Forums Search

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...

Almost nobody rode the “Web 2.0” wave better than Reid Hoffman. He was the most prolific early investor backing nearly every major hit that would go on to become public except Twitter, and he created the second largest company to come out of the social media wave, LinkedIn.

It all came from one insight: The consumer Internet wasn’t over after the dot com crash. And Hoffman is the only person I’m aware of who never stopped believing it. Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and a lot of the early Web 2.0 investors have all admitted there was at least a time they went bearish… but not Hoffman.

He was planning on taking a vacation after PayPal sold to eBay, when he noticed everyone else had moved on to cleantech and other areas. You spend your life as ...

As a startup, it’s not exactly a secret that you need exceptional content in order to stand out from the crowd.

As Gary Vaynerchuk so bluntly puts it, “It literally doesn’t matter what business you’re in, what industry you operate in, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist.”

Of course, chances are you already know this, and are currently putting in the hours to brainstorm and produce top-notch content. Heck, you may have even enlisted some outside help, and already have your own team standing by, ready to turn out articles when you need them.

You’ve probably got a social media presence as well –and try to remember to keep things up to date. But for many startups –and even marketers for that matter, there’s a good chance ...

One of the most basic problems startups face is finding a way to channel the talent, resources, and enthusiasm at their disposal into concrete results. You might have an idea that can change the world, but without a concrete plan to bring it to life, even the most promising businesses can fail to reach their full potential.

Smart goal setting can keep all stakeholders in your startup on track and engaged with the project at hand. It can prevent procrastination from eating away at your enterprise’s potential while keeping your team’s energies focused on discrete objectives. One of the most popular goal setting methodologies is actually contained in the acronym SMART.

If you are looking to expand your startup quickly, SMART goal setting can h...

Conventional wisdom says that startups are at a disadvantage when building their customer base, because they don’t have the same manpower behind their efforts. But Steve Blank asserts that it is this perceived weakness that actually sets startups apart from—and ahead of—their larger competitors. It’s counterintuitive, but true!

Founders Engage Customers Directly

At large companies, employees are sent out into the world to find and talk to customers, reporting back with their findings. But if that employee reports back that the target customer isn’t interested, the passionate founder will undoubtedly believe that the fault is not with the product, but with the employee’s tactics.

At a startup, on the other hand, the founder is the one out p...

For many of us, the thought of becoming the employee once again may feel like a monumental step backward.

We worked so hard to be in a position to forge our own path that reversing course feels like total failure.

But the reality is being an employee again does have its advantages. Even if we decide to go back to being a Founder afterward.

I'm a Founder — how could I be an employee again?

It may be a terrible outcome.

The very nature of most Founders is that we generally don't like being told what to do. It's kind of our thing. It doesn't mean we're horrible people (right?), it just means we're naturally comfortable in leadership roles.

That's why most leaders are leaders.

It's not a subtle change. Once we've had total autonomy it's kind...

Most Founders taking investor money have never had an investor before – so we don't really know what to expect once we've been handed that big fat check.

There's a notion that once investors are involved, we'll get bullied around at Board meetings or pushed out like so many Founder horror stories we've heard. (Yes, Steve Jobs got fired at Apple).

Why do investors want to run my company

To be clear — they don't. At all.

The worst possible outcome for most investors is that they have to stop doing their job (investing) and instead do our jobs (running a company).

There are edge cases where individual angel investors (often with too much time on their hands) may want to meddle with the business, but most professional investors consider havi...