“Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.” – Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
On the Importance of Building Healthy Co-Founder Relationships, Navigating Investor Meetings, and Investing in Your Mental Health as a Founder.
A Chat with Abhinov Balagoni, Founder and CEO of Pax Credit on how he got started and what the future holds for Pax Credit
<em>A serial founder who sold a startup to Apple and worked on infrastructure projects at Google, Harmony.one founder & CEO Stephen Tse has raised an $18M seed round and assembled one of the top engineering teams to build a next-generation high-performance blockchain protocol.</em>
Actionable tips to set up a metaverse company or project in the web3 blockchain space from Jonathan Cohen, Founder and CEO of MetaNept
I’ve always found naming things to be particularly challenging. That is because a bad name is way worse than a good name is good - naming your car the “No-Go” (as the Chevy Nova was in Spanish) is far worse than a decent name like the Passat is good. Naming is, unfortunately, a negative sum game.
It's possible for a solo developer to build a profitable microstartup to pay the bills and live life on their own terms.
There is one of those "universal truths" in the world of startups that, like almost all of them, is neither as universal nor as TRUE as we usually think, and that investors often repeat: 9 out of 10 companies fail.
What's your background, and what are you working on?
I got a text from my Nanny on a Thursday. "Can I call you?"
The main thing for a successful marketing strategy is to keep track of it systematically: test hypotheses, learn from best practices, and constantly improve.
There are countless strategies to apply for the marketing of any startup. Here some personal marketing tips for startup founders are shared to follow in 2021.
What's your background, and what are you working on?
Interview with Thierry Schellenbach, co-founder & CEO of Stream, a provider of APIs and SDKs that enable product teams to add in-app chat and activity feeds.
First time founders build out of passion. They face a problem and try to solve for themselves, making assumptions that everyone has the same problem.
The ability to launch and scale a project efficiently is a practice mastered with experience and, in most cases, a whole portfolio of failures.
MedCrypt was nominated as one of the best startups in Encinitas in Startups of the year hosted by HackerNoon.
In an uncertain and polarised world, some things are worth remembering.
Founders and CEOs have a lot of tasks and responsibilities. Coaching the team, becoming a mentor for newcomers, and preparing for the end of the world.
Given a choice between lucky and smart vs unlucky and stupid, which one should you pick as a founder?
A high-performing technical founder can enter a rabbit role at the expense of other important activities. To get out, they can use reflective writing.
What if startup founders learning mixed martial arts - or mixed martial arts fighters found a startup. Takeaways of traversed startup journey and sports.
What's Your Background, and How Did That Lead You to Your Current Role?
Peter Kolmisoppi explains why The Pirate Bay is still alive and some websites aren't.
What every startup really needs is a quality, clean, easy-to-navigate website.
A few nights ago, I used the wrong pan to make dinner.
When most people hear the word “chip” in the context of a smart home, they immediately imagine the microchips at the heart of their smart devices. But whereas chips power the brains of an individual smart device, CHIP will power the brains of an entire smart home. CHIP will offer huge conveniences to consumers, but its openness may make it harder for hardware startups to build ecosystems and defend against inexpensive knock-offs.
Seth Flora is the owner of LEO Digital Marketing. In his spare time, he helps founders create business plans, form strategies, and more.
Over the past 7 years I have worked in large IT companies in the Russian Federation, EU, and in the USA. Here's what I wish I knew before I started each project
In the nearest future, worldwide economies will face one of the most powerful financial crises since 2008. There are a lot of reasons for it, but the root cause is coronavirus covid-19.
Choosing the right cloud provider can make a big difference in how bumpy the road to success will be.
Peace interviews Oluwatomi Solanke, co-founder and CEO of Trove Finance, a micro-investment platform that allows Nigerians to invest in foreign stock markets.
You have built a tech startup to provide an outstanding solution, but it is not necessary that all the people will understand your idea in the beginning.
How many people will click to check out the website shouldn't matter when you are trying to validate a product.
Entrepreneurship is tough and full of unknowns… Deciding to start a company is like going back to school on purpose, every single day, knowing that there’s much you don’t know. Luckily, it’s 2020: a whole lot of people have started startups before you, and many of them like to talk about it.
Founding CTOs weigh in on how they adapted their role when the company grew to suit their needs and that of their company.
Statistics about startup funding show that 77% of small businesses rely on personal savings for their initial funds. One-third of such companies use less than $5,000, while $10,000 is generally needed to get a business started. Only 0.05% of startups raise venture capital.
What's your background, and what are you working on?
Despite the bear market startups should not turn off their projects in the crypto industry and Web 3.0. A few tips for projects on how to start in a bear market
Joseph Woodbury of Neighbor.com shares three pieces of advice on how to raise capital — from integrating yourself into the local ecosystem to being able to change your plans on a moment’s notice.
