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Startup Founders are not entitled to success, yet we sure act like it.

When we're sitting in a room full of Founders or pouring through social media, we're inclined to think everyone is "killing it" but us. We hear of these meteoric rises, huge funding rounds, and big exits and invariably wonder when all that goodness will happen to us.

What we form is an "entitlement to success." We believe that because we see so much of it happening elsewhere, by virtue of that, it's only a matter of time until it happens to us.

What we miss when creating that entitlement is just how flawed the foundation of that premise is and what a house of cards we create with our own expectations.

"I Deserve to be Funded"

In the early days of our formation, when we'r...

The old days of having to grow our staff by promoting them into a management pyramid are (thankfully) wasting away. Startups can do way more with fewer people, which means fewer management layers and more empowered staff.

Yet, we're still stuck in the old thinking of "I can only progress if people are reporting to me." It's a dying notion, yet one we struggle with as startup Founders to replace. But we have to figure out how to recast the career paths of our teams if we're going to learn to work in a new world of smaller teams doing 10x more than they used to.

A startup is a company that's in the early stages of development, usually characterized by a small team, fast growth, and limited resources.

Most startups fail, but some create amazing ...

There’s the developer’s vision of a mobile app and then there’s the reality of the app in the hands of users. The only way to make sure that the two are one and the same is to conduct beta tests.

If you find beta testing complicated – or you’re not even sure where to begin – then Ubertesters is the tool for you. Ubertesters is a cloud-based platform for managing the beta testing process of mobile apps “to ensure an accurate, fast and cost effective mobile testing process that results in a high-quality, flawless, mobile app.”

Figuring out if beta testing is right for your mobile app, as well as the perfect time for testing, is a good place to begin. Kissmetrics offers excellent recommendations to help make these decisions.

At some point, ho...

Time and time again, I run into mid-continent entrepreneurs who think sales should be a personal experience. Out in Silicon Valley, I have found that a lot of startups stick to self-service platforms rather than human salespeople.

So who’s right? Well, it depends on what’s for sale and who’s buying.

METRICS MATTER: CAC AND ACV

Both approaches can work, but the key factor isn’t where your startup sits on the map. Instead, to choose the right sales strategy, take two things into account: customer acquisition cost and annual contract value.

Let’s start with CAC, or Customer Aquisition Cost, which describes the cost of acquiring a single customer. To calculate CAC, divide the cost of acquiring customers by the number of customers acquired. For...

Historically, the bulk of the Valley’s successful companies haven’t been the rocketship consumer successes like Google and Facebook. They’ve been the steady doubles, base-hits, triples, and home runs of the companies who sell software to businesses.

And in a time when Google and Facebook alone control some 80% of all digital ad budgets, that business model of selling something is starting to look better and better.

One of the few entrepreneurs to bridge these two worlds– selling intuitive, easy to use products to companies– and build a multi-billion public company out of it was Aaron Levie. Unlike a Marc Benioff, Levie didn’t come from the enterprise world. He never worked a day at Oracle or IBM. He came up with the idea in college.

It was ...

The investor pitch. It's feared. It's desired. It's terrifying.

But don't worry: We've got you covered. Here's everything you need to know about that all-important investor pitch.

What should your investor pitch include?

Invisu.me Co-Founder and CEO Donna Griffit is a master pitcher who has helped countless founders distill their pitch down to exactly what they need — and nothing they don’t. She had the opportunity to sit in on a private pitching event where a delegation of startups had the opportunity give a five minute pitch and receive direct feedback from a group of top-tier Silicon Valley VC’s. (So top tier that she can’t even say who was there but, trust us, you will want to memorize this section before your next pitch.)

Here’s what ...

John Tabis was doing fine at his old job. More than fine, actually: he was Director of Corporate Brand Development at Disney.

But instead of continuing to rock the cushy corporate life, John teamed up with his friend Juan Pablo (JP) Montufar-Arroyo and launched The Bouqs, an online flower delivery company. Neither of them had very much money so they went to friends and family and pulled together $13,000 to get started.

That was four years ago. Today, they’re working with nearly $20 million in VC money — and John definitely doesn’t miss Disney.

A native Ecuadorian who grew up on a rose farm, JP witnessed firsthand the low prices, slow payment, and rampant waste that plague the traditional flower supply chain. And on the online branding side ...

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, I believe, is that we’re all trying to grow our businesses in an age of significant distraction. You carry mobile devices that have you tethered to a network millions of people deep, you’re juggling multiple applications at all hours, and pushing the limits of how many things you can track on a regular basis.

At some point, something has to give – and when it does, your productivity and work/life balance takes a hit.

We all struggle with this problem to some degree, and it can be helpful to know how others manage to grow and thrive despite constant distractions and unending task lists.

I recently sat down with content marketing influencer and social media strategist Jeff Bullas to find out h...

Several years ago, we joked that Lyft’s investors— a motley crew that includes Japanese conglomerates, billionaire hedge funds, other ride-sharing startups, sharp elbowed activists like Carl Icahn — and major venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Floodgate — as the coalition of billionaires investing against Uber as much as they were investing in Lyft.

On October 19, another one joined the ranks: Alphabet — Google and Waymo’s parent company — lead a new $1 billion Lyft round. The same one embroiled in a multi-billion trade theft lawsuit with Uber. The same one that was once also an investor in Uber. This has never been an industry where allies stay allies forever. And Lyft’s co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green ...

Do you have a million-dollar business Idea in mind and don’t know HOW to proceed? Whether it is worth, investing time, money and effort?

This is the question that haunts many entrepreneurs and demotivates them from working on their business Idea. The best way to start when you have a business idea in your mind is to think of the problem it is trying to solve.

In this blog, you will figure out the WHAT of problem, WHO of problem, HOW of identifying and validating the problem. I will be explaining this with the help of interesting examples and correlations.

This blog gives an in-depth view of the first step mentioned in my previous article: Came up with a great Business Idea? What Next?—Which is about 6 steps to validate a Business Idea. Here...