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It was only a few short months ago that I jumped out of my steady job airplane in lieu of a parachuteless descent to San Francisco. With virtually no meaningful savings or product development experience, I started to frantically fabricate my company, Pronto Concepts Inc., into a parachute on the way down.

All I had was an idea for a product I thought people would like but I never imagined I could do it alone. I started my journey with a search for a co-founder, only to find out it could have been my biggest mistake.

Why would you want a co-founder?

The typical first step for any potential venture is to congregate a core team of co-founders. This is not done without merit, for there are several reasons for wanting to go at it with teammates...

As a startup founder, one of the most popular questions you’ll get is “Who are your investors?” The industry operates under the assumption that most startups are working with venture capitalists and angel investors, and for good reason. VCs and angels not only provide the capital to get your company off the ground, but the advice they can give and introductions they can make are often as valuable, if not more, than the money.

But, for young companies just taking off, getting through the doors of VCs and angels can be tough. Not to mention, no founder is ever keen on the idea of giving away a part of their company.

When you’re struggling to find VC funding, or want to maintain complete ownership, people will often recommend you try crowdfund...

It’s easy to get lost in the Silicon Valley sauce. I know because I’ve been there. Startups are sexy and we’re surrounded by news of big rounds of funding, the newest cohorts accepted in to prestigious accelerators (like Y Combinator) and essays from legendary investment firms such as a16z.

The examples are endless.

The VC Way

They’ve all earned their names for a reason and produced excellent learning resources for aspiring founders.

But, there’s one caveat, often overlooked by new founders:
They create fantastic resources, tailored toward founders headed down the venture capital (VC) route.

This might seem like small fries— But, not being aware of this caveat can fundamentally (and subconsciously) shift an entrepreneurs evaluation of wh...

"Is 60 hours of work per week enough? 80? 100? Do I just work ALL of them?"

In startup culture, we've developed a pretty broken mantra that "more hours equals more growth". We believe we can kill ourselves to success, and if we're being fair, there's a bit of that requirement in building something from nothing, but the real question is — how many hours should we devote to our startup per week?

Before we get into the number of hours we work, let's first focus on the quality of hours we work.

Remember the 40-hour baseline was established at the turn of the 19th century, popularized by the Ford Motor Company in an era where the number of hours that were worked directly drove the growth of the company.

Nowadays, the correlations are rarely t...

We’re excited to see how communities on Slack are steadily growing day by day. People from different countries and backgrounds discuss a various range of topics in these communities. It is a source of valuable information and contacts we use every day at Standuply while building a Slack bot for remote Agile teams.

We decided to compose a list of Slack communities for your own good. It took us several weeks and after we the list contained more than 400 communities. You’ll see number of members in brackets.

I. Product Talks

🚀 Startups and Product Development

• Startups Live (n/a): Twice-a-week chat with Founders of startups.
• MindTheProduct (6201): International product community. A good one!
• Startup Study Group (6014): Growing community of he...

I’ve been a part of many brand launches over the years. Some have gone smoothly and some haven’t. Looking back, the most successful ones in my mind kept it simple. In doing so, they really focused on three basic areas and how they interact with one another.

Image

When developing an image, I advise people to focus on a few key areas to start with. If you try to tackle everything that a big agency would tackle, you quickly find yourself knee-deep in templates, acronyms, and exercises that are time-consuming and confusing. The tips below are the natural conclusions you’d reach wading through that confusion — keep reading to save yourself some time and suffering.

1. Color – Finding a color palette that visually represents what you stand for is cr...

Q) Where did the idea for Team Jet Set come from?

Josh King Madrid: Team Jet Set came from me deciding to surround myself with people who wanted to win in all aspects of life, who wanted to go beyond the normal expectations and raise the standards. I wanted to create a winners circle of millennials. I wanted to surround myself with entrepreneurs who thought on the same wavelength as I did, individuals who had a growth mindset.

When I was younger, I didn’t have people who had the same mindset or aspirations as me around, so I had to create the environment that I wanted. There was no place for anyone, Millennials specifically, to be able to reach out and find someone making a difference that could mentor them and teach them how to attain the...

We’re living in a world where customer expectations are higher than ever. The traditional one direction advertising flow has been replaced by audiences that demand highly personalized content and valuable experiences.

To answer this demand, create more relevant messages and foster a two-way dialogue between a business and its customer, more and more marketers are implementing interactive content in their strategies.

Here is what you need to know to jump on the interactive content bandwagon and start creating content that increases engagement, generates more conversions and provides valuable customer data.

What Is Interactive Marketing?

NG Data points out that the term interactive marketing encompasses dynamic and personalized content and l...

As your business grows, so does your need to scale sales efficiently. Scale can be your best friend, or the elephant in the room threatening to knock your growth off course. Your sales team needs special attention to scale efficiently. They’re a huge part of why your company is successful, don’t lose the magic that makes you special. Here are the areas to pay attention to when it’s time to scale your sales team.

Sales Training & Mentorship

Training a small team is easy. You know exactly what works and how to communicate it. Communicating the skills and strategies your team needs as a big organization becomes much more difficult. You won’t always get 1-on-1 time with each rep who talks to your customers.

It’s important to develop internal t...

Pandora was never the darling of Silicon Valley. Ever. It never had the hype of Spotify, the scale of a hot social app, or the vision of Netflix. And yet, what it has always had is a leadership team that would not quit and a passionate user base who wouldn’t quit on the product either.

You hear a lot about the great entrepreneurs not giving up… but you hear less about founders pitching 348 investors before they got a yes, less about founding teams who went years without pay, less about founders who personally racked up half a million in debt trying to stay afloat. It took three acts of Congress to save Pandora at one point… and that was when a grassroots campaign by its users bailed the company out. More people complained that Congress migh...