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Founders have to learn so many new skills when they're launching a startup, and writing a business plan is a big one. When you're writing your business plan for the first time, things can get… intimidating.

What do you include? What kind of wording should you use? What do you make sure not to include? Is a mid size business plan different than an enterprise plan or a scalable startup? Do I need to include financials like cash flow statements? What do investors want to see?

It's enough to make even a stalwart startup founder and management team throw in the towel before they've even begun.

Lucky for you — we've created a complete guide to writing your business plan. Check it out if you haven't already. (And if a link from there brought you here...

When we begin working with a brand new client, they’re usually expecting for us to focus on the essentials.

Building their applications, designing the best user experience possible, focusing on their branding, messaging, etc.

That isn’t to say we don’t do this; we do this better than most, but we also focus on one other key attribute that often shocks our customers, our focus on their customer service.

Why do we do this?

Why is this important?

It’s simple.

We can build the best web apps, mobile apps, wearable apps, software and brands on the planet for our clients; but if they don’t have their customer service on-point, none of that matters.

They’ll lose users before they are even able to win them over, and they’ll destroy their brand.

Ima...

Fail fast. Fail forward. Those are just two of the mantras you’ll see hanging in startup offices and incubators across the globe. In the startup world, a failure is considered a learning opportunity, at the least; a feather in the cap of the Founder, at best. We fetishize failure. We normalize it.

But as much as we talk a good game about failure, the reality is that failing sucks. Just as no one goes into their wedding day planning for divorce, no one starts a company thinking, “Yeah, this one will just be my starter. I’ll get it right next time.” No wants to fail, and yet the majority of startups do fail.

According to an examination of startup businesses (by which they mean new companies in general) in the United States conducted by Stati...

You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right? Just in case you’ve been living under a rock — here is a quick recap:

In 1943, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow proposed that humans have a five “levels” of needs, usually drawn in the shape of a pyramid.

The needs at the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs that are necessary for survival: food, water, warmth, rest.

The next level up is “safety,” followed by “belongingness and love,” then “esteem,” and, at the very top of the pyramid, “self-actualization.” The basic idea is that humans need to meet those basic needs first, before they can be concerned about the needs further up the pyramid.

Makes sense, right? You can’t really think about transcendence when your stom...

The end of the calendar year is an extremely busy time for most entrepreneurs and business leaders. From the months of October-December, most of us are busy converting new customers, fulfilling last-minute orders, launching special holiday campaigns and offers, and trying to drive as much business as we can before the new year.

In addition, a lot of us spend the last few months of the year evaluating successes and failures, adjusting budgets, and deciding how teams will grow or shrink in the year ahead.

It’s one of the most taxing times of the year for anyone managing a business.

It’s also the time of year when it’s easiest to neglect friendships, personal hobbies, and family life.

When business is booming and you’re quickly approaching...

Being a Founder doesn't imply one is a good manager. It just means we were around when the company was formed!

Sometimes Founders do grow into great managers — and sometimes they were great managers already. But the real question is: "Do Founders need to be good managers?"

Ideally, yes. But it's not a requirement.

We can fake it for a minute

In the formative years, when we only have a small team, we can usually get by without being great managers.

That's because the team is still small, and mostly operates in a flat "team" structure without a lot of management to be had. That's also why Founders often don't realize they are shitty managers until later on because they ran for so long in an unmanaged structure.

Eventually, though, it catch...

Every Founder feels like their startup must be the one company that is a total shit show compared to how those other startups must be running.

We believe that if we can just get past this next set of challenges, things will finally be smooth sailing.

What we don't realize, especially if we've never done this before, is that the problems never really go away. It's just a never-ending "whack-a-mole" game with different problems.

Problems Don't Go Away — They Just Change Names

When we're small and scrappy, our problems are all about survival. How are we going to meet payroll? How are we going to land that one early investor?

They feel weighty and life-threatening — and to be fair, they are. But those formative years are stressful in the wa...

So you’ve made the leap into the unknown and committed to finally starting your own business. Now what? The to-do list you have created looks huge and overwhelming, where do you start?

Business to-do lists will vary hugely from business to business, but there are a few questions you can ask yourself to decide which are the tasks you should be working on:

1. What will have the largest impact on my business?

Are there any tasks that have a leverage or scaling effect i.e. a little effort (or even a lot of effort) creates a much greater return on the time invested? For example; you may need to update your financial ledger with invoices paid and also come up with a new referral scheme, do the one first that has the biggest multiplier effect (...

Lack of diversity has long been the elephant in the room for the tech industry and everybody is painfully aware the industry is too pale, too male, and very young. Yet few companies are actually tackling the issue head on.

Companies need to know diversity goes beyond the moral issue of equality. If a CEO was told software could make their enterprise 45% more likely to grow share and 70% more likely to capture new markets and boost innovation, throwing time and money at it would be a no-brainer. Yet despite the fact that hard data shows that diverse teams — in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, background — are more effective, innovative, and productive, the majority of companies continue to ignore it.

Many leaders see the value in making tea...

There’s a limited number of colours and shapes in this world, so your logo isn’t your whole brand. Your colour could remind a potential customer of a completely unrelated business (I recently thought of a well known auto care shop when looking at the website of a debt refinancer) and you need to rely on more than just that one aspect of your company to raise brand awareness.

If you have a marketing campaign, do you use just one channel? Only one ad image? Of course not, any campaign is more effective with multiple channels. It’s the exact same principle for “startup branding”.

Have you ever answered the phone without looking, heard “hey it’s me” and known exactly who it was? This is essentially what you want for your company. You want your...