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So you’ve made the leap into the unknown and committed to finally starting your own business. Now what? The to-do list you have created looks huge and overwhelming, where do you start?

Business to-do lists will vary hugely from business to business, but there are a few questions you can ask yourself to decide which are the tasks you should be working on:

1. What will have the largest impact on my business?

Are there any tasks that have a leverage or scaling effect i.e. a little effort (or even a lot of effort) creates a much greater return on the time invested? For example; you may need to update your financial ledger with invoices paid and also come up with a new referral scheme, do the one first that has the biggest multiplier effect (...

Question: HOW do you find beta testers for your new product or service?

Finding the right pool of beta testers isn’t as easy as it sounds. Our startup founders share their personal experiences and best practices to find beta testers for your new product or service.

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

1. Interest-Based User Groups

At Salty Girl Seafood, we’ve chosen to categorize our potential customers by interest. We reach out to specific groups in our community, such as yoga studios, university programs, alumni networks, job-posting listservs, food bloggers and athletic teams to use their contact lists. When people hear t...

You may be an entrepreneur, but that doesn’t mean you’re running a startup. A startup isn’t just a new company — it’s a new company that’s designed to grow fast. Think about how Google would have made decisions early on compared to a new restaurant in your town.

For startups, this focus on growth should extend beyond setting goals. It should extend into the culture that pervades the business.

Many founders of startups are naturally focused on growth, and they assume this attitude will automatically trickle down to the rest of the company. But developing a growth-focused culture among a team that’s constantly adding new people is something you have to work at.

We went from five people on our team to 35 people in a matter of months, and it p...

While it was once an afterthought, cybersecurity should now be a priority for every business. Large businesses are still the preferred target for hackers, but this trend is shifting, as more small businesses are targeted by adversaries each year.

However deciding which cybersecurity product to invest in isn’t easy. For one, the market is rapidly changing and it’s difficult to keep up to date on the best methods. Additionally, there is no all-in-one comprehensive package for a company’s cybersecurity needs. Most times, businesses have to buy each security software individually – including firewall, anti-virus, and spam-filter solutions, among others.

But just because security tools might be difficult for some small businesses to navigate, d...

Michel Feaster is not a woman you’d expect to be scared of anything. Her company, Usermind, is taking on the massive market of customer relationship management (CRM) software by providing a truly personalized customer service experience. Their focus? Millennials.

“Millennials have zero tolerance for companies that are not personalized,” Michel tells Startups.co. “Pretty much every business is facing this world where they’re going to win these hearts and ears — or someone else is going to win the Millennials.”

But Usermind isn’t Michel’s first time on the startup merry-go-round. Her first foray into the startup world was as employee #19 at Apptio. She joined Apptio with the goal of learning firsthand the ins and outs of building a company fr...

Getting ready for our next semester’s class, I asked my Teaching Assistant why I hadn’t seen the posters for our new class around campus. Hearing the litany of excuses that followed –“It was raining.” (The posters go inside the building.) “We still have time.” (We had agreed they were to go up a week ago) — I had a strong sense of déjà vu. When I took the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy, excuses seemed to be our main product. So we created The No Excuses Culture.

No Excuses as a Core Value

In addition to customer discovery, creating end user demand, and product strategy, Marketing also serves as a service organization to sales. It drove me crazy when we failed to deliver a project for sales on time or we missed ...

It’s been a little over a month since I received my last paycheck as a full-time Developer. That’s the day shit got real.

I spent over a decade building products with great people at a Fintech company. Walking away from the comfortable six-figure job was hard, but ignoring my thirst for more was even harder. The decision to leave was easier knowing I had two chatbots in Slack’s App Directory. Both with thousands of installs, tons of dedicated users, and one starting to generate revenue. The door to botrepreneurship was waiting for me to walk through.

The Start

Around this time last year I began my exploration into chatbots. I had no idea of the onslaught that would soon develop. I was spending sleepless nights learning Node.js and tireless...

Just a couple of weeks ago, I closed my first ever investment in a private Silicon Valley startup. I didn’t go through the standard procedures though: while I did conduct my due diligence, I did not get pitched face-to-face in a nice conference room, negotiate deal terms, or seal the deal with a firm handshake.

Instead, like many other educated folks who are excited about startups but don’t quite have the wealth to be accredited investors, I invested through a crowdfunding campaign.

There’s a storm of hype building around this new equity crowdfunding model, which allows middle and even working-class people to invest in a startup by the tens or even hundreds of thousands, without many of the onerous regulatory and accounting issues that so ...

Contrary to popular mythology, venture capitalists are just regular guys who make bets on big opportunities like anyone would in the stock market. They do everything in their power to make sure their bets pay off, but ultimately, even the best ones miss far more often than they hit.

While there are a handful of titles that are thrown around, such as General Partner and Principal, what matters the most is that you talk to a “Partner.”

A venture capitalist is charged with finding a relatively small number of investments (usually less than a dozen per year) to make over a 7 – 10 year period. While the venture capital firm may look at thousands of deals in a given year, they can only pick a handful of deals to pursue.

Writing Checks is Easy. Ma...

Amy Errett wasn’t the likely candidate to reinvent women’s haircare. For one thing, she doesn’t color her hair. For another, she’d never built a company shipping physical goods before.

And this wasn’t lost on her high-powered Silicon Valley network, who couldn’t quite understand why someone so “smart” was wasting her time on such a frivolous category. One they (Usually men whose wives could easily afford $400 salon treatments) just didn’t “get.”

Instead of listening to the Valley elite, Errett listened to her nine-year-old daughter who’d heard her ask countless family friends about their hair routine, whether they colored it, what they used, if they were concerned about the toxins in those treatments, the ammonia that could burn a hole in a...