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Say you’re invited to dine at Buckingham Palace with monarchs from around the world. Would you show up wearing a bathrobe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable, right? Yet, app creators do it all the time. After all their hard work, at last about to go live on the App Store and Google Play and join the company of app royalty, they hurry their app into terrycloth screenshots and expect to be fed like a king.

Not gonna happen.

Choosing to give your app anything less than outstanding screenshots on your app pages is a big mistake. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Understandably, plenty of Founders press forward thinking I can’t pay a developer any more to design screenshots or every time there’s a new release and I need to make updates,...

When you’re starting out, you’re faced with thousands of decisions that are all competing for your limited time. But to get your startup moving, you need to prioritize your needs and lay the groundwork for your business to thrive.

Free, low-cost software allowed us to build our business efficiently and prolong key hires. By investing in tech that takes care of routine business needs, you can limit your spending and boost your company’s chances of survival.

Here are five programs that helped us get off the ground and can help you, too:

Dropbox

Dropbox is a great tool to keep track of the files that your entire team needs to access. Dropbox offers cloud storage and file syncing for free. Many tech startups create and store their files and dat...

We’re excited that you graduated college. We’ll high five you when you complete your MBA. Oh, you’re a doctor now? That’s wonderful.

Congratulations on all of your college degrees — you’ll be happy to know they mean nothing here.

Now, before you start pelting me with your student loan re-payment coupons — let me explain why we want you to be excited about this fact.

We’re a Meritocracy

What is a meritocracy you might ask? It’s essentially a system where groups of people progress based on merit and ability — rather than privilege, wealth, social class, etc.

In our time we’ve seen very little correlation or causality between the level of education people have achieved and their ability to excel at their jobs. In fact, many of our best pe...

Ah, the age old question: “What are investors looking for?”

Unfortunately, there is no universal answer here. The obvious response is “a return on their investment,” but that’s just an outcome — it’s not what helps you determine how to pitch your business today.

By understanding each of the key areas that investors react to, you can be better prepared to position your deal to be more attractive. You can also begin to understand why they may not be reacting the way you would expect them to.

Location, Industry, and Stage

The easiest way to see how you’re a fit for a potential investor is to align with the type of investments they typically make.

Are you starting a cookie company? Great, but you don’t want to reach out to a private equity comp...

Equity investment means you’re trading funding for a stake in your company. Unlike a debt provider like a bank or lender, an equity investor isn’t looking for a simple interest payment on the money they’ve provided you. They are exchanging more risk for more reward – a lot more.

The “more reward” part is what you should be paying attention to. Equity investors aren’t interested in earning 8% on their money with these types of investments. They are looking for 50%, and most likely a lot more. That means you’ll need to prove that your investment can yield a massive return on their capital.

Not Every Business Makes Sense for Equity Capital

Equity capital tends to follow businesses and industries that can experience massive growth and have expo...

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a Founder and a VC walk into an elevator…

In all seriousness, if you’ve spent any time swimming in the startup waters, you’re probably familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch. But in case you missed that day in Founder School, the scenario is this:

Say you got in an elevator, and standing in that elevator was the one person that could make or break your business. You have the length of that elevator ride to convince this person to get on board. And no, the electricity can’t suddenly cut out and leave you with a couple of hours to fill instead of a handful of seconds.

Well — What the @#*! do you say?

There’s a reason the elevator pitch has become such an icon of entrepreneurship. And it’s not be...

What is customer segmentation?

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing a large group of customers into smaller groups, based on certain characteristics. It’s also sometimes called “market segmentation.”

Why is customer segmentation important?

Customer segmentation is important because it helps companies market more effectively to their customers. If you want your marketing budget to go as far as it can, it’s essential that you know who you’re marketing to and what they respond to when it comes to advertisements.

For example, if your company had a customer base that included both 14-year-old boys and 45-year-old men, you wouldn’t use the same marketing techniques with the two groups, would you? But you can’t even know that you have ...

When Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann introduced himself to Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber turned on his heel and uttered the now-infamous words, “See you in the trenches.”

On the surface, the Silicon Valley feud seems misplaced: Postmates is a logistics company that connects couriers and consumers, and Uber’s bread and butter is transportation for humans.

But Uber has been trying to establish its own competing delivery service, and both companies are using big brands to fuel their explosive growth. Uber has partnered with the NFL, Capital One, and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Postmates recently inked deals with Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill, McDonald’s, and Apple.

Pursuing big brands has been a smart way for Uber to expose more ...

Planning to raise some capital for your startup? Well, before announcing your intentions to the world, take a step back and remember that investors are a notoriously skittish bunch. According to a Fundable study, venture capital and angel investors pour money into less than 1 percent of new enterprises, meaning it may be best to raise money away from the public eye.

A more low-key business fundraising approach isn’t as tough as it sounds, as most entrepreneurs unknowingly do it to some extent. If you’ve read about a startup that’s “killing” or “crushing” its fundraising goals, that’s usually a calculated effort to build the kind of buzz that entices on-the-fence investors to take the plunge before it’s too late.

To combat potential investo...

Recently, I hosted my eighth Marketplace Dinner. Marketplace Dinners are a series of happy hour-esque meetups that bring together founders and leaders at startup companies growing, you guessed it, marketplaces.

So far, we’ve gathered over 1,117 founders and leaders over eight events hosted at the offices of Thumbtack, Shippo, and DogVacay. In attendance were entrepreneurs and executors from Lyft, Airbnb, UpWork, eBay, Uber, InstaCart, and many more “unicorn” business marketplaces as well as burgeoning startups.

Each event is three hours of eating, drinking and telling tales of what it took to build a marketplace.

Why the need for Business Marketplace Dinners? Two reasons:

1 — Startup founders are incredibly collaborative and thoughtful.

As...