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Just because it's our startup doesn't mean we still have upside in it.

Anyone who's taken on a single round of capital and has suffered the painful dilution that comes with has had the first taste of "reduced upside." We accept it though, like taking awful medicine because we know it'll make things better in the end. But at some point that medicine stops working.

At some point, we look around and realize that our startup no longer provides the kind of upside for us we thought it would. It was easy to overlook when we could see us "making billions" but now reality has set in and we realize we just have a really stressful job that pays us way below market.

Call it What it is

First off, we have to call it what it is — a shitty deal. Is it a sh...

Startup failure is knowing our friends aren't asking about our startup because they already know we've failed.

It's knowing we're the punchline of community gossip, sometimes from fellow Founders who might have a right to joke, but mostly from those who don't.

It's about trading that exciting victory we dreamed about for the nightmare that kept us from sleeping at all.

Anxiety can be a Powerful Ally

Anxiety, however, can be a powerful motivator.

It's often a terrible, awful kind of energy that rots us to the core while accomplishing nothing useful. That's unless we judo-move that energy into something that powers us toward something positive.

We can stay up all night with our anxiety or we can stay up all night working on our next great ...

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 ...

Breaking up with investors at the end of a failed startup journey is basically every Founder's worst nightmare. It's that awful conversation we did everything in our power to avoid. We rehearsed it over and over while starting at the ceiling at 3 AM. And yet, here we are.

How we break up with investors is as important as how we built the relationship to begin with. That's because in the startup world, building long standing relationships among key players, including investors, is all about treating those folks with respect at every step of the journey — even the shitty ending part.

We need to own the outcome

This is no time to point fingers. It was our job to create a successful startup; it didn't work out — we have to own that. This is th...

We all love to act like we’re reinventing the wheel here in Startup Land. And, sometimes, (maybe even a lot of the time), we are. The startup world has dramatically changed how the business world operates: from company perks to customer service to everyone suddenly thinking that an open plan office is less oppressive than one with cubicles.

(Spoiler alert: It’s not.)

We’ve also invented a new understanding around the stages of a startup business. Granted, it’s not a total reinvention of the business stage wheel — maybe “evolution” is a better descriptor for how we’ve come to determine the stages of a startup. But there are parts of this “new model” that are certainly unique to our particular way of doing things. And one of those parts is th...

If you’re looking to improve your sales process — look no further than the “2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report“. Buyers want things to be easy. So easy, in fact, that 89 percent of survey respondents said that they chose vendors that made a return on investment easier to prove or that could be easily justified with a business case. They also preferred speed over price — with 80 percent of buyers citing deployment and ease of use as “very important.”

Your customers want to understand how to use your product — not sit through a pitch and wonder if it’ll actually fit their needs. Selling is less about explaining why buyers should buy and more about showing how an easy-to-use product or service will help them.

Ditch the dead-end “why” part of the c...

As Founders, when we give away equity determines how much we're going to lose.

That's because the equity game, and our job of holding on to it for dear life, is really about vulnerability. The more vulnerable we are, the more we give away. The stronger our position is, the more we retain. It's really that simple, and yet, especially if this is our first startup, it's hard to realize when we're giving up too much too early.

There are really three moments in time where we have to really consider our timing and our approach — when we add co-founders, hiring early employees, and when we take on seed capital. What we often don't realize is that there is a lot of strategy to when and how we pull these triggers, while a lack of strategy has massiv...

This is Part I of our interview with Rhone co-Founder and CEO Nate Checketts. Check in next week for Part II!

Hey, do we really want to do this? We don’t have to be starting a business. We have good jobs. We both have families and mortgages. We don’t have to do this.

When you’re starting a new company, the week your site launches is pretty much guaranteed to be the most stressful week of your life, even under the best circumstances.

The circumstances that Nate Checketts was dealing with in the week leading up to the launch of his company, Rhone? Let’s just say they were a little less than the best.

“A week before the launch, my co-founder’s kitchen caught on fire and nearly burned his house down. So he and his family – he had three kids a...

Communicating a bold vision isn't just about how it's delivered, it's about how it's crafted.

As Founders, we live and die by the quality of our visions. We use it to inspire people to join us, to convince customers to buy from us, and to attract investors to fund our ridiculous ideas. Visions are the lifeblood of what we do, and yet, a lot of us don't really understand how to create them.

The common misconception is that our vision is simply a grand statement we make about the future. While that's partially true, it doesn't really explain what separates a good vision statement from a great one. To create a great one, we have to understand the three underlying mechanics.

Sell the Problem

Selling a vision is really about framing a problem be...

As my partner, Startups.com and Fundable founder, Wil Schroter likes to say, “There's not a lot of ‘fun' in funding.”

Raising equity funding for your startup is a long, difficult, and often demoralizing process. However, if you're successful, you walk away with money that will help your startup grow and become everything you hope it could become.

One of the major challenges that founders run across is that raising a round often takes more time than they expected. While a founder might know that your startup is excellent, convincing other people to invest thousands — and potentially millions — of dollars into their company is not a simple task.

“I've always heard that the rule of thumb is three to four months to do a fundraise — or that you sho...