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When you meet someone, you know whether there’s a connection. Shared experiences, interests, and values can quickly bond total strangers.

Brands aren’t people, of course, but branding is about humanizing a brand in a way that helps consumers connect with it.

Today, brand authenticity and trust top shoppers’ priority lists. Sixty-four percent say shared values influence their authentic brand relationships, and 63 percent prefer to buy from brands they perceive as honest.

Just look at Warby Parker. “We believe everyone has the right to see,” its slogan proclaims. By selling designer frames with a socially conscious and a frictionless customer experience, the scrappy eye wear brand found friends in an overpriced, impersonal market.

Seemingly o...

Being a Founder is a job that anyone can get and no one is qualified for.

My 9-year-old daughter became a Founder last year within 60 minutes of forming her own company online (she didn't even need my help). I'd argue she's about as qualified as most of the Founders I meet at Startups.com, and that's not a knock. It's to say that none of us are "qualified" to be a Founder, not because we're not smart enough, or capable enough, or experienced enough — it's because fundamentally it's impossible to be qualified for this job.

We Can't Be An Expert At Everything

The difference between a Founder leading a startup and a CEO leading an established business is that the Founder has to be there from the start when no one else is there. That means the...

Logos. They’re little things that can make a big difference to your company. In this age of iPhone tiles and fractured attention, a great logo can help make your company — while a terrible one can break it.

However, too many founders try to design their own startup logo. I’ve seen the results — and they’re rarely pretty.

While designing your own startup logo might seem like a good way for a bootstrapping startup founder to save some money, it’s one of those things (like waxing and home electric work) that you should probably leave to the pros.

I spoke with two such professionals — Zaheer Dodhia, the CEO of DesignMantic and branding expert and logo designer Carolina Correa — about the common mistakes that companies make when it comes to star...

Startups.com marketing technology stack

What is a Martech Stack?

First up, what even is Martech? This is an abbreviation of “marketing technology.” It’s the tools and software you use in your day-to-day sales and marketing.

The reference to the “stack” has been used by developers for years, in reference to the technology and codebases they use within the products they build. Martech Stack references the marketing technologies and tools you use within your marketing infrastructure set-up.

By stacking these tools together and integrating them you create a consistent, automated flow of data between your tools.

The benefits of setting up a Martech Stack

The likelihood is that you already have some form of Martech Stack in place, even without...

What if this very moment is our last - and best - shot at success?

It's kind of hard to think about, actually. We tend to think about our careers as a whole in a progressive way, where we start at the bottom and climb our way to the top. But our startups are more like a job where we can be the mailroom clerk one year, the CEO the next year, and the doorman the next year.

It puts us in a tough spot because we're constantly wondering whether this is our moment. For those of us that haven't been around long enough, it's worse, because we may not realize yet that those peaks and valleys even exist — all we've seen is the come up.

Striking Lightning

Most startup Founders get one glimpse of "striking lightning" when all of the pieces of momentum ...

Don’t miss out! Check out the previous edition here:

–Getting Your Idea Going: There is no perfect idea

You should have started your business yesterday. You’re reading this because you didn’t. It’s frustrating, I know. You find yourself waiting for that perfect storm of events to come together to make it obvious that it’s time to get going.

Instead, you come up with a perfect storm of excuses.

Founders basically use three basic excuses to avoid starting–and they all “feel” valid at the time! But, what’s (usually) missing is someone willing to challenge them.

Today let’s put some excuses down on paper and figure out how we can get past them.

“But, I’m waiting for a novel idea.”

Your idea doesn’t need to be entirely novel—But, it does need ...

Founders are rarely prepared for how to handle a legit crisis, like when the whole world turns upside down overnight.

I lived through 9/11 with 700 employees, raised multiple funding rounds in the middle of the 2007 Financial Crisis, and just for "funsies" oversaw the overnight shutdown of a startup with 450 people.

So yeah, I have some experience here.

What I've learned is when crisis hits, a solid approach to communication is one of the single most effective tools we can employ.

Cut the Bullshit

In times of crisis, no one wants to hear the sugar-coated version of where things stand.

"Hey Team, I know half of you have turned into flesh-eating Zombies, but the good news is there's way more La Croix for those of you who have survived!"

No...

There are a ton of jobs we can hire for — a "Founder" isn't one of them.

Nearly all of us, at some point, dream of replacing ourselves with someone else, ideally someone that's a big level up, so that we can take the pressure off of us and enjoy the good life. But over time most of us arrive at the same conclusion — back-filling the role of "Founder" is nearly impossible.

Why is it so hard? Clearly, there are more people out there substantially more qualified than we are to run our companies. Yet, time and time again, Founders try to recruit the "perfect replacement" only to find themselves right back in the leadership chair before they know it.

The answer lies in the fact that while we can hire capabilities beyond our own, there are a few ...

Starting a startup isn’t just about opening your doors or launching your website. Long before that happens, it’s about planning to launch.

There’s a real art form in the planning, and those who have launched a lot of startups — as we have — approach launching a new idea very differently from someone who’s just taking on their first startup.

Simply put — we emphasize spending as little time as possible on chasing ideas that may not work. We’re nuts about efficiency.

We know that time is both our friend and our greatest enemy. And we do everything we can to protect our time so it’s spent in the most efficient way possible.

So what does that actually look like? Here are 10 steps to launching a startup, from someone who’s been there (a few time...

The term Impact Investing was coined in 2007 to refer to “investments made with the intention of generating both financial return and social and/or environmental impact”. Less than a decade later, impact investing now boasts $77B in assets, with $15B invested in 2015 alone — a 30% increase from the previous year — and is expected to grow by a factor of ten over the next ten years. For comparison, $141B was invested in venture capital worldwide in 2015, but experienced a decline of 10% in 2016 in total deal funding.

With such growing interest in this approach to investing from a great variety of stakeholders, impact investing inevitably means different things to different people ranging from investments in luxury car manufacturer Tesla, to ...