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How much time do we spend preparing our spouses for our startup journey?

Do we assume they somehow magically understand the path we've chosen to follow? Do we know for sure that our sacrifices align with their goals? When is the last time we sat down and made ourselves 100% sure that we're still on the same page?

In a business where we spend so much time recruiting talent, pitching investors and selling customers, we often overlook the most important person we should be convincing to join our cause — our spouses.

Often the single most important person in our life hasn't been afforded the same time and attention as everyone else to understand exactly why we're going down this crazy path. Or perhaps they do, but they haven't been reminded in...

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...

Venture capital funding is both the most commonly referenced and yet commonly misunderstood form of investor capital available.

Unlike banks or more traditional investment sources, venture capital funding is all about big risks and big rewards.

Simply put, venture capital funding involves a venture capital firm investing a large sum of money (typically starting at $2 million or more) in exchange for an equity stake in your company.

Venture Capital Funding Risks and Rewards

Unlike banks or more traditional investment sources, venture capital funding is all about big risks and big rewards.

Venture capital firms specifically look for companies that offer an exceptionally large growth opportunity, which you can think of as the type of company t...

It’s taken on the allure of the holy grail. Systems would crash trying to count the words devoted to the subject. I’ll bet you don’t need to be told that I’m writing about: productivity.

We’re all in search of greater productivity (even if we define doing less as more, make sense?) One day, the times we’re living in may well be known as the GSD era.

Notes, doodles, end-of-day/beginning-of-day routines, virtual assistants… Buckle up as Startups Live surveys Founders’ different approaches to achieving superhuman productivity.

Wil Schroter wasted no time diving into a conversation that several people proved eager to discuss. “I’d like to talk about time management, but I’d also love to talk about how you all are managing productivity.”

“I lik...

Whether you’ve raised a few million or you’ve bootstrapped your way into business, your responsibility as a founder is to leverage your company’s resources for maximum gains.

A mediocre founder spends money to maintain the status quo. A smart founder knows that every dollar coming out of their pocket needs to be justified by a healthy ROI.

While the reality is a little more complex than “you gotta spend money to make money,” these five investments have proven themselves to have high returns in the short and long-term for growing businesses.

1. Cover Your A$$ and Protect What’s Important

If headline-grabbing IPO blunders and startup lawsuits have taught us anything, it’s that quality legal advice is an invaluable asset to any startup. When y...

Fundraising is the lifeblood of any non-profit. Unfortunately, it also takes a significant amount of time and volunteer effort to make outbound calls and knock on doors. Since most of your volunteers aren’t professionally-trained fundraising experts, it can be difficult to solicit donations and support.

Traditional channels for fundraising are also less effective than they once were. You’ll need to pivot and try new avenues to gain donor support in a digital age.

How to Leverage Content Marketing to Attract Donors and Supporters

Today, much of the marketing and advertising done by major brands and successful nonprofits is based on content. Content marketing takes a variety of forms, and for the nonprofit it offers a great way to share the ...

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...

Someone that becomes a Startupper is usually someone that has identified a specific problem or need and is super focused on creating the best solution. It is that hyper focus that allows small teams in garages to compete with Fortune 500 companies.

But as a startup CEO or core team member, you have hundreds if not thousands of tasks to complete and staying focused can become an issue. That’s why one of the key competencies an entrepreneur should have is discipline and an ability to focus on each problem at once all while not losing the larger picture.

Below is a video of a crazy day in the startup life, not an average one.

The day begins by waking up and checking all emails and responding. It is also productive to map out the beginning of...

We wanted to find out, were these people telling us they liked the product just to be nice? Or was there something else that was going on?

Jeff Stefanis and his co-Founder Amber Wason were pedal to the metal on development of their electric bike startup Riide in early 2015. They had perfected their design, they had partnered with a top manufacturing company to build the bikes, and they were offering test rides around Washington, DC as a way to introduce DC commuters to the idea and turn testers into buyers.

There was just one problem: nobody was buying.

“Our conversion rate from test rides to buying was about 3%,” Jeff remembers. “Which is not great.”

The low conversion rate confused Jeff and Amber at first, because it seemed to directly co...

A few weeks ago I read this post from Eric Stromberg. It inspired me to write what you are now reading.

Eric admits the matrix isn’t exhaustive. But it gives you a general sense of which consumer markets (shopping, media, and finance in this case, I did the math) are the most crowded ones in general.

The matrix also shows there are very few people innovating in areas related to security, seniors, or healthcare. And no one, I repeat, no one innovating in the parenting consumer market!

This reminded me of CB Insights’ “MGI Industry Digitization Index” (shown below) where you can see which industries are most and least “digitized.”

The red dots clearly show which industries are screaming for innovation, so why are they the least talked about?...