Forums Search

So, you’ve decided that you want to hire a company such as Chop Dawg to help build your future iPhone or Android application. That is exciting! With that said, now comes the vetting process that is so critical to the success of your app.

We’ve covered before extensively on our library about what you need to do to prepare for your first meeting with an agency. Some of the essentials are writing out your app requirements, conducting at least preliminary market research, determining your minimum and maximum budgets that you’re willing to invest, and the type of timeframe you’re willing to work around to bring your idea to life, etc.

We typically ask these types of questions to you, but what are the questions that you should prepare to ask the...

After almost two decades of decline, music industry revenues are finally starting to recover again and a lot of the credit goes to one guy: Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify. Ironically, Spotify was backed by the guy who helped enable all that piracy to begin with: Napster’s Sean Parker.

It was no small thing for the Recording Industry to learn to love Spotify… or any Internet music company for that matter. It was also no small thing for Ek to start Spotify with the stance of not wanting to “Disrupt” music labels—he wanted to help them.

It took Founder Daniel Ek two years to get his first deals in Sweden, and another two years to launch in the US. He and his partner invested largely their own money until they showed traction, and likely would h...

While we may not know all there is to know about our business yet, there’s still going to be some good old-fashioned accounting to do. So let’s break out those green visors and add machines — it’s time to learn WTF accounting is!

At its core, in order to be an accountant we need to be able to collect all the sources of income and expenses and translate those into a spreadsheet. When the numbers are small, this is so easy to do we’ll wonder why people get paid to do it. When they get large, we’ll wonder why anyone is willing to do this for any amount of money ever!

Can any Founder do Accounting for Startups?

Yes! Because accounting for startups in the early days just isn't that complicated yet. Even if we've never seen any financial statements ...

Need some PR for your project? When you’re launching a new business or product, or simply need a bit of a boost, PR can be helpful. Assuming you’ve done the due diligence (read the publication first, make sure you’re a good fit, look up the editor etc etc), actually writing the pitch is the hardest part.

Here’s a template style list of questions to answer (actually write these down!)

1. What do I want?

I want to increase sales.

2. What do I want from the publication?

I want one online article, one Instagram shout out, published in print.

3. What does the publication want?

Stories of business owners, content to fill pages.

4. What can I give the publication?

A giveaway, thought leadership, something else.

5. What is the value of my offering...

As mentioned briefly above, there are multiple valuation methods to value a startup, and one not mentioned (but worth noting since this is arguably the most common startup valuation approach) is the Venture Capital Method that was developed in 1987 by Bill Sahlman.

If working with a venture capital firm, you should know how they calculate valuations. Venture capital firms use this valuation method to establish an understanding of the value of a startup using this basic framework. In addition to the venture capital method, a VC Term Sheet is used to define the specific conditions of venture capital investments between an early-stage startup company and the venture firm itself.

No marketing budget to speak of. At best, basic video, photography and editing skills. This doesn’t sound like a winning recipe for launching a successful ad campaign. Not by a long shot. But, if you fit the profile, you’re probably not at so great of a disadvantage as you might think.

Thanks to StoriesAds.

StoriesAds is a tool that lets you make Instagram Stories ads in just a couple of minutes. It’s currently free to use, and pretty much anyone capable of uploading a video has sufficient design chops for success.

Created by online video maker Shakr in collaboration with the inbound marketing and sales platform HubSpot, StoriesAds supplies templates that make building a stories ad extremely easy. You select a template, then customize visu...

A lot of people confuse crowdfunding with crowdsourcing. While they are similar in that they both allow people to primarily leverage mass-community collaboration, they relate to two different things entirely.

So, what’s the key difference?

The short answer:

Crowdfunding is the process of sourcing money or funds from a group or groups of people.

Crowdsourcing is the process of sourcing information or skills or end products from a group or groups of people.

The long answer:

What is crowdfunding?

In a crowdfunding campaign, a person, business, or organization raises a relatively small amount of money from a large group of people. Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and indiv...

Truly, it has been a busy and productive year! Here at Startups.co, we will be taking it easy, spending time with our families and drinking way too much ‘nog until the New Year.

While we are on this short hiatus — lets take a stroll down memory lane and review the top 17 articles that we published in 2017.

Read them all at once, or portion them out like a kid trying to make Christmas candy last until Easter. Either way — we won’t judge. Enjoy!

1. How to Write a Business Plan For Investors (That They Will Love)

A good business plan should do more than explain what your company does, how you earn money and what you want to do. It should also tell a persuasive story and illustrate the many ways that your company and product are Grade-A Awesom...

Decoupling startup stress from our "regular life" is one of the biggest challenges we deal with as Founders. Running a startup isn't like working at a job. The startup is a part of who we are, so our stress feels like it's imprinted into our very DNA.

Yet, at the same time, if we can't decouple our startup stress and our home lives, we risk destroying both. What we need is an actual strategy for freeing up our minds so that we can actually enjoy both sides of our lives.

Isolate and Attack the Problem

As Founders, we are awesome at attacking problems all day long at our startups. So why is it that we never isolate the problem of our "take-home stress" and attack it with the same intensity?

The first step is to isolate the problem as an actua...

Have you ever noticed how musicians who have a breakout album almost always follow up with a shitty second album?

Founders are the same way. Typically our first startup success, which took our entire lives to evolve, is quickly followed up by a terrible second startup idea. It's not because we're "less of a Founder" than we were the first time, any more than that band knows less about music than they did on our first album. It's because rushing a creative process is the fastest way to ensure the outcome totally sucks.

Good Ideas Take Time

What we don't realize is that good ideas take time. When we were working on our first idea, we had the benefit of many years of consideration before we shaped that idea. We also had the benefit of trashin...