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The business of buying or selling a startup is a murky world that most folks have no concept for. We hear about the end result – one hot company gets bought by another. But we rarely know what goes on behind the scenes to get to that point.

Let’s talk about just that.

I’ve had a fair bit of experience on both sides of this equation, as I’ve sold a few companies and have also purchased a few (Launchrock, Clarity.fm, and KillerStartups) quite recently. At Startups.co we talk to a lot of companies about potential acquisitions. (If you’re in the startups space and have a great product, feel free to email me about it.)

In the past six months, I’ve explained our process of acquisition to dozens of companies, and it has become clear that people do...

Question: What is one tip you have for keeping your personal and professional life separate?

Don’t Use Your Facebook Profile for Work

“Use a Facebook page to promote your business, and keep your Facebook profile for actual friends and family only. Many people make the mistake of blurring the line and they’re left with the worst of both worlds: They can’t promote on Facebook because they’ll annoy their friends, and they can’t be too personal for fear of coming across as unprofessional with prospects. Separate the two.”

— Laura Roeder
MeetEdgar.com
@lkr

Schedule Your Life, Too

“Reserve personal time in your schedule for activities that allow you to recharge and that add value, such as daily exercise, a weekly date or social night, family acti...

Mark Robinson and Sam Lee, the founders of Class.Travel, sat down with us to discuss how to launch and create apps that users love. The two met over tacos and Mexican beer, and stumbled upon the idea to create Class.Travel, a platform allowing you to easily book hotels.

Both have a background in computer science and have always wanted to start their own companies. Below they share their top ten tips on creating a user-friendly mobile app.

1. Foster a pool of qualified users
   Find people who are interested in your product or service and really lean on them. Let them offer feedback, involve them in decisions, and keep them posted on news and updates. These people will be your first customers and potential investors down the line.
2. Get advice from...

As an expert SEO, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades.

You need to understand link building, marketing, public relations, psychology, and technology.

At a certain point, there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you’d like to do.

But you can save quite a bit of time and effort on small things by using browser extensions.

You can install them with one or two mouse clicks and access them with ease to the right of your address bar.

They will help you:

• analyze website performance quickly
• examine code behind websites
• build links better
• save time by improving your task efficiency

I’ve put together a list of 28 browser extensions I consider to be the best. I encourage you to give a few of them a try.

A quick heads-up: most of thes...

Here’s the short version:

I created Startups.co as my dream job. There wasn’t any magic to it – but I had to be painfully honest about how I really wanted the rest of my life to play out.

This is how I did it.

Imagine this: as of today, you are now working at your dream job.

What would that look like?

Get really detailed with it: How would every hour of the day go? What would you get to do? What would you never, ever, ever, ever have to do again? Have you written all of this down and made a plan around it?

Yeah, neither did I – for about 18 years in a row.

And then I did, and it was the most profound and relatively simple change I ever made. So much so that I have dedicated the rest of my life to helping my fellow Founders align what they ...

As startup Founders, we are constantly focused on making sure our fledgling companies have enough runway to grow. We believe that if the company’s bank account runs out, the company goes bankrupt and it’s game over.

But that’s not always true. It’s often not until your personal bank account runs to zero that your startup is truly done for.

The fact is that startups don’t truly go bankrupt until their Founders go bankrupt. The problem is that Founders are often so focused on the startup’s finances that they overlook their own ability to stay afloat in the process. I call this ability your “personal runway,” or the amount of time that you can stay alive and fed, regardless of the health of your business.

Back to Basics

I learned all abou...

What is one surefire tip to find investors and/or making the right impression on an investor?

The following advice around how to find investors is provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Have Your Legal House in Order

I’ve seen investors decline to invest in startups because their founders were so unsophisticated about legal formalities and/or because there is no documentation about intellectual property ownership. Before you find investors, you need to form a legal entity...

Since 2004, our companies have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs raising capital for their businesses. Over time, this has provided us an incredible vantage point from which to observe how the most successful entrepreneurs prepare for approaching investors. We have also seen firsthand that there are many things most entrepreneurs don’t know about investors, but should. We’ve compiled a list of the 10 things every entrepreneur should know about investors to help prepare them for the process.

#1: There Are a Lot of Investors Out There

According to the Center for Venture Research, there are 8.7 million people who qualify as accredited investors in the United States. However, only a small portion of those people actively invest in deals (a...

Investors help fuel the economy, providing entrepreneurs and thriving businesses with the capital they need to innovate and grow. This leads to economic development, job creation, and break-throughs that change the way we look at the world. The path to becoming a millionaire or billionaire investor does more than put lots of zeroes at the end of your bank statements. It tends to leave you with some hard won wisdom. Here, we’ve put together a list of the top 10 quotes from self-made millionaire and billionaire investors to help guide you on your own path.

“There must be high risk – in fact, very high risk. It’s the key to success. If there is no risk, you have already missed the boat. Your competitors will already be there.”

— Tom Perkins
(n...

Startup entrepreneurs face the daunting task of getting everything in order and taking care of even the minor thing precisely. Ranging from finances, back-end, front-end development to marketing and product launches, a startup entrepreneur has to take care of everything possible. Most of the time and personnel is wasted on administrative tasks which can be completely automated through the use of some powerful tools. Getting your idea developed into a full-fledged business is the primary task of an entrepreneur and a startup is no way endowed with hordes of cash to hire more personnel, unless backed in millions by a VC or angel investor.

Every startup has to operate in the financial constraints imposed on it and has to limit the personnel wo...