Team is more important than the startup itself. Investors prefer invest in the Jockey over the Horse. There may be n number of reasons for not getting through the funding rounds. If your startup is able to provide 10x return I can invest straight away. However, I will look at the team first and f...
I was just speaking with a colleague about this as we are both starting new startups and were reflecting on our previous projects together. In hindsight we recognize that one of the main challenges was proper expectation setting around adoption and engagement. If someone else is setting those exp...
If you take less money out than the fair market value of your time, it's a hobby. If you can pay yourself a fair market wage, you own a job. If your business had profit beyond your fair market wage, it's a business. There is a section on this in my book; How To Sell My Own Business. You see, ...
There are some things that you can do for the safety of your rental dresses. Getting business insurance is the first and most practical thing to do but it is not possible to claim insurance after each and every instance of product damage. So apart from insurance, you will also need to have care m...
You really have two forms of payment here given that you can't be paid out of the small sum of money the founder has. The decision as to what to accept depends on the idea the person has and your belief in it. 1. Equity It's called sweat equity for a reason. If the person you've been approac...
You use the title co-founder, which indicates a partnership and mandates that the tech hire (I'm assuming is the CTO) be provided with the perks and benefits of other co-founders. If you are using the term co-founder loosely and there is no formal co-founder designation in place, then wait 6 mont...
Competing in this category when there are so many dominant incumbents is really difficult. You'll need a product that significantly leapfrogs that of the existing leaders, which means it's likely mobile-first and focuses on a simplified, minimalistic user experience that delivers on the core use...
The way I was approached as a marketing co-founder is that I reconnected with a friend at our high school reunion. He was a highly technical founder who had run his business for a year but wasn't getting the results he wanted. He had no marketing expertise and offered me a majority equity share t...
I would need to know a little more about your product or service but it sounds to me like you are making an improvement to an existing product or service and that to me sounds like a viable business model. If you can package whatever the specific service or product is in a scale-able way throug...
Mashable is the best blog a tech CEO should connect with. There are literally hundreds of books to sort through and you need to find books specific to what you are doing and what you will connect with.