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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...

I talk to hundreds of entrepreneurs every year. It’s a privilege that provides me with extraordinary perspective on how ideas are making it to market. One of the consistent themes in startups struggling to make it out of the idea/concept phase is that they can’t get out of their own way.

While the stereotypical inventor is purported to be secretive, distrustful and reclusive, many of these behaviors—intentional or incidental—can now be observed in startup founders of all stripes. Because of the ease with which you can now reach vast audiences, doing nothing to promote or expose your idea can now be interpreted as an act of secrecy. You owe it to your idea to expose it to a potential market to determine viability.

Your idea might be great, o...

Active investors sift through dozens of deals a week, and some hundreds a month. In order to find the gold, they need to quickly weed out the junk. The junk usually involves startups with any one of three red flags that deems the deal a “pass.”

Unfortunately startup founders are rarely aware of these flags, or choose to ignore them. Regardless of whether you believe these flags apply to your startup or not, you can be sure that investors will be far more critical of your progress and your deal traction.

No Traction

Traction is your ability to demonstrate you can move the ball forward, with or without funding. Traction comes from signing up early customers, generating some revenue, or demonstrating high user growth.

Startups often complain t...

Brand promotion through email marketing is a crucial tool for customer acquisition and engagement. Many businesses waste precious effort and resources because they don’t plan their brand promotion properly.

Traditionally, retailers have been able to just post huge signs and distribute flyers making consumers aware of the sale in the back. Their storefronts could remain nicely decorated.

Ecommerce retailers face a new challenge. They promote multiple product categories, various CTAs, and a sense of urgency practically daily to customers. While it may be efficient in the short-term, it dilutes the value of the brand.

Consumers aren’t curious to see new advertisements or flyer graphics, but they might be curious about new products and discount...

Funding doesn't make a lot of sense to first time Founders. In our minds, we think, "Hey, investors want to make money, so if my startup can make money, who cares how big it gets?"

Unfortunately, that thinking overlooks one big fact: that for every one investor check out there, there are hundreds of startups competing for it.

In order to understand how investors look at one deal versus another, we first have to understand how investors look at deals in the first place.

Investors Need Big Returns

There's no absolute rule here, but investor behavior generally follows a consistent trend. Most "professional" investors (people who invest consistently) gravitate toward investments that can yield an exponential return, such as an IPO.

The think...

Raising capital isn’t easy.

Don’t be fooled by the blog hype and sensational headlines – it’s still a game where less than 1% of new businesses will get funded by storied VCs and angels.

So for the rest of us, the non-one percenters, we need a more reliable playbook to invest our precious cycles in.

Busting the Startup Bubble

Let me get this party started with a big shot of sobriety.

Over 500,000 companies will be started this month in the U.S. alone. Venture capitalists will write less than 100 checks to them in the next 30 days. Angel investors will add just over 4,000. We’re still around 495,000 checks short of everyone getting a piece.

I share this math for two reasons.

1. To point out that if you’re going to bank your future solely on...

As your business grows, so does your need to scale sales efficiently. Scale can be your best friend, or the elephant in the room threatening to knock your growth off course. Your sales team needs special attention to scale efficiently. They’re a huge part of why your company is successful, don’t lose the magic that makes you special. Here are the areas to pay attention to when it’s time to scale your sales team.

Sales Training & Mentorship

Training a small team is easy. You know exactly what works and how to communicate it. Communicating the skills and strategies your team needs as a big organization becomes much more difficult. You won’t always get 1-on-1 time with each rep who talks to your customers.

It’s important to develop internal t...

When we talk about building startups, we talk about lots of costs: Staffing costs, the cost of capital, cost per acquisition, and opportunity cost.

But we never talk about the biggest cost – the emotional cost.

Imagine if we could put a numeric value on how much “emotional capital” we have in the bank. The amount of stamina, the amount of positivity, the amount of physical wellness we have left. Startup Founders don’t just run out of financial capital – we run out of emotional capital.

Running out of emotional capital isn’t something we talk about, and that’s a problem. That’s because the cost of capital in this case is our well-being, our relationships, and ultimately the startups we sacrificed it all to build.

This needs to be a more...

Making the choice between equity financing versus the use of convertible debt when raising capital can be a tough one. Below are six of the most common differences between the two. Read on for help deciding which is the best method for you.

There are many advantages to using either structure. For an in-depth article check out this post. We hope this gives you the information you need to make an informed decision on what is right for your company. Have any more questions? Let us know @startupsco.

Your website is like a car: if you fail to get routine oil changes, the vehicle’s performance will continue to drop until the engine stalls. Don’t let this happen to your website after all the hard work you’ve invested in getting it up and running. You, your web developer and your hosting company should follow the website maintenance checklist below.

1. Thoroughly review and test the entire website (annually or after any updates). Set aside time to methodically and thoroughly review all pages of the website. You may find broken links, features that don’t work or areas that can use improvement. Pay special attention to overall user experience, load time, missing or outdated content, missing page titles or meta tags (content descriptions), inco...