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There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. — Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1929 a collection of ten letters was published under the title “Letters to a Young Poet”, written by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet. The young officer had written Rilke a letter asking for guidance and they corresponded — the two never met in person. In this piece are “double-quoted” extracts from Rilke’s letters.

An American invention

When the great business thinker Peter Drucker wrote that the “CEO” title was “an American invention”, he was referring to this label in the organizational charts of large corporations. What’s odd about this title in start...

What is company culture?

Despite how obsessed the startup world is with company culture, there’s no singular definition we can all turn to. But there are really two parts to it: Philosophical and practical.

On a philosophical level, company culture is the intangible atmosphere of your company. Some people call it the “personality” or the “glue that holds everyone together” or even the “soul.” It’s as much a feeling — of belonging, of shared purpose, even of similar ways of dress — as it is an aspiration for the entire company to contribute to.

“The truth is that culture – on its own – is not the thing that will bring you success in whatever way you may define it for yourself and your team,” Adii Pienaar, founder of Conversio, says. “Buildin...

When you’re at a startup and don’t have a budget for marketing, PR is a great way to get your market’s attention and foster growth. The right PR strategies will create awareness for your startup company and product and expand your reach.

There are so many articles on building long-term PR campaigns just to get one journalist’s attention, that it can be overwhelming when you’re looking for effective tactics that work right away. Luckily, you don’t have to wait months for one press hit.

Doing PR for startups can lead to massive growth

Here are five simple PR strategies that will drive instant results for your startup.

1. Find co-marketing partners

Co-marketing is a very effective way to broaden your reach by collaborating with another compan...

Marketing for a crowdfunding campaign isn’t exactly the same as traditional marketing.

Let’s say that marketing is cake. Traditional marketing is a standard cake you’d whip up from a box or simple recipe. Crowdfunding marketing campaigns, however, are their own kind of cake. They’re like a souffle. A souffle — when done right — delivers a kind of magical combination of lightness and richness. When done wrong, it just falls into a heap.

Souffles and crowdfunding can yield incredible results. But in both cases, you have to take a more nuanced approach to reach that outcome.

Baking Up Crowdfunding Success

A crowdfunding marketing campaign is different from traditional advertising efforts, and it needs to hit a specific sweet spot. The tone ca...

In a world of billion dollar exits and absurd funding rounds, startup Founders have lost sight of what financial success really is.

Don’t get me wrong… Having billions of dollars is amazing. But, you know what else is cool? Making a million flipping dollars. Especially when you don’t have a million flipping dollars!

Let’s take the time to recalibrate how we think about startup success — and more specifically — Founder success. When we get to the point where we can only think of “success” as some astronomical, arbitrary outcome, we’re headed down a very dangerous path that affects our startup, our finances and — if we’re being honest — our health.

“But a $1 million business isn’t very big.”

No, a million dollar business isn’t very big. ...

Startups.co, the world’s largest startup launch platform, announced Tuesday, August 11th that they have signed an agreement to purchase Zirtual, the leading platform for connecting fast-growing startup companies with virtual assistants.

This agreement comes on the heels of an announcement by Zirtual on Monday, August 10th that the company would pause operations while it made a transition. The brief outage was due to a capital infusion that the company was counting on for expansion. Startups.co has notified all Zirtual employees, clients and associates that the service will resume normal operations as of Monday, August 17th.

The Zirtual service has grown at a rapid pace, expanding to over 400 Zirtual Assistants (ZAs) in just a few years, ser...

A little more than a year ago I read Brian Halligan’s great post about his scale-up leadership lessons over 9 years as HubSpot’s CEO. It’s an awesome read and I recommend everyone to go check it out. In it I was introduced to The Bus Analogy (which assumably originates from Jim Collins’ Good to Great). And as Brian writes, it goes something like this:

I have used the 🚌 analogy ever since to sta...

It’s fun to imagine the vast potential of a new product that is attempting to create a brand new market. Space exploration, nanotechnology, virtual reality, breakthrough cures for diseases, etc. This type of innovation has enormous potential to change people’s lives and with that, huge potential investment returns. Many early-stage investors focus on companies developing cutting-edge products or technology.

It’s easy to be seduced by these sexy new ideas. These investors easily envision a world (or at least a target market) positively impacted by these innovations and they project outsized returns by investing in the first-movers. While this investment approach is helpful in terms of serving as a catalyst for important, technological advanc...

All entrepreneurs launch with the hope that their businesses will live forever – or at least survive the next hundred years. They develop long-term business plans, chart growth paths, and seek advice from veteran business owners. Those words of wisdom likely don’t advise them to find a way to “cannibalize” their own companies.

But even if your company hits the hundred-year mark, you should always be looking for ways to revolutionize your initial idea before someone else does. No cautionary tale better illustrates this point than Kodak.

Most people would be surprised to discover that Kodak invented the digital camera, but it didn’t commercialize it for fear of jeopardizing its film business. By the time Kodak realized its digital camera prot...

Your potential customers live in a noisy world, so your company needs to build a concise story that will penetrate all of the clamor and actually reachyour consumer base. This means condensing the major points of your company into two consumable bits: your company story and your founder story. Having both and keeping them distinguishable from one another is really important for ensuring that neither overshadows the other, but together will create leverage for a great brand story.

The 2 components of an effective company story:

1. The myth of your brand. Describe what it is about your brand that is spectacular and illuminate the ideal long-term impact of your brand on the market.
2. The literal description. What your company is tangibly offering...