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Mark Robinson and Sam Lee, the founders of Class.Travel, sat down with us to discuss how to launch and create apps that users love. The two met over tacos and Mexican beer, and stumbled upon the idea to create Class.Travel, a platform allowing you to easily book hotels.

Both have a background in computer science and have always wanted to start their own companies. Below they share their top ten tips on creating a user-friendly mobile app.

1. Foster a pool of qualified users
   Find people who are interested in your product or service and really lean on them. Let them offer feedback, involve them in decisions, and keep them posted on news and updates. These people will be your first customers and potential investors down the line.
2. Get advice from...

When Uber first entered the saturated world of on-demand food delivery, it wasn’t easy. Especially considering how crowded the space already is (consider Seamless, Postmates, Grubhub, and now Amazon). Still, UberEats took off, offering its menus in 120 markets around the world in just three years; it even earned more than Uber’s original ride-sharing platform.

Uber makes it look easy, right? But starting a business or transitioning into an already packed industry can be difficult, regardless of whether the company is a well-known conglomerate or a brand-new startup. To begin, business leaders should learn who their customers are — even before marketing. You’ll never attract an audience if you don’t know who your target is (or what their nee...

Building a weekend side project or an MVP to validate your startup is not as hard as you think. Whether you’ve never written a line of code in your life or your GitHub profile link is in your Twitter bio, there are existing tools that you can use to build your initial product in a day and sometimes even a few hours! I’ll share some of these with you that make up my MVP toolkit.

First, let’s focus on what I think is one of the most important considerations and that is validation. Your whole goal when building an MVP is to either validate so you can continue down the path you are assuming is correct (with added conviction), make changes with new learnings (pivot idea, product, and or approach), or realize that what you assumed is not worth y...

There’s something weird going on at Conversio. The team is spread out, not just across cities, but across continents. They get together as a team about once every six months. And they just might have one of the strongest company cultures out there.

Their secret: the entire Conversio team is intensely, radically, maybe even fanatically committed to their company culture.

Not that that’s a bad thing. Quite the opposite. If startup culture comes down to what’s in the water at the company water cooler, we could all stand to take a sip of what the Conversio team is drinking.

And that formula has its roots with the company’s Founder, Adii Pienaar.

Startup culture is something of a passion of Adii’s. When he first started Conversio, he began deve...

If you’re expecting to get the funding you need to take your startup to the next level, you need to get serious about your business pitch. Without the right amount of preparation, people are not likely to throw money at your “amazing” business idea.

Here are some business pitch tips based on my experience as a CEO and entrepreneur. They will help you impress potential investors and find the right fit for your business.

Getting Ready

Benjamin Franklin was right. “By failing to prepare we prepare to fail.”

Leave your startup business pitch preparation to the last minute and a “thanks but no thanks” is all but a fait accompli. If you think natural charm and some ‘ad-libbing’ will get you through, please think again.

Research your audience

Onc...

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, I believe, is that we’re all trying to grow our businesses in an age of significant distraction. You carry mobile devices that have you tethered to a network millions of people deep, you’re juggling multiple applications at all hours, and pushing the limits of how many things you can track on a regular basis.

At some point, something has to give – and when it does, your productivity and work/life balance takes a hit.

We all struggle with this problem to some degree, and it can be helpful to know how others manage to grow and thrive despite constant distractions and unending task lists.

I recently sat down with content marketing influencer and social media strategist Jeff Bullas to find out h...

Startup entrepreneurs face the daunting task of getting everything in order and taking care of even the minor thing precisely. Ranging from finances, back-end, front-end development to marketing and product launches, a startup entrepreneur has to take care of everything possible. Most of the time and personnel is wasted on administrative tasks which can be completely automated through the use of some powerful tools. Getting your idea developed into a full-fledged business is the primary task of an entrepreneur and a startup is no way endowed with hordes of cash to hire more personnel, unless backed in millions by a VC or angel investor.

Every startup has to operate in the financial constraints imposed on it and has to limit the personnel wo...

What is an Inc.?

“Inc.” stands for “incorporated.” If you see it after the name of a company, it means that company is legally incorporated in at least one state. The founders have filled out all the paperwork, paid all the fees, and is viewed as a corporation by the government and the IRS.

How does an Inc. work?

Structure of a Corporation

Let’s look a the structure of a corporation, which most Incs. are. Corporations have three main tiers of management: shareholders, directors, and officers.

Shareholders The shareholders of a corporation are the owners. They’re the ones who “hold” shares of stock. Depending on how much stock they own, they have varying degrees of influence on the corporation — but they don’t make the decisions or run the d...

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Aeclectic Tarot, the internet’s largest resource for tarot cards and the people who love them, is that it feels like a step back in time.

A time when the internet was still small; when personal pages would put together by hobbyists; when online forums still felt like loving communities. And that, founder Kate Hill, tells Startups.co, is deliberate.

“My audience is not 25-year-old tech workers,” Kate tells Startups.co. “In the New Age space, being really corporate and polished doesn’t really fit.”

As as a result, her site is an amazing example of how listening to your audience and community rather than blindly following online trends can result in something amazing.

A ‘90s site that has withstood...

SEO. You’ve heard the acronym and you know that a lot of small businesses are seeing great growth from investing in it. But you don’t know how to do it, or what it can mean for your company.

SEO is an ongoing full-company initiative. It involves a very real investment.

But, you’re a small business or a startup. You have very limited resources, a short financial runway, and you’re trying to get something new off the ground. So what does SEO mean for you?

In the next 10 minutes you spend reading this article, my goal is to help you understand what SEO can mean for a small business like yours. We’ll cover:

1. How to invest in it from the beginning;
2. What you can do in the coming weeks to set yourself a solid foundation;
3. How to leverage PR for SEO...