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You need a social media team that can absolutely nail it. That doesn’t happen by just putting warm bodies in front of computers. You need a team of innovators, mold-breakers, thinkers, organizers, brainstormers, collaborators, and strategists who are wicked smart, insanely skilled, and ready to push your business to an extreme level on social media.

In other words, you need a social media dream team.

How do you wrap your mind around the social media scene?

Social media has seemed to spiral out of control. It’s bigger than we ever thought it would become. It grows and changes on a daily basis. We’re all done talking about its “meteoric rise.” That’s cliché. We already know that more than a quarter of the world’s population uses social media,...

The following post is an excerpt is from Chapter 2 of the book Startup Seed Funding for the Rest of Us: How to Raise $1 Million for Your Startup – Even Outside of Silicon Valley, by Mike Belsito. This chapter specifically talks about the importance of finding traction for your startup, even at the earliest stages of building a product and raising seed capital. Further, this chapter discusses specifics on what entrepreneurs can do to build up that traction at these early stages.

CHAPTER TWO
The Only Chapter You May Need to Read

Traction: It’s what investors everywhere are looking for in order to determine whether to anoint your startup “the next big thing” and inject the cold, hard cash needed to accelerate your business. If you can’t fin...

Brian Chesky’s dad wasn’t thrilled he had decided to go to art school. Chesky promised him he would not move back home to live in their basement, and that when he was done, he’d get a real job with health care benefits.

And he did. But at age 22 he was overcome by a “weird feeling of mortality.” A sense of “this is my life”: Commuting in LA traffic alone to a job in a design company. It was a let down after he’d started to believe the high-minded rhetoric from Rhode Island School of Design that designers could “design the world around them.”

He quit that job, rolled up a foam bed into his crappy Honda Civic and moved in with his old design pal Joe Gebbia in San Francisco. In a bid to pay rent, they opened up their home to attendees of a des...

Like any other business situation, your first impression with a potential investor goes a long way. There are a few ways to get it right and endless amount of ways to get very wrong!

You won’t get a ton of introductions so make the ones that you do get count.

In order to understand why your pitch will resonate with investors, you need to understand a little bit about the person you’re contacting.

Understanding the Investor

Let’s assume you’re an investor. You’ve hung your shingle out to the world that reads “I write checks to people with great ideas.” That’s a sign for every person who has ever sought capital to come seek you out and pitch you.

Soon you’re getting an endless stream of ideas pitched to you—most of them horrible—that you have...

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...

Looking for the next billion dollar idea? Good luck. Many unicorns pivot away from their initial idea and novice entrepreneurs often fail to understand this and instead attempt invent the next “you name it” idea from the get-go.

Experienced entrepreneurs know the better way. All they need to do is to look inside their inner self and talk to other people to learn what remains broken in the world around. Then — fix that, in the best possible way.

Well, so easy to read, but the devil is in the details. That’s why I’d like to share the set of techniques how to come up with better ideas for a startup.

Look Inside Yourself

Great ideas are born when you feel a particular need on your own. However, you may not notice those signals in the daily rou...

Since 2004, our companies have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs raising capital for their businesses. Over time, this has provided us an incredible vantage point from which to observe how the most successful entrepreneurs prepare for approaching investors. We have also seen firsthand that there are many things most entrepreneurs don’t know about investors, but should. We’ve compiled a list of the 10 things every entrepreneur should know about investors to help prepare them for the process.

#1: There Are a Lot of Investors Out There

According to the Center for Venture Research, there are 8.7 million people who qualify as accredited investors in the United States. However, only a small portion of those people actively invest in deals (a...

Logos. They’re little things that can make a big difference to your company. In this age of iPhone tiles and fractured attention, a great logo can help make your company — while a terrible one can break it.

However, too many founders try to design their own startup logo. I’ve seen the results — and they’re rarely pretty.

While designing your own startup logo might seem like a good way for a bootstrapping startup founder to save some money, it’s one of those things (like waxing and home electric work) that you should probably leave to the pros.

I spoke with two such professionals — Zaheer Dodhia, the CEO of DesignMantic and branding expert and logo designer Carolina Correa — about the common mistakes that companies make when it comes to star...

There is a never-ending supply of questions when starting a business. Who is your target consumer? How does your product improve lives? What is the best way to showcase your value to buyers? While the questions are many, your core values should never be floating around with these unknowns.

After all, your mission or philosophy is the reason you took the financial and emotional risks of putting yourself and your new venture out there. And, no matter how difficult things get, your core values are akin to the North Star, guiding you in running and growing your business.

Retaining these core values is easier said than done, though. Temptation to let moral priorities slide can come up when you’re under pressure — either from investors or a deple...

Business theory can be tricky to understand. Leave it to the power of one cow to help you grasp the workings of these popular business models.

The Direct Sales Model

A direct sales business operates through a network of salespeople. Typically there is no fixed retail location.

Examples: Avon, Mary Kay, Traveling Vineyard

The Freemium Model

A business under a freemium model gives away a service at no cost before offering advanced services as add-ons.

Examples: Dropbox, Hootsuite, MailChimp

The Subscription Model

The objective of a subscription business model is to retain customers under a long-term contract and secure recurring revenue.

Examples: Netflix, eHarmony

The Franchise Model

Under a franchise business model, business owners purc...