While the novelty of creating the next Facebook sounds amazing, the truth is we don't need to necessarily invent a product to bring a new innovation to market.

If we look closely, we'll see that some of the fastest-growing companies out there — Uber, Casper, Dollar Shave Club and dare I say it, WeWork — are all based on ancient business models with a new twist.

Start With This: "What's Wrong With Current Products?"

Look, Uber didn't invent taxis — they just simply asked, "What's broken about the taxi business?" (Well, the limo business initially but who's tracking?) Any of us would be hard-pressed to find an existing product or service that couldn't use a ton of improvement.

What customers care most about is the improvement. Maybe that's ...

Today’s Favorite Find: RightGIF

Elevator Pitch

RightGIF is an easy Slack integration that serves up better GIFs.

Why We Love It

If your startup/company/team of you and your best friend isn’t on Slack yet, you will be soon. They’ve hands-down won the team management wars with their ridiculously rapid growth and super easy integration. However, one of the initial things that I loved about Slack — the GIF integration with Giphy — sucks.

Like, majorly sucks. Like, you end up sending out GIFs that will, best case scenario, confuse and, worst case scenario, get you fired. On our work channels, we’ve abandoned GIFs altogether, because the only humor we were getting out of them was laughs over how terrible they were. Now, I’m not a Giphy hater by ...

Say you’re invited to dine at Buckingham Palace with monarchs from around the world. Would you show up wearing a bathrobe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable, right? Yet, app creators do it all the time. After all their hard work, at last about to go live on the App Store and Google Play and join the company of app royalty, they hurry their app into terrycloth screenshots and expect to be fed like a king.

Not gonna happen.

Choosing to give your app anything less than outstanding screenshots on your app pages is a big mistake. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Understandably, plenty of Founders press forward thinking I can’t pay a developer any more to design screenshots or every time there’s a new release and I need to make updates,...

A market analysis is an assessment of any given market that includes both qualitative and quantitative research. Conducting a thorough market analysis as a key piece of your business plan ensures that you know everything there is to know about your market.

Coincidentally, it reassures any current or future investors that you know what you’re doing, that you’ve done you’re homework and that you’re the right entrepreneur to address the gap in this particular market.

HOW TO CONDUCT A MARKET ANALYSIS

But — in order to conduct a thorough market analysis — you need to cover a wide range of topics. Before diving into the specifics, remember that at its core, a market analysis is about learning the most you can about your market.

You’ll discover w...

Think of big companies like the Death Star.

On the outset, it's a planet killer. But its weakness, (other than a really questionably-architected ventilation system), is that it moves at a glacial pace.

I spent 10 years running a digital agency working with these Fortune 500 giants like BMW, Best Buy and Eli Lilly.

What we don't see on the outside is how impossible it is for these companies to move internally and how we can use that lack of mobility to our advantage versus worrying about our home planet of Alderaan getting blown up.

Big Companies Face Inward, Not Outward

The first thing we need to know about big companies is that their culture is almost always faced entirely inward.

That means their staff, unlike ours, spends more time co...

“While culture might eat strategy for breakfast — cynicism will devour your carefully-nurtured culture for lunch, dinner, and snacks in between.”

–Jason Eckenroth, Cynicism: Predator Of Your Company Culture

We all know what cynicism looks like. It isn’t hard to spot. It’s all around us. Maybe what’s hard to accept is that it can’t be stopped, to admit the scary truth that it’s highly contagious. Anyone can succumb to it who isn’t willing to examine oneself. Or step outside of a group that has been infected and begin the hard conversations that can cure the poison.

But where does it come from? What causes cynicism? How can you protect yourself and your company from it’s corrosive effects? In today’s Startups Live, Founders fearlessly confron...

When you're in charge of a business, you're all too familiar with that feeling of racing to catch up. But no matter how hard you push or how much you work, you never seem to reach the finish line.

There's always more marketing to do, more emails to send, another meeting around the corner, more prospects to qualify…

Terminal “behinderness” is an affliction that generates heart-pounding stress and makes you wonder how the most successful founders and leaders manage to be so productive while you feel like you're constantly drowning.

A lot of it comes down to how they structure their days.

Curious about how some of the top business leaders spent their time, John Rampton (CEO of Due) and Chris Stowell (VP of the International Center for Management a...

The acquisition of new donors is important, but you can’t neglect past donors and the support they bring. While the retention rate of first-year donors is only 23.7%, the retention rate of multi-year donors jumps to just over 58%.

Build a relationship with those supporters and keep them engaged outside of fundraising. That will keep your retention rates up and they’ll be more likely to respond when you call on them.

Email marketing is a great, non-invasive, and non-interruptive way to stay in front of supporters while also providing value. Even better, the ROI is significant. As your list grows, a single email to your supporters could trigger an influx of donations, greatly reducing the time it takes to hit fundraising targets.

Here’s how ...

You probably know the saying: It costs money to make money. And with 50 percent of new businesses failing within five years — and 70 percent failing within 10 — marketing is more important than ever. Marketing is what fuels business growth, and it’s one of the most important things to consider in a business plan. Without a solid marketing strategy in place, you’ll find that you’ll be spending a lot of time and money on trying to grow your business with little to show for it.

As a new business owner, it would be great to see high-impact results immediately. Without millions of dollars from venture capitalists, though, gaining results can be a long road. However, while there is no magic formula to marketing, there are some easy, high-impact ...

Crowdfunding may seem like a new idea, but it actually has a long and rich history with roots going back to the 1700’s.

However, modern day crowdfunding — where people and businesses raise small amounts of money from a large group of people, usually online — has its origins in 1997.

In this infographic, we look at some of the historical movements that led to the development of crowdfunding as we know it, as well as major events over the past two decades that have shaped modern day crowdfunding.

Infographic text transcript:

1700’s: The Irish Loan Fund

The Irish Loan Fund was established by author and Irish nationalist Jonathon Swift in the early 1700’s as a way to provide loans to poor but creditworthy people in Dublin.

The Fund was succes...