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Question: What is one critical thing I should consider before starting my first business?

The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.

Marketing Plan

You should have a written marketing plan in place before starting your business. This is the most overlooked puzzle piece in modern business. You outsource your accounting and your legal, but most companies think they can do their own marketing without experience. While your business will evolve, why not get there quicker with a strategic marketing plan by a professional?

— Steven Newlon
SYN3RGY Creative Group

Unique Factor

Make sure your business concept can stand out in the crowd. If ...

It’s hard to think of an innovation that has had a more transformative impact on the business landscape than the rise of crowdfunding.

Once upon a time, the only people who could bring new products to market were the ones who already had the capital and connections to make it happen. Now, thanks to crowdfunding, anyone with an idea and an Internet connection can mount the next big crowdfunding campaign – and the next must-have product can come from anywhere.

Crowdfunding is a great way to raise the funds you need to make your vision a reality. It can also be an awesome way to test a pricing strategy or validate demand for your product.

But crowdfunding campaigns aren’t (just) a fast track to capital or product validation. A successful crow...

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We are 3 co-founders in ideation phase of our SaaS product. How do we split equity fairly? When do we incorporate the company: now or later?

Alessandro Daliana, Leadership Coach and Consultant, answered:

Personally, I am a big fan of the consortium, or contractual joint venture, to get projects moving. In your case, the three co-founders write a contract setting out who is responsible for what work, who much they should be paid, estimate the hours, and so on, like any project. They nominate a lead, decide how to contribute any funds that are necessary, and anything else they may need. And, you conclude with a simple—or complex—way of converting all the resources al...

Last year, Tatiana Sorokina’s twin sister was struggling to figure out where she should do her medical residency. From the thousands of options, each with it’s own set of offerings and requirements, how could she know what really mattered? How could she even know what was available, much less what was good?

It was a nightmare, but Tatiana’s sister had something other soon-to-be med students didn’t: A data scientist for a twin. So in a move that might just qualify her for Best Sister of 2015, Tatiana created an algorithm that would help her sister sort through her many, many options.

When her sister got into med school, sanity intact, Tatiana brought the prototype to her colleague Louisy Raymond, a veteran marketer with years of experience a...

Neil Patel’s introduction of the author: When I think about branding, logo design, and designing great products, there’s one person I love working with. He has worked with me for many years and for several of my companies. His name is Ian Main, and this post—based on his latest work helping me rebrand Quick Sprout—is about Ian’s thoughts on how to create a great brand.

When I was growing up in Australia, my family would drive seven hours every Christmas holiday to visit my grandparents. There were five McDonald’s restaurants on that trip, and I knew exactly where each was and the distance between them. The sports teams I played for gave out McDonald’s gift vouchers, and McDonald’s sponsored our team equipment and ceremonies.

The colors, sm...

In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create web products that are helpful in the development process, and that we would use ourselves for building websites for clients.

From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.

In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all...

There’s a limited number of colours and shapes in this world, so your logo isn’t your whole brand. Your colour could remind a potential customer of a completely unrelated business (I recently thought of a well known auto care shop when looking at the website of a debt refinancer) and you need to rely on more than just that one aspect of your company to raise brand awareness.

If you have a marketing campaign, do you use just one channel? Only one ad image? Of course not, any campaign is more effective with multiple channels. It’s the exact same principle for “startup branding”.

Have you ever answered the phone without looking, heard “hey it’s me” and known exactly who it was? This is essentially what you want for your company. You want your...

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
~Bill Copeland

It’s not exactly a groundbreaking claim to say that setting business goals is crucial to the success of any company. But sometimes, as Founders, we get so focused on the big-picture goals we have for our company, we forget about another set of goals we should be setting: goals for our team.

Trying to run a company without setting team goals is kind of like a football coach sending their team onto the field without a game plan. You may score a touchdown, sure – but the more likely outcome is chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of hurt.

The big-picture goals you set for your company may be the roadmap that shows yo...

“While culture might eat strategy for breakfast — cynicism will devour your carefully-nurtured culture for lunch, dinner, and snacks in between.”

–Jason Eckenroth, Cynicism: Predator Of Your Company Culture

We all know what cynicism looks like. It isn’t hard to spot. It’s all around us. Maybe what’s hard to accept is that it can’t be stopped, to admit the scary truth that it’s highly contagious. Anyone can succumb to it who isn’t willing to examine oneself. Or step outside of a group that has been infected and begin the hard conversations that can cure the poison.

But where does it come from? What causes cynicism? How can you protect yourself and your company from it’s corrosive effects? In today’s Startups Live, Founders fearlessly confron...

The end of the calendar year is an extremely busy time for most entrepreneurs and business leaders. From the months of October-December, most of us are busy converting new customers, fulfilling last-minute orders, launching special holiday campaigns and offers, and trying to drive as much business as we can before the new year.

In addition, a lot of us spend the last few months of the year evaluating successes and failures, adjusting budgets, and deciding how teams will grow or shrink in the year ahead.

It’s one of the most taxing times of the year for anyone managing a business.

It’s also the time of year when it’s easiest to neglect friendships, personal hobbies, and family life.

When business is booming and you’re quickly approaching...