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What an exciting moment! You’re looking to scale up your startup and need to bring in a growth agency to help you do that. But, it’s a big decision. Choosing the wrong agency will lead to months of delayed growth, thousands of dollars in wasted spend, and difficult conversations down the line trying to understand where it all went wrong.

This means it is vitally important you make the right decision from the get-go. There are hundreds of marketing agencies out there, but if you are in the startup phase of growth I’d recommend going with a startup growth agency that has experience in the earlier stages.

I have done some of the research for you by putting together a list of the top 9 startup agencies I know deliver great results. So, at least...

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We are 3 co-founders in ideation phase of our SaaS product. How do we split equity fairly? When do we incorporate the company: now or later?

Alessandro Daliana, Leadership Coach and Consultant, answered:

Personally, I am a big fan of the consortium, or contractual joint venture, to get projects moving. In your case, the three co-founders write a contract setting out who is responsible for what work, who much they should be paid, estimate the hours, and so on, like any project. They nominate a lead, decide how to contribute any funds that are necessary, and anything else they may need. And, you conclude with a simple—or complex—way of converting all the resources al...

“Our target market is everyone!”

If we had a dollar for every time we heard these words from Founders here at Startups.co, we would have… okay, so we’re not quite sure. But it would be a lot of dollars.

We get it: planting your flag and defining your target market can be scary. It means taking a stand and proclaiming to the world, “This is who we are.” And, maybe just as scary and definitely just as important, “This is who we aren’t.”

But let us give it to you straight: your target market is not “everyone.” At least, not right away. And you know something else? You don’t want it to be, either.

What is a target market?

In layman’s terms, a target market is a group or groups of consumers in which a product or service is intended for.

The Pow...

When you meet someone, you know whether there’s a connection. Shared experiences, interests, and values can quickly bond total strangers.

Brands aren’t people, of course, but branding is about humanizing a brand in a way that helps consumers connect with it.

Today, brand authenticity and trust top shoppers’ priority lists. Sixty-four percent say shared values influence their authentic brand relationships, and 63 percent prefer to buy from brands they perceive as honest.

Just look at Warby Parker. “We believe everyone has the right to see,” its slogan proclaims. By selling designer frames with a socially conscious and a frictionless customer experience, the scrappy eye wear brand found friends in an overpriced, impersonal market.

Seemingly o...

Today I’m really excited to share some great news: we’ve just completed the acquisition of Zana.io, a world-class educational platform for startups.

Zana is the brainchild of my friend Shea Tate-Di Donna. While at True Ventures, she created the well-regarded “True University” to help educate their 150 portfolio companies on the best practices for starting a company. That effort led to the formation of Zana as an extension of Shea’s dream to democratize the type of learning often reserved only for venture-funded Silicon Valley companies.

Educating entrepreneurs is one of the most critical initiatives we’ve embraced at Startups.co, and we couldn’t be happier to bring Zana into our family to help drive us forward.

Now 1 million startups on our...

What is a convertible note (aka Convertible Debt)?

A convertible note (otherwise called convertible debt) is a loan from investors that converts into equity. It’s a common way for investors to invest in early stage startups, particularly ones that are pre-valuation.

Here’s how it works:

An investor loans a startup a certain amount of money, but instead of expecting their money back in the form of payments with interest, their “payment” comes in the form of equity.

That conversion from the balance of the loan to preferred stock happens at a specified point — usually a new valuation at the conclusion of a new funding round.

When a company accepts investment in the form of a convertible note, notes are issued instead of priced equity.

Key par...

After closing a new Series C round of $50MM, CEO Eoghan McCabe has released the Intercom pitch deck from 2011, the slides they used to raise their initial $600K convertible note.

I often call Intercom one of the startup tools that have been key to our success and it’s not an overstatement. We’ve leveraged their platform to create an engaging, personalized and human experience of support and customer success, that our customers truly appreciate. It’s this personal experience that has kept us on an exponential growth path for over 12 months now.

Intercom released their first pitch deck on their blog this week, you can find the original slides here. Still, we took the liberty of redesigning the presentation on Slidebean to make it shine. Here’...

Everyone talks about starting companies — yet no one ever tells us how to shut them down.

That's because by the time startups go into this dark, hazy abyss called "shut down" mode, things get really quiet. We stop hearing from Founders, investors start talking about other "hot new investments," and the media has moved on long ago.

That doesn't change the fact that most startups fail, and with that, Founders need to have a grounded understanding in how to wind down their startups gracefully.

This is very difficult advice for a frustrated Founder to seek because it's often embarrassing to even ask, or in some cases, the people they need to seek counsel with are actually connected to the business.

So for all of my fellow Founders who are wre...

What are some aspects of business travel that startup leaders absolutely must invest in to help their companies in the long run?

Almost every traveler has an opinion about what’s worth the splurge, from programs like Global Entry to more indulgent items like upgrades and private guides. But unlike individual travelers, a company can’t use a single nice suitcase or pair of comfortable shoes for all its employees’ subsequent trips, so what should a business spend money on to make travel as productive, painless, and cost-effective as possible?

Here are my top five ideas:

1. Time

The old adage is true — saving time means money in business travel. An extra hour spent working is more useful than spending that hour in the back of a taxi or at a...

Sometimes having to burn it all down is the best medicine our startup can take.

It sure doesn't feel that way at the time. When we're sitting across from an income statement that's been decimated and thinking of having to go back to our team, investors, and partners to tell them some truly horrible news, the last thing we're thinking is "Hey this might be great!"

But for those of you that have never been through it, I'm here to tell you, it may in fact be the best thing that ever happened to our startups.

That's because a Hard Reset gives us the one opportunity to go back and reset all of our decisions that we've made, teeing us up to build a far more efficient and capable startup going forward. It sucks — like I said — but it also has som...