May 1st, 2002, AOL at the time known as America Online announced a deal with Google. That deal was crucial and one of those that made Google the tech giant it is today. Would Google had lost that deal chances are it would have never become the monopolist we know today.
As someone who went through the co-founder dating process (and emerged with a fantastic partner), I thought I’d share a few “real dating world" tips.
How building in public helped the growth of my startup.
Confused if the startup life is for you? I'm a founder myself and I'll walk you through the 4 steps you can take to start building a startup.
Have you wondered why despite huge investments most of the businesses tend to fail? Yes, I am sure you have. And yet there are some that are able to scale heights, without much investments…
The most essential difference between Libra and Saga is a governance mechanism. In Saga, the owners of the currency and its "fate" so to speak are the SGA holders. Saga has a built-in democracy to prevent the case of plutocracy.
Although WFH is now the new normal because of COVID, managing a remote startup presents unique challenges. As first-time founders of a fully-distributed team, this is the advice and playbook we wish we read when we started out on this journey.
In this post, I’d like to share my learnings on how to validate product ideas quickly. This is an extremely useful skill to have when building 0 to 1 products, because most product ideas will fail in the market. So, better not spend 3-6 months building something that nobody wants. Note that idea validation is different from problem validation. Problem validation requires following a different playbook.
If a disaster were to occur, would your business be prepared?
The hard truth is, building a successful MVP is not as simple as coming up with an idea and taking it to a team of developers or a software development company.
In an effort to gain dominance, blockchain ecosystems are providing free money and resources for devs that #BUIDL on their chain.
Publications love to bombard us with stories of entrepreneurs who find instant success. The problem is “instant success” simply doesn’t happen.
SaaS is not a buzzword in 2019! It's a proven, efficient and most widely used model to deliver software to customers. SaaS stands for software as a service, which means the software is delivered as a continuous service over the web/internet where the customer doesn't have to download and install the product on his system. Examples of popular SaaS products include Zoho, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Twilio, etc.
The first time I’d considered working at a startup, I was still in college, commuting from my parent’s house to save on student loans.
As per the Small Business Administration reports 2019, 30.7 million small businesses have been set up in the United States. When you research the reasons for this many numbers, you will realize that there are no limits on who can become the entrepreneur. Setting up the business won't require any college degree, godfather, and a bunch of money.
You’re going to spend more time with your co-founder than with your spouse. This is why finding the right one is the one activity you CANNOT afford to rush. If you’re truly passionate about founding a company, you have only two options: compromise or keep on looking.
Lingke Wang and the Ethos team have recently raised over $46 million in order to simplify and modernize the archaic life insurance industry.
Could the forced remote work of COVID19 bring about new growth and a more fair work-life balance?
The launch of any project begins with three stages - market research, business plan development and team building. Building a team is the most challenging work for a founder as it deals with the most vulnerable material – human resources. For any project, an efficient and strong team is the key to success. Here are the main tips already successful entrepreneurs recommend to keep in mind when finding the right people to form the team.
Building a product that solved the enormous inefficiencies in digital advertising seemed like a win-win for everyone: consumers, marketers and publishers alike.
A Previous VC Reveals What Matters More Than Your Pitch Deck.
The world's best marketer isn't Mark Zuckerberg or Neil Patel, it's President Trump. With his marketing strategies, he became the most powerful person in the world. Here are 5 things we can learn from the world's top marketer:
Follow our detailed guide for discovering the product-market fit for your startup
Yes, we’re witnessing a crisis unfolding. Not only people get gripped by the coronavirus fear. It’s like a stroke for most businesses — some will recover, some won’t.
“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.”
As a kid I always wanted to be the best at what I did: school, sports, games, you name it. I remember playing cards with friends and if I lost and somebody laughed, I would get very upset and disappointed.
Launch is neither the beginning nor the end. It is a series of overlapping sequences. A typical one may include pre-build, pre-launch, launch, and post-launch.
Is there a repeatable process for coming up with new and good startup ideas? In this post, we distill insights from great founders and technologists, like Eric Yuan of Zoom, Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, etc and share three simple questions you can ask yourself to generate startup ideas worth pursuing.
Never Trusting Anybody, and the Impact it Had on Me
Emil first sketched the idea for the company on the back of a napkin during his flight to Mumbai in 2000. Today, the company is the world’s leading graph platform, powering mission-critical enterprise applications, including artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and master data.
Entrepreneurs tend to believe that all the stars in the sky need to be aligned perfectly for their start-ups to succeed. Because of this belief, they postpone their jump to entrepreneurship, often indefinitely.
The millennials are too tired of 9 to 5 jobs and a monotonous lifestyle for a decade now. They have a good skill set and corporate experience, which pushes, them to open startups with the knowledge gained from their work environment. But does everyone see success in venturing startups, and what are the difficulties they face to be consistent in their entrepreneurial dreams? Let us see the top 10 reasons for tech startups fail and how we can recover and be ready with measures to overcome the failures:
When building your startup you can have a great idea and the perfect market conditions and still come up short. For both your startup and investors, execution is key.
