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In January 2016, after 8 years in the British Military, I left to enter our crazy world of startups. Over the past 8 months I have pivoted three times from my original idea.

That’s a lot in a short space of time but it has helped me find product market fit. I can attribute some of this speed to my military background. There is a lot of advice out there from the military to business and vice versa but here are some direct lessons I believe the military can teach the Pre Seed Startup:

The Why

No soldier is going to follow you to into combat unless he/she knows why they are doing it. When I started my first company KitShare (an Air BnB for surfboards, skis, etc) because I had no employees I hadn’t given it much thought until an investor asked ...

Do you have a million-dollar business Idea in mind and don’t know HOW to proceed? Whether it is worth, investing time, money and effort?

This is the question that haunts many entrepreneurs and demotivates them from working on their business Idea. The best way to start when you have a business idea in your mind is to think of the problem it is trying to solve.

In this blog, you will figure out the WHAT of problem, WHO of problem, HOW of identifying and validating the problem. I will be explaining this with the help of interesting examples and correlations.

This blog gives an in-depth view of the first step mentioned in my previous article: Came up with a great Business Idea? What Next?—Which is about 6 steps to validate a Business Idea. Here...

We created Toggl Button 3 years ago to make Toggl more accessible and better integrated with other tools. We started small — advertising only to our own users and integrating with a few major project management tools. Up until recently, only one developer ever worked full time on Toggl Button.

Yes, you read that well. Out of the 135,000 total users, about 85,000 have found us in the last two years, while I was leading the efforts on growing Toggl Button — the ultimate time tracking add-on for all your favorite web tools.

As usual, I can’t promise you’ll get rich quick or succeed over nigh...

This is Part I of our interview with Rhone co-Founder and CEO Nate Checketts. Check in next week for Part II!

Hey, do we really want to do this? We don’t have to be starting a business. We have good jobs. We both have families and mortgages. We don’t have to do this.

When you’re starting a new company, the week your site launches is pretty much guaranteed to be the most stressful week of your life, even under the best circumstances.

The circumstances that Nate Checketts was dealing with in the week leading up to the launch of his company, Rhone? Let’s just say they were a little less than the best.

“A week before the launch, my co-founder’s kitchen caught on fire and nearly burned his house down. So he and his family – he had three kids a...

Once you have your fundraising plan and your pitch list together, it’s time to make sure you have all of your key pitch assets in order. Most of these assets are built from the same basic content and are simply reworked to fit different needs and requests.

Once you have the basics down, it’s pretty easy to prepare all of these documents as needed. Here’s a comprehensive list of what you’ll need to prepare when you’re ready to launch your fundraise.

Elevator Pitch

Your elevator pitch is a short, consistent synopsis of your business, usually in just a few sentences. Surprisingly, getting your pitch to be short and consistent is kind of hard to do.

Although the amount of content you need to create is tiny—just a few sentences—the amount of tho...

According to figures reported in the GEM Global Report, 100 million new businesses are launched annually.

Thats nearly 11,000 startups per hour.

So, how do you beat this competition? By raising more funds? By marketing more aggressively? Maybe. But, I believe that increasing the brand value of your startup can help it not only survive the competition but thrive.

When it comes to marketing your business, branding is an old concept. Unfortunately, it’s one that few startups utilize properly. Review these 7 tips to improve (or build!) your startup’s branding:

Tip #1 — No persistence, no brand

For example, what are the labels you would associate with the Nike brand?

You’re probably thinking somewhere along the lines of sports, Michael Jordan,...

Today we’re exploring how cognitive bias affects venture capitalism. The topic is worth our time because investing is just as much art as it is science.

A venture firm works from a thesis, but a thesis is just a set of proposed understandings. Beneath the graphs and pie charts, the empirical anchors, lie fuzzier things like intuition, hope, and bias.

Let’s understand that bias to better understand why money gets allocated the way it does.

Brains Full of Bias

The human mind is prone to quirks of thought that distort reality. A fun example is the IKEA effect: the tendency to over-value items that you assembled yourself. The planning fallacy is another cognitive bias, one that software developers are familiar with, at least in practice — peop...

Have a great startup idea? Great! Now you need someone to build it. If you are not technical and don’t want to learn to code, how do you hire a great developer to build your MVP?

For many people the process of hiring the first tech person to build your early-stage startup can be very intimidating but it doesn’t have to be. During my time coding risk systems on Wall Street, I interviewed hundreds of developers for a spot on our team. Below are five things to look for in a promising candidate.

1. Look For a Person Excited About Solving Big Challenges.

Ask your candidate what was the biggest challenge she faced in her last few projects. If the answer involves anything about finishing the project on time, dealing with difficult clients or havi...

Ben is currently VP Product at GoInstant, a venture-backed startup focused on changing how we share and experience the web with co-browsing technology. GoInstant was recently acquired by Salesforce.com. He is also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, which is an early stage accelerator in Montreal. They’ve invested in five startups: Localmind, Massive Damage, HighScore House, qidiq and Happy Stuff. Three of those companies have gone on to raise follow on capital.

Prior to that Ben was the CEO and co-founder of Standout Jobs, which sold in 2010. He’s been an entrepreneur in the web space for 15+ years. Ben is also involved in a number of different projects as an advisor, consultant and mentor. His main interests include: Web/mobile startups...

A fair warning about pitching venture capital firms: no amount of preparation will guarantee that you will raise venture capital. But being unprepared is the fastest way to fail. You really only get one shot making the right impression with each venture capital firm and the last thing you want is to blow your chances because you didn’t spend the time to know your business inside and out.

Contrary to what you may think, venture capital firms don’t actually read business plans, but they are sure glad you have one.

In the previous section we explained how to find venture capital firms to send your elevator pitch to. Now we’ll explain what you’ll need when they ask you to present.

Executive Summary

Over the years the reliance on venture capital...