; they also shape what it will be like to come to work every day.

Hiring is one of the most essential components of building a startup. But for some reason it’s also one of the least talked about. When you’re a founder, you’re frequently pulling double-duty as your own HR rep. But how many founders have you heard of that actually...

Everyone knows brand building is an essential component of building a company. “That’s not on brand,” you hear people say. Or: “This is going to be great for our brand.”

There’s brand essence, brand style, brand ambassadors, brand story…. But, when it comes to defining what a brand is – let alone how you build one – things start to get a little murky.

What is a brand?

Part of that stems from a confusion between two similar, related, yet distinct terms: branding and brand.

Your company’s “branding” refers to the collection of visual and verbal assets associated with your company. That includes things like your logo, color scheme, messaging platform. These are the cues that signal to customers that they’re interacting with your company.

Your...