Category: Startup Business (Page 5 of 19)

Mistakes tend to happen for even the most seasoned startup veterans. Maybe you scaled too quickly, mistimed your product launch, or perhaps you just hired the wrong person. Whatever the reason, mistakes often provide a humbling opportunity for reflection and personal growth, and most importantly, give you an idea of what not to do going forward. At the end of the day however, there are some mistakes that can easily be avoided by listening to the advice of others.

We spoke to nine startup founders and asked them what their best advice was for avoiding the most common startup mistakes. Here’s what they said.

1. Focus Read More...

Below are some incredible books recommended for entrepreneurs…

by Jim Burnett, founder of ExpertOpinions.info

“To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch others on houses they can’t afford, and when they’re caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success, car dealers pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest. It’s endless, the pitching – endless, exhilarating, soul-sucking, and as unrelenting as death.”

Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins Read More...

by Howard Edelman, co-founder of BUILD

Several years ago I had decided to start my first medical device company. For the first year, I was slogging it alone in my garage building and testing prototypes and struggling to prove a concept.  Given the stage of the project, it made the most sense to be on my own for time. I knew the project needed to be managed and executed this way until a certain amount of risk was removed. After that, maybe then the project would become something more. I thought I would be able to attract more capital and the right team members after I achieved certain goals.

For a long period early on when discussing or presenting the company, I would refer to it as “the project” thinking this somehow made is more manageable with the skeleton crew.  I remember squirreling this lesson away from a board member during my salad days at another startup. His project had suffered through years of lean times later to graduate to a “company” when he felt supported by the right management team that took him years to assemble. Read More...

Mike Ryan discusses the value of joining a business incubator.

Jack jumps out from his box and shouts out loud ‘I don’t want to live in here anymore, I want to build my own Big Box’. Jack thought he didn’t want to be just another Jack who lived in someone else’s box – he wanted to be different. He had the passion and he thought in his mind, “What more does one need to build his own big box, besides the passion to build one”.

So, when he jumped out of the old box he felt free, he felt excited, he knew he could now build a box of any size he wanted. And to no one’s surprise he chose BIG and set out to make the biggest box that anyone could think about. But there was one problem, Jack had never built a box before – he had only lived in it!

We see many startups making the same mistake as Jack –to start making the biggest box even before understanding how to make a box. There are certain key things that entrepreneurs miss out in the excitement of embarking in their journey. I have come across some such typical problems after interacting with few startups and going through their business plans while running my startup incubation & consultancy firm. I thought would be useful if I shared them, for all the Jacks who are thinking about jumping out of their respective boxes: Read More...

by Stamatis N. Astra, Founder & CEO at PhotOral

We entrepreneurs are wired to get things done. We are constantly chased by the burn rate, the pitch deadline, the release countdown and the launch date. We must say what we are doing and then simply do it. The latest mantra for startups is a lean and mean methodology, where eager angels can throw in a pittance of seed money to test your idea.

Now with the flood of cloud and mobile apps, we should throw our idea to the masses and prove its demand.  Sprinkle in the accelerators, a boot camp that preps founders to be ready for an inflection point, and a demo day in 3-6 months. Young founders are trained to set aggressive deadlines, try their idea, and if it doesn’t work, pivot. The phrase “There is always the enterprise” is so often used, someone should trademark it. Get to market, get the revenue, get more features, get more updates, get more products…and do it faster than your dot-com predecessors. Indeed, “Fail Fast” is not only a badge of honor among founders but an expectation among investors. Read More...

by Ian MacIver Mobile Consultancy

After decades of living through the technical revolution we now all enjoy, there are a few keys points we should always look out for. These are the indicators that lead to the next set of revolutionary changes.  The first one is ‘what do masses of people do today but want to do it in a more convenient and quicker way but do not know they can or want to?’ Seems an odd statement I know. Example would be hotmail when it was first created. At the time when hotmail was getting its first funding, those people who could use email could only used it via their company accounts. There was no link between the email server and a web page. No ability to create a private email account or access it anywhere on the net as it was then. Second one is ‘A fundamental change in the capacity to consume’. If the capacity increases multiply time that of the current consumption rate a major change will occur.  Example from the normal world is motorways or freeways. If you change a normal road to a 6 lane freeway over a 100 mile range we all know people will travel more and use it for many different things we would never have imagined.

How does this relate to new start-ups?  The key question is, does your start-up enhance or change the way people already function today, or are you creating a complete new process/concept that people have never done before? If it is the first one, then your job will be much easier because the customer base is already in the mindset of the product. The hotmail example grew so rapidly because people already knew what an email account was and the demand was already there.  The capacity question is one of the main triggers for new innovation. I have always viewed a world where 100MBs are available at all times in all locations as a major break point for rapid innovation. We are now looking at the roll-out of 4G mobile phone coverage which will be followed by 5G in a few years. It will be able to manage 100Mbs download and about 20Mbs upload depending on the configuration. With this amount of capacity available to your customers, now is the time to think what could be available to the end customer when bandwidth was not a problem. But that is of course what everyone is talking about.  What they are not talking about is; can we use this capacity in a different way.  If you have all this capacity can you now have distributed parallel computing from your customers? Can your customer’s fixed or mobile devices be part of your business? Why do you have to have servers in racks when you already have customer’s devices with spare processing power? Some may remember the SETI program which used spare PC processing power to crunch images from space. It was a great idea with limited bandwidth at the time. Now bandwidth is not a problem can we move into the space where the capacity allows us to distribute the company’s need to process across thousands of customer devices lowering the cost and environmental impact of us running servers? I am sure there are many questions or perceived restrictions in this idea but it is for the innovators to create a situation where new ideas succeed. Read More...