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No one tells Founders "Hey, you know what, it was a good run but you should probably stop killing yourself and just take the mulligan on this one." No one ever actually tells us it's OK to quit.

Instead, we build up this narrative in our head that we've got to burn through all of our savings, exhaust our health, and basically run ourselves into the ground to prove we didn't give up. But here's the problem — everyone else gave up a long, long time ago. They just never told us — and never will.

Investors Have No Incentive to Tell Us What's Up

When we were kids playing sports, and we were obviously winded, our coach would pull us out and tell us to take a breather. If our investors were our coaches, they'd hand us some amphetamines and tell us...

The Pitch Deck Traction Slide helps showcase early traction when we pitch investors. But what kind of traction metrics matter to investors? Let's walk through some common pitch deck traction slide examples showcasing user growth, growing revenue, and scaling active users.

Also, if you're concerned about showing traction in your pitch deck, don't sweat it. We'll show you how to position your traction slides even if you're pre-revenue.

Traction Slide Pitch Deck Formula

The perfect traction slide pitch deck formula incorporates three investor questions into a single slide:

Product Progress + Customer Acquisition + Visible Growth = Traction

The most stunning pitch deck examples incorporate all of these factors into their traction slides. Let's look ...

If you had the idea for Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg, you could have been worth $40 billion like good ol' Mark, right?.

Except, you couldn't. Because the idea alone isn't worth jack.

Not so sure? Ask Jonathan Abrams the incredibly talented Founder who created Friendster in 2002, around the time good ol' Zuck was graduating high school. Friendster was absolutely Facebook before Facebook, as was Hi5 and MySpace.

But unless you're a band from the mid-2000s, you're probably not maintaining a profile anywhere but "the Facebook."

Oh, and technically the idea wasn't Mark's either, but that's a whole other movie.

Why isn't an idea worth mullah?

Think of the idea like a seed.

The seed alone has the potential to be something great, but by itse...

Every Founder feels like their startup must be the one company that is a total shit show compared to how those other startups must be running.

We believe that if we can just get past this next set of challenges, things will finally be smooth sailing.

What we don't realize, especially if we've never done this before, is that the problems never really go away. It's just a never-ending "whack-a-mole" game with different problems.

Problems Don't Go Away — They Just Change Names

When we're small and scrappy, our problems are all about survival. How are we going to meet payroll? How are we going to land that one early investor?

They feel weighty and life-threatening — and to be fair, they are. But those formative years are stressful in the wa...

The web has made it possible for everyone from prospective customers to business partners to potential employees to see at the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen what companies have to offer. If upon first glance they see unhappy customers or poor reviews, there’s a very real potential of permanent damage to a business’s bottom line.

Companies’ online reputations reflect how the businesses conduct themselves and how they operate on a daily basis. Increasingly, customers are turning to the information they find online when deciding whether to engage with a brand.

To cultivate a healthy online presence, companies need to constantly demonstrate why people should come to them as industry leaders and trustworthy partners — both in daily cus...

A few years back I was having lunch with a fellow Founder who had started a company that was #1 on the Inc 500 list. He had launched the startup from the basement of his girlfriend’s house with zero capital and had built into a massive company.

We were eating lunch at an exclusive country club he had just joined and were walking out to the parking lot where his shiny new Ferrari was parked. Clearly things were going well for him.

I asked him a simple question “What do people say now when they see you in that new Ferrari?”

He said “They say: ‘It must be nice.’”

Ahhh! “It must be nice” – The most popular refrain us Founders get when the outside world sees what we have – without seeing what it took to get there.

This isn’t for the people who h...

Being a Founder doesn't imply one is a good manager. It just means we were around when the company was formed!

Sometimes Founders do grow into great managers — and sometimes they were great managers already. But the real question is: "Do Founders need to be good managers?"

Ideally, yes. But it's not a requirement.

We can fake it for a minute

In the formative years, when we only have a small team, we can usually get by without being great managers.

That's because the team is still small, and mostly operates in a flat "team" structure without a lot of management to be had. That's also why Founders often don't realize they are shitty managers until later on because they ran for so long in an unmanaged structure.

Eventually, though, it catch...

All startup financial projections are based on a few key assumptions about how we feel the business will perform.

In this section, we're going to explain what key assumptions drive our financial forecasts and how to adjust them to create a financial model that works.

Download our Income Statement Template here to get started and follow along.

What’s the Goal Here?

The Assumptions tab in our income statement template gives us a worksheet to help determine what the right values will be to populate in our projected income statement. The tab itself is just a worksheet that drives things like our revenue projections, cost assumptions, and ultimately net income.

We’ll walk through each of the assumptions in this worksheet one by one to give a little m...

Without a doubt, reading and learning is one of the most essential ingredients to becoming a stronger entrepreneur. As a learning enthusiast who travels everywhere with a paperback, I’ve recently joined the ranks of Blinkist downloaders. Unfamiliar with the name?

Blinkist allows you to quickly digest books by offering condensed versions of hot sellers in the form of voiceover narratives. It’s great for entrepreneurs who can’t seem to keep up with Bill Gates’ penchant for reading 50 books a year. I prefer the feel of a traditional book, but it’s a nice stopgap when I’m short on time.

When I do have a few hours over the weekend, I turn on my meditation app and block out some “chill” time. (Thank you to my loving wife who understands!) It’s mo...

The past few years have seen an explosion of podcasts — it seems like everyone wants to get in on the audio. And startup founders (many of whom have probably been listening to podcasts since they started in the early aughts) are no exception! But how do you know what to listen to in this vast sea of startup podcasts?

Don’t worry — we have you covered. Here are the top 20 best startup podcasts as we head into 2020. Grab your noise cancelling earphones — and get listening.

1. Startup Therapy

Hosted by Startups.com founders and serial entrepreneurs Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan, Startup Therapy is an inside perspective on issues startup founders really care about. From what to expect in your first year after launching to how to deal with the e...