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Raising capital isn’t easy.

Don’t be fooled by the blog hype and sensational headlines – it’s still a game where less than 1% of new businesses will get funded by storied VCs and angels.

So for the rest of us, the non-one percenters, we need a more reliable playbook to invest our precious cycles in.

Busting the Startup Bubble

Let me get this party started with a big shot of sobriety.

Over 500,000 companies will be started this month in the U.S. alone. Venture capitalists will write less than 100 checks to them in the next 30 days. Angel investors will add just over 4,000. We’re still around 495,000 checks short of everyone getting a piece.

I share this math for two reasons.

1. To point out that if you’re going to bank your future solely on...

It’s so easy to get hung up on the details. Don’t get me wrong, they are all important. Your logo, for example, is a key piece of your branding. But should you spend months agonizing over the fonts and icons used in your logo? Should you wait until you can afford a professional designer to create a logo before you go forward with your startup?

If your answer to those questions is “Hell, no!”, then you’ll want to have a look at MakeLogoOnlineFree.com (MLOF). MLOF is a simple tool that enables anyone to create a free logo in minutes – and not some napkin doodle logo, but a professional logo that will make your business proud.

Making a logo truly couldn’t be any easier than using MLOF’s free logo generator. You enter the name of your brand, e...

Tell me if this pitch sounds familiar:

“If we could capture just 1% of the market for this product, we could do over $500 million in sales! And that’s with just 1% of it!”

It’s the basis for the all-too-popular and far-too-lame “1% of the market” approach. The suggestion, used by overzealous (and inexperienced) entrepreneurs is that 1% of a market is so little, that it couldn’t possibly be hard to capture.

And let’s face it, 1% is awfully small!

1% of a pizza is about two bites. 1% of your mortgage payment probably means you can pay it with the cash in your wallet. 1% of a typical business book is only two pages. Boy, that sounds ridiculously easy.

Yet 1% of the market for a particular product ain’t a slice of pizza or few pages of a book. ...

A company will only survive as long as it continues to have a strong customer base. Even the best products will fail without a steady stream of users.

Luckily, once a company has attracted its first customers, maintaining demand and continuing customer development momentum becomes considerably easier.

However, how do you go about finding customers as an early-stage startup?

In this extensive blog post, we’ve gathered some of the best and most valuable insights from Gagan Biyani, a Graduate of the Silicon Valley Founder Institute, as well as the co-founder of Udemy and Sprig.

How Do You Perform Initial Customer Research and Development?

When launching Sprig, Gagan planned the company’s development extensively, almost as if writing a marketin...

Paying your dues sucks. When I started my career, I got told by everyone older than me that whenever they handed me shit work I should be thankful because I was “paying my dues”.

I assumed it was some tired colloquialism for getting young people to do work at sub-market rates without questioning their own value.

Virtually every business is built on software, whether it’s a website, a mobile app or desktop programs. Companies that are good at outsourcing can launch products and services much faster and cheaper than competitors, and maintain a long competitive edge. Unfortunately, most companies are awful at it. A horrifying two thirds of outsourced projects are late, over budget, incomplete or malfunctioning, and often all four at once. This unnecessarily costs businesses billions each year.

I know a little bit about outsourcing because I was the founder and former CEO of RentACoder.com (later renamed vWorker.com), an outsourcing marketplace with 400,000 users, and $131 million in projects. I saw numerous companies making the same mistakes over and ...

Remote work. Work from home. Telecommuting and teleworking. Whatever you call it, distributed teams are becoming increasingly popular… and it’s here to stay.

A recent Gallup Poll noted that, in the U.S., telecommuting for work is up 37% in the last decade. 34% of business leaders surveyed at a recent Global Leadership Summit in London predicted more than half of their company’s global workforce would work remotely by 2020. Around the world, more and more companies are building distributed teams, just like we have at Mailbird.

When you look at the benefits of having a distributed team, it’s understandable why we chose to build our team this way. Happy people make great work and, generally speaking, those who work remotely are happier, more ...

Today’s Favorite Find: Simple Poll

Elevator Pitch

Simple Poll is a Slack bot that lets you make — you guessed it! — simple polls.

Why We Love It

Another day, another Slack bot, amirite? Seriously though, as Slack continues their crazy momentum of 2015 into 2016, and quickly works toward their world domination of all of our offices, both remote and IRL, we’re only going to see more and more Slack bots pop up. And from my view right now, at the onset of 2016, it makes a lot sense: Slack shows no signs of slowing down.

(Check back this time next year, and we’ll see if I’ve had to eat my words or not. To steal the iconic line from Project Runway: In tech, one day you’re in and the next day? You’re out.)

The latest Slack bot to catch my eye is ...

The business of buying or selling a startup is a murky world that most folks have no concept for. We hear about the end result – one hot company gets bought by another. But we rarely know what goes on behind the scenes to get to that point.

Let’s talk about just that.

I’ve had a fair bit of experience on both sides of this equation, as I’ve sold a few companies and have also purchased a few (Launchrock, Clarity.fm, and KillerStartups) quite recently. At Startups.co we talk to a lot of companies about potential acquisitions. (If you’re in the startups space and have a great product, feel free to email me about it.)

In the past six months, I’ve explained our process of acquisition to dozens of companies, and it has become clear that people do...

Question: What is one thing to look for when investing in a startup?

The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

How Customer Focused They Are

I ask every founder, “How many sales calls did you make in the last week?” If founders spend more time perfecting features than speaking with potential customers, their focus is in the wrong place. They might have a great product. It might look like a business. But without customers, it’s not a business. If the ...