Forums Search

When you’re starting a new company, customer service is everything. Startups make or break based on their earliest customers and if you can’t get those early adopters to stick around as you’re muddling through the inevitable mistakes that happen in an early-stage startup, you’re going to end up in the huge pile of startups that fail. Additionally, traction is one of the most important factors that VCs examine when they’re deciding whether or not to give a company money. Bad customer support equals lost customers, which means crappy traction.

But good customer support? That can make all the difference.

“At HappyFox, we once won a deal with a Fortune 50 company based purely on the quick response time they received,” HappyFox founder Shalin Ja...

Getting ready to audit your site’s SEO? Congratulations! You’re about to embark towards improving your overall SEO footprint while also finding every single potential wart that your website may have.

The bad news is every site will have things wrong with it – yours included. The good news is that each new issue that you find represents an opportunity to improve. As an SEO, the point of auditing your site is to find areas to squeeze more juice out of.

In my previous article entitled, SEO for Beginners, I outlined how there are both things occurring on page, as well as off page, that can impact your site’s SEO performance. Foundational to a good SEO strategy to the point of almost being a prerequisite is technical and content optimization.

B...

What if I told you the perfect idea is a myth? We all know what the myth looks like – it’s this moment of inspiration where it’s so obvious that the world will love your idea for the Double Decker Couch. You rush downstairs in your PJs and begin a montage scene going from blueprint to big sale to furniture tycoon by the time the theme song is over.

Perfect Ideas aren’t Perfect (at all)

Perfect ideas don’t exist because—until you put them into the real world—they’re just concepts. In the real world your idea will get beat up a thousand times until it barely resembles whatever is in your head right now.

We get caught up in the notion that if the idea in our head doesn’t check all the right boxes, then there must be a good reason to hold back...

I’ve launched 4 startups so far in my career. And at every other company that I worked for, I treated the role as if it was my own startup. In doing that I found that there are a ton of things that need to be done, but we rarely think about the things that need to NOT be done.

Consider this my gift to you. Most startup advice you read includes more things to add to your to-do list. This is your authorization to reduce and cut back.

1. Stop accepting all the meeting invites

Have you seriously looked at your calendar recently? Unless you’re one of the rare few who already abide by Jason’s calendar practice, then it most likely looks like a train wreck.

Maybe your future genetic clone can attend the double-booked meetings?
In some cases you ...

If you want to compete in the world of high growth startups, you better know how to play the marketing game. Marketing has become a big stakes game where companies are betting fortunes on the success of their products. Nowadays, if you can’t play the big marketing game you may not even get the attention of the customers you need to grow your business.

So how do you compete if you don’t have the cash to run with the big dogs? The answer lies in growing your marketing budget by doubling up on your marketing investments quickly. Chances are the capital you need to compete in this game is right under your nose, you just need to know where to look for it.

Make marketing an investment

The first step to growing your marketing budget is thinking ab...

If you had the idea for Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg, you could have been worth $40 billion like good ol' Mark, right?.

Except, you couldn't. Because the idea alone isn't worth jack.

Not so sure? Ask Jonathan Abrams the incredibly talented Founder who created Friendster in 2002, around the time good ol' Zuck was graduating high school. Friendster was absolutely Facebook before Facebook, as was Hi5 and MySpace.

But unless you're a band from the mid-2000s, you're probably not maintaining a profile anywhere but "the Facebook."

Oh, and technically the idea wasn't Mark's either, but that's a whole other movie.

Why isn't an idea worth mullah?

Think of the idea like a seed.

The seed alone has the potential to be something great, but by itse...

Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy Duarte is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.

The below video is the fifth part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:

As an entrepreneur and founder of a startup, you already know you can do a lot of things well. You’re the head under many hats; the go-to guy or gal for a plethora of issues.

Nancy agrees with you. Entrepreneurial-minded people see n...

Building a new product is one of the most exciting ventures for entrepreneurs. You know you’ve got a great idea, and you’re certain consumers will agree. So you put everything into its development — even though as many as 95 percent of new products fail. That means 19 out of 20 products won’t last the year.

When a startup is blinded by a big idea, it closes its eyes to the bigger picture.

The reasons vary, but the biggest culprit appears to be need. About 42 percent of startup founders say their companies failed because consumers didn’t want what they were selling.

When a startup is blinded by a big idea, it closes its eyes to the bigger picture. Companies waste time getting their product to market by adding features a consumer won’t need. ...