Success is not about being lucky or born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
As an entrepreneur, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to outsourcing software development.
As a business person without the tech skills to build an MVP, it can be tempting to look for a software development partner as soon as possible.
Though the FOMO is gone but here are the key takeaways that founders can learn from Clubhouse.
If you are aware of the values of carrying out the Product Design Process, then you are halfway through the success!
Analysing the growth strategy behind exclusive social media platform Clubhouse - which achieved a $1B valuation in less than one year.
A collection of insider tips from our "How I Raised It" podcast
As someone who has created my own startup, I understand how difficult it can be to for startups during the early stages. There can be so many problems including the lack of funding, the lack of business relationships or the lack of talent in the team. Therefore, I would like to share 4 different products and support schemes that helped me.
90% of startups fail. They mostly fail because of the lack of market need. That's why it's crucial to validate your product ideas before allocating resources to a software project that is destined to fail. How do you know for certain if there's a market need for the software that you'd like to develop, though? Pre-sales constitute an answer. A software pre-sale helps you validate your product ideas without investing in them. You also get to fund your software development with the money you earn from pre-sales and develop a product that the market truly needs.
Building a startup! You have an epiphany and say to yourself:
“Startup advisors are crucial to the success of your business.”
This checklist covers the most important aspects of incorporating your business so you can move forward confidently.
Here's why you can't and shouldn't be your startup's CEO forever. Eventually, if you're lucky, it'll come time to let someone else manage your baby.
More than 30.2 million people in the U.S. own their small business.
In this guide, I’m going to give you in-depth knowledge of a very popular and widely used client-side framework called Angular. This guide intends to help founders of non-technical background who wish to learn the basic idea behind Angular. It will also help you make a decision if it’s the right choice for your upcoming project, and, subsequently what a front-end developer must know about Angular and how to hire angular developers in the current scenario.
We often pay for air tickets more than necessary. And most of us know about that. However, we sometimes just have no time or patience to find better deals. That’s the reason why email subscribing services, sending their users notifications about advantageous flight deals, have recently become popular. They commonly work as freemium services offering free or paid subscription plans. Since this market is relatively young, we saw an opportunity to enter it with our product and launched our Manyflights system in late December.
I’ve been a full-time founder for almost a year but have been into startup culture for most of my professional career as a software engineer (~4 years).
Here is the exact process I’ve used to successfully interview software developers.
Science has a problem.
4 New Year Resolutions every startup founder should stick to in 2021 including taking care of mental health, implementing cloud tech, and more.
Since leaving the corporate world, and jumping into entrepreneurship I’ve founded three startups. In that time, I’ve seen my fair share of co-founders.
9 tips to improve your financial modeling game as a founder.
A large part of my role at Altar revolves around having conversations with entrepreneurs.
It’s a decision that can make or break a startup: Do you invest in in-house resources to create your product or do you outsource software development to a third-party developer? On the one hand, as a startup, shouldn’t product development be a core competency? On the other, surely it’s better to go to market as quickly as possible and allow the “experts” to help you get there and avoid all the pitfalls of technology development.
You don’t know, what you don’t know. Hold that phrase in mind as I explain why one of the worst job listings I’ve ever seen was so terrible.
You have a brilliant idea, but you have no idea how to build a startup. And you can’t code. You have 4 options:
The only way to learn is by starting and doing things relentlessly. You should go deep into a chosen space, and don't worry about making big leaps.
Finding a technical co-founder is one of the biggest challenges faced by startup founders. Here’s how Audapio’s Founder Dudley Gould overcame this common startup hurdle.
Building a Startup? Hopefully, that means you’ve found a problem or inefficiency, you thought long and hard about it, and now have a vision on the best way to solve it.
Almost 2 years ago, we launched Meddy out of a class project at college. We faced our fair share of challenges from lawsuits to team conflicts to engineering issues etc.
Launching a startup is a huge undertaking that will test your personal and professional relationships to the limit.
A recent nationwide survey aiming to better understand the “before and after” of emotions in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic has found that people’s #1 emotion now is anxiety, and before the outbreak, the #1 emotion was calm.
Choosing a technical co-founder is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an entrepreneur.
Less than a decade ago, we could only dream of being able to spend five minutes on a job that required 10 hours to complete. All we could hope for was a magic wand. Cargo dancing with tambourines could also help, but there was no guarantee (pun intended).
From “challenger banks” to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, fintech startups such as Stripe & Paypal continue to revolutionise the financial industry.
Ali Halabi moved to Istanbul in 2013 to solve the city's massive traffic problem. His first startup was an on-demand carpooling service, but it failed.
I recently sat down with Nelly Yusupova, a CTO & Startup Advisor with 18 years of experience in the tech industry. Throughout our conversation, she shared a number of tips and insights on exactly what you should do as a non-technical founder before you begin your search for a technical partner.
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