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Question: What is one part of starting up that was easier than you anticipated?

Finding a Support Network

“A support network of other entrepreneurs will make any journey a lot more enjoyable—and a lot easier, too! By joining key networking groups, like YEC, and moving into a co-working space, building a support group of like-minded entrepreneurs after starting ZinePak was easier than I would have imagined. I never expected to make so many close friends so quickly!”

— Brittany Hodak
ZinePak
@brittanyhodak

Forming the Business Entity

“What I initially believed would be the most difficult part about starting a business for myself, which I would say is the process of coming up with and registering a name, filling out the proper paperwork, and c...

You know how the rest of that sage advice goes. Dreamers can only take an entrepreneurial venture so far, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t vital. However, dreamers need to be balanced with doers.

It’s the doers who get the funding – and without funding, you don’t have a business. In this video by StartupGrind, founders and investors talk about what actually gets a check written.

George Zachary of Charles River Ventures says he’s just recently figured it out after 17 years of being a venture capitalist: “Almost all the investments I wrote a check into, I had to have the feeling, ‘Would I be a co-founder of this company?’” In other words, are you barking up the right tree with investors?

This doesn’t mean a venture Zachary passed on wasn’t g...

Neil Patel’s introduction of the author: When I think about branding, logo design, and designing great products, there’s one person I love working with. He has worked with me for many years and for several of my companies. His name is Ian Main, and this post—based on his latest work helping me rebrand Quick Sprout—is about Ian’s thoughts on how to create a great brand.

When I was growing up in Australia, my family would drive seven hours every Christmas holiday to visit my grandparents. There were five McDonald’s restaurants on that trip, and I knew exactly where each was and the distance between them. The sports teams I played for gave out McDonald’s gift vouchers, and McDonald’s sponsored our team equipment and ceremonies.

The colors, sm...

This interview, conducted by Emily Pope, was originally published on the General Assembly blog.

Raffi Khatchadourian is a Mathematical Economics major and incoming junior at Colgate University. A self-starter and talented entrepreneur, Raffi has established himself as the COO of indify, an emerging music startup, before many of his peers have even declared their major. Back in January, Raffi attended GA’s week-long Business Accelerator program in partnership with Colgate University. Since then, he and his co-founders have gone on to win $10,000 in funding from Colgate University’s Entrepreneur Weekend Shark Tank and $15,000 from Colgate University’s Entrepreneurs Fund. Read on to learn how this young entrepreneur transformed his passion fo...

You’d think that by now nearly everyone would be sold on the idea of SaaS, cloud services, and the power and flexibility of a subscription service to meet their needs.

You’d think.

Unfortunately, not everyone is convinced that SaaS is a legitimate model for software usage and purchase.

I’m going to go through their main objections one by one. What you need to know at the outset is that many B2B decision makers view cloud solutions with a heavy dose of skepticism. As many as 49% of companies are concerned about data and the security of their information in a cloud context.

Let me set the stage for what you’re about to read.

• In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the main objections to SaaS. I’m referring primarily to B2B SaaS that ha...

Yes, AI is actually going to change everything, and No, we're not all totally screwed.

Why? Because every time we embrace change as Founders, we create exponentially more value than has ever existed before. And every time things change, everyone freaks out and thinks the "old ways" were the only way things should have been done.

I'm an avid carpenter — I build tons of stuff with power tools. Every time I'm zipping through a piece of lumber with my portable saw I think, "Some poor bastard used to have to do this by hand. I bet the moment he saw an electric saw, he figured he'd be out of a job!"

What we're missing with that line of thinking isn't whether we'll be displaced — it's whether we should have been doing that work by hand, to begin w...

Sweat equity is created when you or others contribute work to a business in the hopes that it will pay off in terms of an interest in the company as opposed to hourly or salaried wages.

You may hear a web designer saying that they took a 2% interest in a company that they paid for in sweat equity. They traded the value of their time for a stake in the company.

Trading time for equity is a time-honored tradition among startup companies and is used very aggressively. While at first it may seem like you’ve printed a whole bunch of Monopoly money that you can start using to pay people with, you’ll soon find out that there is a real cost to offering up stock early on.

Valuing Input

With sweat equity, it is critical that you translate effort into...

At Startups.com we talk to thousands of founders, many of whom are weighing the benefits of convertible debt versus equity. If you’re not sure what convertible debt is, check out these posts:

• Convertible Debt Simplified

• Convertible Debt Basics

Since equity and convertible debt are the most common methods for raising early stage startup funding, it makes sense to examine them side by side so that you can understand the differences. Hopefully this will make your decision easier, so you can move on to the real fun of actually raising the money.

In order to get a handle on the decision we’re going to do three things:

1. Compare convertible debt and equity
2. Discuss how investors think about convertible debt
3. Evaluate the pitfalls of using conv...

Seven months after filming an episode for season six of ABC’s hit television show “Shark Tank,” I finally received the email I had been waiting for: my episode had an air date, and it was only 18 days away!

My immediate thoughts were relief and terror, in that order. Relief because it was the end of an almost year-long waiting game since producers had first contacted me with an invitation to appear on the show, and terror because I suddenly realized that I had absolutely no idea what my business—or my life—would be like in 30 days’ time.

Moments after receiving the email, I shared the “Shark Tank” news, along with my feelings of excitement and uncertainty, with a friend, Colin McGuire. After a short congratulations, he said something that r...

Amy Errett wasn’t the likely candidate to reinvent women’s haircare. For one thing, she doesn’t color her hair. For another, she’d never built a company shipping physical goods before.

And this wasn’t lost on her high-powered Silicon Valley network, who couldn’t quite understand why someone so “smart” was wasting her time on such a frivolous category. One they (Usually men whose wives could easily afford $400 salon treatments) just didn’t “get.”

Instead of listening to the Valley elite, Errett listened to her nine-year-old daughter who’d heard her ask countless family friends about their hair routine, whether they colored it, what they used, if they were concerned about the toxins in those treatments, the ammonia that could burn a hole in a...