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If you’ve arrived at a crossroads in your life when you’ve realized that making another buck won’t make you any happier or more fulfilled, you’re not alone. The question is, what can you do about it?

It took being in a morphine-infused, bedridden state in a hospital at age 39 for me to reconsider what business meant to me.

Staring my own mortality in the face, I asked myself the question: “If I died today, did I make difference?” The answer was a resounding no. There was so much more I could be doing. I knew that success is not about what you “get” in life, but about what you give. From that moment I vowed to become a “go-giver” instead of a “go-getter” and to instill a new conscious capitalist mindset into how I approached doing business.

In this age of social media, entrepreneurship is at an all-time high. The time for creating a start-up company has never been more optimal, thanks to recent interest in technology and innovation. Profit valuations of successful start-ups have also skyrocketed in response to a rise in venture capital investors. Creating a start-up also celebrates low-cost entry, making it easier than ever to jump in and play a hand at the game of business. As many as 40 start-ups in 2013 were valued at $1 billion or more, according to a NY Times article.

But as effortless as it is to create a start-up business, the real challenge lies in evolving it. Only 1 out of every 10 start-up companies make it to the 5th year. What are the barriers that prevent the suc...

Crowdfunding at a glance

Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and individual investors.

This approach taps into the collective efforts of a large pool of individuals — primarily online via social media and crowdfunding platforms — and leverages their networks for greater reach and exposure.

How is crowdfunding different from other types of finance?

Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the mainstream approach to business finance. Traditionally, if a person want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, they would need to pack up their business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop their idea around to a limited pool or wealthy indiv...

Today’s Favorite Find: GoDaddy Logo Design Service

Elevator Pitch

GoDaddy’s new Logo Design Service is “professional web services offering that enables GoDaddy customers to refine their online image with a logo professionally designed and customized to their requirements.”

Why We Love It

I’ve spent a good portion of the past four years on the internet. Scratch that — I’ve probably spent the majority of the past four years on the internet. As a professional blogger and a startup-focused professional blogger, specifically, I’ve looked at way more than my fair share of company logos over the years. There have been some good, some bad, and some terrible (looking at you with that new nonsense, Uber). And I’m here to tell you that your logo de...

From Mark Twain to Mark Zuckerberg, some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century were renowned for their lack of organization. Indeed, Einstein famously said that “a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,” permanently cementing, for better or worse, the association of brilliance and disorganization in the popular imagination.

This dynamic seems to have carried over to the theater arts as well. Aspiring writers, performers, and producers won’t find a single, clear avenue for proceeding from proof of concept to execution. Unlike other industries (such as publishing), the theater arts don’t have an effective progression for stories to grow from an idea in a writer’s mind into a fully-fledged musical ready for the public.

The sol...

How Hard is it to Get a Business Loan?

Unfortunately, business loans can be difficult for startups to procure.

That’s because while some funding sources in the startup ecosystem — like VCs and angel investors — are looking to take big risks, traditional financial institutions like banks generally aren’t.

You’re going to need to show that you have perfect personal (and probably business) credit and they might even require that you’re profitable or on track to become profitable. Generally, banks prefer businesses that have a proven track record when they’re handing out loans.

But that doesn’t mean business loans are impossible for startup founders! It’s just something to keep in mind when you’re considering a bank loan as a funding source.

How much should a startup Founder pay themselves?

Should we show our commitment and work for nothing? Or should we try to at least match how much we made at our last jobs? How do we have a salary discussion with ourselves? What about our co-founders or investors?

The problem with negotiating a startup salary, even if it's with ourselves, is that we often compare this discussion to how we've thought about salaries in the past. We use the false comparison of a traditional company salary, or we go to the other extreme and assume we have to work for nothing but high fives.

Neither is true.

Startup Founders and their teams simply need to calibrate compensation to how startups themselves grow: dynamically and based on milestones.

Startups Don...

Access is power, and customers have never had more access than they do today. The Internet brings products and services worldwide right to a customer’s fingertips — and simultaneously brings the customer’s experience to the world. With an abundance of choice, dissatisfied (or bored) customers can brand-hop with ease. And with a tweet or a Facebook Live post, customers can make or break a company’s carefully crafted image.

But knowledge is also power, and startups can take advantage of it. If you truly know your customer and understand what it takes to transform new customers into loyal fans, you can restore the balance of power, ensuring revenue is headed in the right direction.

Customer Experience Drives Revenue Growth

A 2016 study by For...

In the startup world, we like to think of customer experience as this mystical, ineffable thing: a magical alchemy that happens at the intersection of our product and our audience.

And the thing is – it is. When the right product finds the right audience with the right problem at the right time, the result really is magical.

Some people will try to tell you can’t systematize magic. But those people have never been to Hogwarts. Or Startups.co.

To quote the old business idiom, “People make processes. Processes make a business.” Putting a process around your customer journey doesn’t destroy the magic of customer experience – it makes it better. When you systematize your customer experience, you turn customer delight into a process you can rep...

There’s an old adage that says “Entrepreneurs do what other people won’t in order to do what other people can’t.”

The suggestion there is spot on – that the entrepreneurs who get to live the life people dream about did so because they were willing to make the sacrifices it took to make that life happen.

So the question really is: can you afford not to be an entrepreneur?

If the answer is “yes,” your life will probably be just fine doing whatever it is that you enjoy doing. But if you really want a taste for what it means to control your own world and reap the benefits of taking risks, starting off on your own is really the only option.

A Paycheck versus a Payout

Most people equate starting and growing a business to the financial rewards of ...