Forums Search

I've failed numerous times and watched countless other Founders do the same. We kept ourselves awake nonstop worrying about the outcome of our failures. We took years off of our life and put ourselves in horrible places mentally and physically.

And you know what we learned in the end? It generally didn't matter.

That's right, our "fear of failure" was always 100x worse than how the failure itself played out. And so we took desperate measures to avoid failure, like clearing the last of our savings, running up debt, and going yet another year without pay. At some point, we became far more intent on "not failing" than succeeding.

What we need is a method for dissecting failure into actionable bits.

Failure needs to be Unpacked

If we think ab...

There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups: SBA small business loans, business credit lines, short term loans, invoice financing, and merchant cash advances. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

SBA Small Business Loans

A SBA small business loan is a loan that is backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). Founded in 1953, the SBA is a federal government program that provides support to small business owners in the form of mentorship, workshops, counseling, and small business loans.

While the loans are backed by the SBA, they don’t come directly from the SBA. You’ll have to find a local lender who provides SBA loans in order to access the funding.

Who qualifies?

There are three main types of SBA small...

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...

What are Microloans?

Microloans are small loans that businesses that can't access traditional loans or other finance options. It could be because they don't have any — or great — credit. It could be because their businesses aren't very established yet or they're locked out of the traditional financing options for a variety of reasons. They're usually short-term loans, with low-interest rates.

Microloans started in Bangladesh with economist Muhammad Yunus in the early 1980s. It was primarily to help people in developing countries who didn't have access to traditional small business loans. Access to a microloan program gave them funding to start businesses and raise themselves out of poverty. There are now a huge range of microlending options w...

Millennials have set a high bar in terms of tech and entrepreneurship, but Generation Z could be even more ambitious than its predecessor. The newest generation in the workforce grew up surrounded by Snapchat, YouTube, and Musical.ly — and Gen Zers probably had an iPad before they could walk.

A whopping 98 percent of Gen Zers own a smartphone, and this generation expects to get smartphones at a younger age than any other generation. Research indicates that 45 percent of Gen Zers are on their phones “almost constantly,” and about 62 percent of Gen Z and Millennials would rather leave their wallets at home instead of their phones.

But the differences go beyond tech. Young people in 2018 know how to work for what they want, know how the gig ec...

When you’re confident about a business model, you will have absolutely nothing holding you back.

When I call Miguel Madrid at his Austin apartment, he’s glued to his computer, handling exchange requests in the wake of fulfilling the two massively successful pre-order campaigns his company Comfortable Club ran on Kickstarter last year.

“We shipped about 15,000 items in three days,” he tells me.

Comfortable Club is an online apparel brand that delivers ridiculously cozy underwear and loungewear at half the price of retail. The idea seems to be striking a chord: between those two Kickstarter campaigns, Comfortable Club has taken in more than $350,000 in pre-order revenue from over 5,000 backers — now customers.

All of which means things have b...

There's a ton of risk in taking startup advice from "advisors".

It's not that the advisors themselves are bad people — they tend to be very well-intentioned folks. It's that most advice tends to be dispensed out of context, with very little digging on behalf of the advisor, and delivered in a way to assume what they have suggested is the gospel.

It's time to stop simply taking startup advice, and instead start calibrating whether the advice we're getting is even relevant to begin with. Because more often than not, the advice we're getting from our trusted advisors is just flat out wrong.

And what’s worse? We don’t even think to question it.

Advice out of Context

The likelihood of finding advice that is absolutely aligned with our situatio...

It's 3:35 A.M. We wake up in hot sweat so wet we've soaked our Night Ranger vintage crop top right through. We had this awful dream that we were somehow fired from our own company.

"Wait. I'm the Founder — how can I get fired?"

If you own 100% of the voting stock and have no other shareholders — you can't.

Your totalitarian rule is safe, El Presidente. However, the moment we have additional shareholders in the mix, the game can change quickly.

Multiple shareholders, especially investors, typically introduce provisions in the Operating Agreement of the company that "protect" the shareholders from wrongdoing by the officers of the company.

Does that mean the janitor can initiate a palace revolt and overthrow us? Probably not. But it does m...

Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

• Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch

• Part 2 - Market Size

• Part 3 - Revenue Model

• Part 4 - Operating Model

• Part 5 - Customer Definition ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 6 - Customer Acquisition

• Part 7 - Funding

• Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets

• Part 9 - Traction

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let’s dive in!

A company in the early growth stages should concentrate its efforts on a particular segment of customers whose needs most closely match that of their best current customers and not a broad universe of prospects for expansion.

Customer segmentation works for companies that started yesterday, and mature companies as well. In the...

“Leaders who encourage employees to pursue their side hustles can be rewarded for that investment of trust. People gain skills and master new technologies through side hustles, which can end up benefitting their primary employer.”

–Michael Ray Newman, 3 Ways to Support Employee Side Hustles

Is it insane to empower employees when the result may be that they leave your company? What exactly is the story with employee side hustles? A number of different perspectives kick around these very questions in today’s Startups Live session.

What will you walk away with? You may very well leave the conversation reconsidering your employer-employee relations. You might adopt or alter policies to accommodate side projects – to better honor your employees...