So much has to go right for a startup to survive and thrive, it’s wise to know the most common, avoidable mistakes, made by first-time founders. Many first-time founders don’t know what they don’t know. Others are told, but they just don’t want to hear it and fumble. They lack the good sense needed to build a product people will […]
This is the twelfth and FINAL article in a series on how to start a company in 2020. See the previous article, Capitalize the Company All the founders I have coached over the years know my mantra well: To start and grow a successful business, you must learn to be a good operator. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are […]
This is the ninth article in a series on how to start a company in 2020. See the previous article, Create Name and Branding Strategy. Apologies for the delay between posts, I have been caught up in the COVID Craziness and helping startups put out fires. “The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful […]
The startup founder imperative is to decisively act on what’s most important and most immediate each week. What’s important and what’s immediate are two very different things. These two decision-drivers also change dramatically at each stage of the venture’s life cycle. For example, what’s most important and most immediate in the conception stage (finding Product-Market Fit while avoiding confirmation bias), is very different than […]
You are no doubt familiar with the idiom, “The devil is in the details.” It’s a well-known truism that almost nothing is as simple as it seems. This is especially true in business. Starting, buying, building and ultimately selling a business is almost always more complex than it seems when looking in from the outside. This is ode to another well-know saying, […]
A lot has been written about entrepreneurs and what makes them successful. A lot has been written about startups and why so many of them fail. Less has been written about entrepreneurial communities and what it takes to create a thriving startup ecosystem. I’d like to bridge these topics and share with you five very important drivers of entrepreneurial success, […]
Today marks the 19th anniversary of my company, StartupBiz.com. That’s a lot of chapters…a lot of lessons. Figured I would share a few. It’s Friday, I’m celebrating with a glass of wine and reminiscing. Grab a glass and join me. (Thank you, BTW, to all my friends, colleagues and connections that sent me a congrats note here on Linkedin.) I […]
This is a follow up to my last post, “What I’ve Learned About Writing Successfully On Linkedin.” In that post, I define what it means to write successfully on Linkedin by using a system of objective and subjective metrics. I describe the metrics I use to gauge the success of posts and encourage writers to adopt them or devise their […]
Just about everyone I know has a company. It’s a fashionable thing to have these days. Even people who work full time at a company have their own company on the side. Most of these companies are not businesses. If you are not intimately familiar with the startup world, it’s easy to confuse the two. It’s a popular myth that […]
In my last post, I argued the need for startups to create and institute good processes. I explained the differences between good processes and bad processes. In this post, I will suggest a process for creating good processes. This process can be used by the founders to create company-wide processes, or by the various department heads empowered to create the […]
