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The Funding Slide in our investor pitch deck summarizes our investment opportunity, including our use of funds, investment amount, and what we want to accomplish in our next stage. Potential investors, from angel investors, to venture capitalists, will zero in on this part of the slide deck to determine their initial investment.

Typically this is the final slide of an investor pitch deck, where we transition from pitching investors to making the big ask.

What do Potential Investors want to know?

Our investor deck should cover three critical factors when we get our "ask slide":

"How much capital? What Round of capital?"

Many investors, from venture capitalists to angel investors, align their investments based on the amount of capital a startup co...

Five years ago I dropped out of a PhD program and started my first company. I had no idea what I was doing and made every mistake you could imagine. Needless to say that business didn’t last very long.

Since then I’ve gone on to start three more companies — one venture-backed, two service-based — each with varying levels of success and failure.

From these experiences there’s one lesson I’ve learned that’s remarkably simple, exceedingly powerful and virtually universal: good things happen when you’re helpful.

Clear a path and make others look good

I was recently introduced to Ryan Holiday’s “canvas strategy”. In short, his “canvas strategy” speaks to the notion of identifying mentors and actively finding ways to support them and their missi...

We’re excited that you graduated college. We’ll high five you when you complete your MBA. Oh, you’re a doctor now? That’s wonderful.

Congratulations on all of your college degrees — you’ll be happy to know they mean nothing here.

Now, before you start pelting me with your student loan re-payment coupons — let me explain why we want you to be excited about this fact.

We’re a Meritocracy

What is a meritocracy you might ask? It’s essentially a system where groups of people progress based on merit and ability — rather than privilege, wealth, social class, etc.

In our time we’ve seen very little correlation or causality between the level of education people have achieved and their ability to excel at their jobs. In fact, many of our best pe...

Founders don't get the luxury of sharing openly — at least not without consequences.

Unfortunately, we learn this lesson the hard way, from acting and sharing like we used to do as an employee, only to find out that Founders don't get the same "safe space" we once enjoyed as employees.

Our startups are now a complex web of relationships, responsibilities and again, consequences that we need to understand and respect every time we're about to open our mouths about, well, anything.

It Wasn't Like This Before

When we were in our last job as an employee, we didn't really understand consequences the way we do now. If we got really pissed about something a co-worker did, we could hop on a Slack chat or if we were really clueless about this stuff,...

Marketing for a crowdfunding campaign isn’t exactly the same as traditional marketing.

Let’s say that marketing is cake. Traditional marketing is a standard cake you’d whip up from a box or simple recipe. Crowdfunding marketing campaigns, however, are their own kind of cake. They’re like a souffle. A souffle — when done right — delivers a kind of magical combination of lightness and richness. When done wrong, it just falls into a heap.

Souffles and crowdfunding can yield incredible results. But in both cases, you have to take a more nuanced approach to reach that outcome.

Baking Up Crowdfunding Success

A crowdfunding marketing campaign is different from traditional advertising efforts, and it needs to hit a specific sweet spot. The tone ca...

Intro to the Customer discovery process

Up to this point, we’ve made sure that there is a problem in the market for your business idea to solve through idea validation research and notable experts have verified that you’re on the right path. Now we begin the last test of the business idea validation process — customer discovery.

We’re using customer discovery as a methodical approach to ensuring the product idea you’ve identified aligns with what potential customers actually want at a price they are willing to pay.

Key Takeaway

Use idea validation to confirm that the problem, solution, and revenue model aligns with what potential customers really want.

Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery centers around 3 critical pillars of your business model ...

Your brand and professional reputation is the one thing that will set you apart from your competition. Branding is the only tactic you can employ that is truly unique and that your competitors simply can’t replicate completely.

In branding, you’re dealing with the perception of your audience. To be regarded as an expert is what really matters. This isn’t a form of trickery or positioning yourself as a ‘marketing guru.’ It just requires a change in the way you communicate.

Instead of communicating like a beginner with no proven track record, you should be communicating like an expert with lots of knowledge and experience under your belt.

It’s about being yourself, being passionate about what you’re doing and really believing that you are wor...

The worst advice Founders get consistently comes from their hometown.

I call these the "local yocals" and every hometown has them. They are well-meaning advisors who try to guide a Founder through the startup stages but instead fill their head with irrelevant, outdated, and in many cases straight-up bad advice.

Every single time I talk to a Founder that's been clearly led astray, I ask where they got that advice. And in almost every case, it's from someone that simply isn't relevant to the startup ecosystem. It's their well-meaning uncle who made a boatload of money in commercial real estate, or a local angel investor who has no idea who YCombinator is, or the "startup guru" who had the one exit in town but has never left the state.

From a ...

Wil Schroter: Baremetrics did the unthinkable – it showed the rest of the world what other companies were doing in revenues – publicly. It pulled back the most sacred curtain. Why in the hell would you have ever thought that would be a good idea when so much common business practice does the opposite?

Josh Pigford: Our transparency is rooted in laziness! Back when I first launched Baremetrics I felt strongly about having a live demo instead of some screenshots. I could have generated an infinite amount of fake data, but that’d have taken a lot of time and I don’t think it’d have felt as authentic.

On top of that, my friends at Buffer and Groove and clearly had some success in being transparent, so figured what the heck!

At that point Barem...

Imagine having easy access to the information spread across all of your devices and apps. Really, take a moment to think about how being able to quickly find anything you’ve seen in your digital life might transform your world.

Consider the hours, the days you’ve lost… Various studies show that workers spend 20% of their time searching for information and gathering data.

We are remarkably bad at retrieving information that we’ve already seen. So bad, it brings to mind the George Carlin bit on little moments that we all share: Did you ever look at your watch and then you don’t know what time it is? So you look again, and you still don’t know the time. And you look a third time, and somebody says, “What time is it?” and you say, “I don’t know...