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Ten years ago, Andy Dunn was at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He was torn between taking a high paying job and following the lead of Brian Spaly– a classmate who was selling better-fitting pants out of the back of his car.

That company would become Bonobos, a promising survivor in an otherwise graveyard of so-called “ecommerce 2.0” upstarts.

Spaly and Dunn had a contentious falling out; with Dunn keeping Bonobos and Spaly going on to build (and sell) TrunkClub. Dunn is still plugging away with Bonobos, hoping to reinvent the way brands are built in an online world.

He says he’s now confident that Bonobos will survive. But continuing to build it into a stand-alone ecommerce company is another matter. An even bigger challenge: Maki...

Do you have a million-dollar business idea in your mind and don’t know HOW to proceed? Whether it is worth, investing time, money and effort?

This is the question that haunts many entrepreneurs and stops them from working on their business idea. The reason behind this is lack of insightful data available online to guide one through the steps. That’s where my motivation comes from when writing this article.

Hopefully, by the end, you’ll understand WHAT to do, HOW to do, WHEN to do and WHY to do things if you have a great new business idea.

Stop being a wantrepreneur. Think of a new business idea, do a set of exercises or validations before taking a decision on whether to move forward with the business idea or not and make a business out of...

Every founder knows that company culture is crucial to a startup’s success — as Fred Wilson says, “If you want to be in business forever, you need to build a culture that sustains the business” — but there are seven common mistakes that startups make when creating their culture:

1. You think culture just “happens.”

Running a startup means your burn rate is always in the forefront of your mind, and as a result, everything takes a backseat to getting to MVP. Culture can be fixed later, right? The truth is that “culture” is just another way of saying “how we work here,” and by the time you get to your MVP, it will be deeply entrenched.

FiveStars’s founder Victor Ho never took the time to officially define the culture— he felt it was too “chee...

Creativity and innovation thrive in an early-stage startup environment. Communication is harmonious, decisions are made quickly as a team, and shared understanding trumps systems and processes as everyone shares the workload.

When I launched BounceFire, my first startup, I was juggling many tasks: selling our services, writing code, hiring employees, and drywalling the new office, not to mention cleaning the toilet. We did everything manually. It was only when we hired our first employee that I could start offloading certain tasks.

But as the company grew, it encountered a common problem for startups: How do you keep hold of that easy communication, creativity, and innovation as you scale?

The Challenge of Innovation
for startup businesses...

Whether you’re a freelancer or small business owner, invoicing is essential. After all, if you aren’t getting paid, how can you expect to keep your business afloat or keep up with your bills? However, if you’re new to invoicing, you may feel a bit overwhelmed because there’s a lot more to it than just sending out an email that says “You Owe Me $1,000.”

To help you better understand the invoicing process, here are some useful tips you should implement the next time you send out an invoice.

Invoicing Basics

Before sending out an invoice, you’ll want to make sure you have the following key elements covered:

• Date – When are you sending out the invoice and when do you expect it to be paid? It’s not uncommon for clients to pay an invoice 30, 60,...

It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs. Why? Because KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric. This focus must not be limited to the KPIs themselves, for they are merely measurements of outcomes. We look for founders to have an understanding of what levers can be pulled and what tweaks can be made to improve the business, which will then be reflected in its KPIs. So the focus should not be on the KPIs themselves, but the mea...

If you’re looking to improve your sales process — look no further than the “2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report“. Buyers want things to be easy. So easy, in fact, that 89 percent of survey respondents said that they chose vendors that made a return on investment easier to prove or that could be easily justified with a business case. They also preferred speed over price — with 80 percent of buyers citing deployment and ease of use as “very important.”

Your customers want to understand how to use your product — not sit through a pitch and wonder if it’ll actually fit their needs. Selling is less about explaining why buyers should buy and more about showing how an easy-to-use product or service will help them.

Ditch the dead-end “why” part of the c...

Pitching your product line to a retailer? There are so many areas to cover. Do you know which three facts matter most to the decision-makers?

The greatest challenge product companies face is convincing retail buyers your brand will sell. If you want shelf placement in Target, Walmart, CVS, or ANY retailer for that matter, your retail pitch (or as I call it, the Retail Story) needs to address retailers’ key needs. And their primary need revolves around mitigating their sales risk.

The following are the 3 most effective ways to show retailers how you will mitigate their sales risk as you’re pitching your product to retailers and stores:

#1: Demonstrate Sales Potential

The best way of showing how you will mitigate sales risk is by showing the...

“Make yourself at home.” It’s what we tell our guests when we want them to feel comfortable in our space. We say it as a courtesy. But if we really mean it, we’ll add information. We’ll tell our guests that there’s a pool table in the basement, snacks and refreshments out on the island in the kitchen… To immediately feel at home in new environments, most of us need to find our bearings first, to be shown around the place.

The same holds true for web-based applications, where invitations to make ourselves at home are pretty lackluster across the board. To be fair, a lot of energy is devoted to creating intuitive user experiences, but this isn’t the same as being shown around.

If you truly want your guests to feel at home in your app, you mig...

Question: Name your best tip for training summer interns as seamlessly and quickly as possible.

Plan Ahead

“Have a plan and lay it out clearly before they begin. Copying interns on emails prior to their start date has proven to be helpful. Also, ensure they have someone to shadow so they can hit the ground running.”

— Ashley Mady
Brandberry
@KickAshMady

Make Everything Transparent

“Provide interns with complete transparency on company initiatives, even if it doesn’t relate to their job spec or day to day tasks. I’ve found companies hold back on what they share with interns. But if you provide the same level of transparency you provide employees, interns tend to learn quicker, feel more tied into the organization and empowered to work harder...