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Startups create financial projections in the form of a "Pro Forma Income Statement" — which simply means a financial forecast. Early-stage startups are still building their financial models with assumptions, forecasting everything from sales revenue to marketing costs to a basic cash flow projection.

We're going to explain exactly how to build financial projections for your startup even if you have no idea where to start!

Financial Projections are just Assumptions

Most businesses that have been around a while have historical financial statements that detail how operating expenses, direct costs, fixed costs, and their sales forecast have worked all along — startups have none of this.

Therefore instead of working from real-world data to build our...

At Startups.com, we built an 8-figure business by saying "no" — a lot.

We knew going in that if we’re going to have 100% control of our destiny now and in the future, that would only work if we could constantly say "no" in a disciplined manner.

But you know what? Saying "no" sucks. Just like saying "no" to delicious glazed donuts sucks. We know that we want them, but we also know the cost of saying "yes"! Now I'm hungry for a glazed donut. See what I mean? We knew that controlling our destiny would mean an insane amount of discipline, across the entire organization. In order to prepare ourselves for this discipline, like any good regimen, there were a few things that we'd have to stay incredibly focused on.

We had to be OK with things takin...

I had a classmate Brian in grade school that would drive teachers crazy by asking them, “Why do we have to learn this?” He wasn’t a troublemaker at all, and I think this is what unnerved the teachers most. Dealing with hell raisers was an expected part of the job, but an ordinary kid questioning how things run? Well, that could bring the whole show crashing down…

With social media, we’ve all turned into Brian, asking aloud, “Why are you showing me this?” But unlike Brian, we have the power to turn away. Stories we don’t care about? Not gonna read ‘em. Sales pitches for goods we’ve never shown any interest in whatsoever? See ya.

So, how do you reach an audience of Brians that can tune out whatever they damn well please?

Quuu is a service tha...

The publishing industry is both volatile and in many ways stuck in tradition, so if you’re trying to get a mention or more for your product or your startup, you need to understand the constraints and go through the right doors.

I’ve led Marketing and Content Analytics at The Huffington Post, VentureBeat, and Federated Media, and have seen the underbelly of the editorial business. And as a startup mentor and advisor, I’ve also seen many promising young companies struggle to break into the publishing world and go about it all wrong. If you’re trying to get media attention for your product or startup, read these tips first.

There are 3 ways to get published:

Work with a PR agency who knows the right people. Tread carefully on this path. PR ag...

A few years back I was driving through a windy street of Bel-Air with my wife, looking at houses. If you ever want to feel ridiculously poor, I encourage you to do the same.

During our home tour we drove up beside a house under construction that was so big, we thought it was a hotel. We just kept driving around the perimeter of the house, and it just kept going! Our realtor told us it was the future home of Elon Musk.

A younger version of me would have said "Someday I'm going to have that house!" and believed wholeheartedly that there were some future series of events that would lead to that outcome. It's the blessing and curse of being a Founder I think.

I turned to my wife and said "I can't have that — and that's OK." Let me explain why t...

Founders need to be as militant about recharging as they are about working.

Yet, nothing in front of us suggests slowing down or taking a break to do it — at all. We have a mountain of work, no one to help us, and we're burning through what's left of our cash and credit. The last thing any of that suggests is "Let's plan a sweet vacation!"

What we're missing in this mess is the fact that it's not about whether or not we want to take a break — it's that we have to. If we're going to run the marathon that is the startup journey, we can't just go full sprint 24x7 and pretend it'll all work out. Instead, we have to become highly regimented in our plan to recharge all the time, and treat that recharge as seriously as we treat our startup.

Move t...

The most impossible task for a Startup Founder is to "invent a big idea."

It's not because we lack creativity, it's because we wind up focusing our energy on the wrong thing. Big ideas, by themselves, are nearly impossible to corral in our minds because they are inherently either "not big enough" or "too big to tackle."

We tend to go about this all backward. We assume that once an idea is incredible enough, it will guide all of our actions thereafter. But that is like putting a map down on a table and saying "We want to go west!" without making this is the most reasonable path.

"What Do I Want This Idea To Achieve?"

Any idea can become a "big idea" if you work at it hard enough. What we should be more focused on is a step beyond that — wha...

How much money do we need to be rich?

It's an important question as Founders because our financial goals and appetite for risk are inextricably tied to the decisions we make in building our startups.

The problem with determining what "rich" is to us is that there's rarely a hard limit on how big that number can be. In some cases, we may even feel ashamed to state it out loud, for fear that we're either too high ("you jerk!") or too low ("slacker!").

The thing is — it doesn't matter. In most cases, we're really not talking about "being rich" as a goal, what we're really talking about is being "safe". We want to know that our bills will get paid, our loved ones will get taken care of, and if shit hits the fan (because eventually, it always do...

What is Quiet Quitting and Why is it Important?

While it isn’t a new phenomenon, many of us might be familiar with the behavior but not have a term connected to it, that is, until now. You may have heard the term "quiet quitting" recently as the latest workplace trend, many thanks to influencers on TikTok, but it has been around long before social media ever existed. Generally, there are multiple definitions floating around as to what quiet quitting is, and what it means for the workplace.

Upon first hearing the term, many might mistake quiet quitting as slacking off at work, but that is not entirely true. Some people define it as not taking on more work and setting boundaries with employers to avoid burnout, while others say it’s simply not...

Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

• Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch

• Part 2 - Market Size

• Part 3 - Revenue Model

• Part 4 - Operating Model

• Part 5 - Customer Definition

• Part 6 - Customer Acquisition

• Part 7 - Funding

• Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 9 - Traction

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let's dive in!

Our investor pitch deck is just one of a handful of assets we need to have prepared for potential investors. A compelling startup pitch deck is just part of the package — if we're going to raise money and impress investors we'll need to prepare everything from our elevator pitch to our financial projections to a comprehensive...