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As startups — unless you’re VC-funded — we don’t usually have the big marketing budgets that established companies have. We may not be able to drop thousands on a single ad campaign. But the good news is that we don’t have to. We have strengths we can tap into that can power our marketing and help us land customers.

One of those strengths is our ability to wow customers in ways that the big guys — with their bloated infrastructure and slow-moving cogs — just can’t.

Startups can use customer stories to illustrate how their products and services solve problems and make life wonderful, motivating potential customers to move forward in the buying journey.

How Customers Stories Boost Marketing

Customer stories, or case studies, can be used thro...

Say you’re invited to dine at Buckingham Palace with monarchs from around the world. Would you show up wearing a bathrobe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable, right? Yet, app creators do it all the time. After all their hard work, at last about to go live on the App Store and Google Play and join the company of app royalty, they hurry their app into terrycloth screenshots and expect to be fed like a king.

Not gonna happen.

Choosing to give your app anything less than outstanding screenshots on your app pages is a big mistake. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Understandably, plenty of Founders press forward thinking I can’t pay a developer any more to design screenshots or every time there’s a new release and I need to make updates,...

As my partner, Startups.com and Fundable founder, Wil Schroter likes to say, “There's not a lot of ‘fun' in funding.”

Raising equity funding for your startup is a long, difficult, and often demoralizing process. However, if you're successful, you walk away with money that will help your startup grow and become everything you hope it could become.

One of the major challenges that founders run across is that raising a round often takes more time than they expected. While a founder might know that your startup is excellent, convincing other people to invest thousands — and potentially millions — of dollars into their company is not a simple task.

“I've always heard that the rule of thumb is three to four months to do a fundraise — or that you sho...

The gender gap that persists in Silicon Valley and throughout startups in general needs no introduction. Fewer opportunities, fewer CEOs, less pay, less respect – to name just a few issues familiar to women. Laundry lists of ails and acknowledgement of the gender gap are common. What you encounter less frequently are solutions in progress, conversations that go beyond paying lip service to the obstacles women face.

Not so in this morning’s Startups Live Coffee Hour with special guest Lisa Wang. Here she walks us through her projects designed to empower women and talks us beyond the initial difficulties of discussing gender, making it easier to effect change for all who genuinely want it and moving us closer to healthier startup ecosystems.

Most consumers discover products and services on the internet, and this has leveled the playing field for all kinds of vendors. A two-person startup with an eye-grabbing web presence can attract customers just as well as a big corporation.

But there’s a catch: With so many options available, the target audience is going to size up a company in an instant. The first impression a company makes will determine whether a potential customer passes or gives it a closer look. And design is largely responsible for that first impression.

But let’s face it: Design is subjective. As with fashion, people tend to be pretty complimentary of their own design tastes. If they think something looks good to them, it must look good to everybody, right? And bec...

People often automatically put small and large businesses into completely separate categories, even when they share the same space in the same market. Their logic is often that a small business can surely never compete with the resources and the horsepower of its corporate peers.

But (as you’ll know if you own a small business yourself) while small businesses seem to be at a disadvantage when it comes to resources, their ideas are just as good as the big guys. It’s just that these ideas often don’t have the same space and support to grow. Without big budgets, it’s harder to make investments in marketing, research, and hiring, so they can’t create the same kind of testing ground that large companies take for granted.

This lack of a lab in wh...

Today’s Favorite Find: Polymail

Elevator Pitch

Polymail is “the most powerful platform for email productivity in a beautiful native app — on desktop and mobile.”

Why We Love It

Look, no one really likes email. In fact, people’s avid dislike of email has brought us everything from Slack to multiple apps trying to fix the problem that is email. And perhaps no one hates email more than startup founders, who spend even more time than the average Joe glued to their email inboxes.

And while I’ve written about quite a few solutions to the email problem over the years, I have to say that it looks like Polymail has finally, actually solved email. They’re still in closed alpha, but, from all reports, this is the email app we’ve been waiting for.

Ok...

Like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, PowerPoint abides. It’s a great tool for assembling presentations and pitch decks. Lively conversations and entire industries surround the PowerPoint – trying to make slides better, helping people prepare materials, debating that the tool is outdated and boring… And at the center, PowerPoint abides.

There is no shortage of templates available online, but the Quickstart PowerPoint Template sticks with the fundamentals, aiming to help people “create amazing powerpoint presentations in minutes.”

Using standard fonts prevents any snags or downloading delays. A trove of images eliminates the need to conduct time-consuming searches elsewhere. 38 ready-made slides put creators close to the finish line before the...

Crowdfunding at a glance

Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and individual investors.

This approach taps into the collective efforts of a large pool of individuals — primarily online via social media and crowdfunding platforms — and leverages their networks for greater reach and exposure.

How is crowdfunding different from other types of finance?

Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the mainstream approach to business finance. Traditionally, if a person want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, they would need to pack up their business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop their idea around to a limited pool or wealthy indiv...

Slack is a great work tool for communication. Teams love being able to easily send messages to one another in real time and keeping conversations organized by channels. For speed, convenience and simplicity, Slack rocks.

Is there a downside to being able to connect so efficiently?

Well, employees and managers do grow accustomed to living with one another in their back pockets. When it comes time to have a more serious conversation, it’s not always obvious that more than the typical quick question/brief exchange is being called for. Setting up different channels for different kinds of conversation is one way to make the distinction, but there’s no guarantee that’s how they’ll actually be used.

Is there a better way to signal when the stakes ...