You’ve spent months building your startup. You’ve validated your idea through user feedback until you’re confident you’ve hit product/market fit. Your startup is ready to scale. All you need is money to fuel your growth engine. Fortunately, there’s never been an easier time to find investors for a startup. Compared to 15 years ago, US-based VC […]

The ecommerce world beams with opportunities for financial success, job independence, and life satisfaction. But success comes with a price. I’m not talking about an emotional cost (although that may also be true), but a financial one. In order to get a profitable ecommerce store running, you need to make a lot of decisions, including choosing

You’re excited to start your own business, and dying to quit your day job, but you may be wondering: How long will it take me to become an entrepreneur? Weeks? Months? Years? This is a hard question to answer because, well, you don’t become an entrepreneur like you become a doctor. Becoming a doctor is

The famed Apple marketing whiz Guy Kawasaki once said about starting a business, “the hardest thing about getting started is getting started.” And while we entrepreneurs are naturally motivated people, he was certainly right in one respect. From a funding perspective, it can be damn hard to start a business. Sure, the eruption of digital

What do Airbnb, Slack, Uber and their founders have in common? They’re all examples of what life can be like when you make it big as a tech startup founder. But billions aren’t made overnight. It takes a great idea, an even greater team, and usually some money to get started. Where should the money

Poor experiences with shipping can cost you customers, sometimes even before the sale is complete. But great experiences lead to repeat business. Of course, we all want to deliver those great experiences, but man, it can cost a lot. It’s hard to focus on one operational aspect like shipping, and put the time into figuring

I’ll never forget that one morning when I walked into the office, just like any other day, and got fired on the spot. I was left with a mortgage, bills, and a serious panic attack. That’s when I made the decision to become my own boss. Three years later, my co-founder Matt Callen and I launched

What differentiates pitch decks that inspire investors to open their checkbooks from those that leaves them apathetic and skeptical? Developing a killer investor pitch deck to fund your business does not come effortlessly to most founders. Yet the quality of your pitch deck can determine whether your business accelerates at breakneck speeds or crashes and burns before

While your incredible, unique, surefire business idea will be sure to captivate investors, you won’t get very far in finding financial support unless you can also tell its financial story. That’s the purpose of your business financial plan—to show your potential funders what a good bet this is. You aren’t just a dreamer. You’re a

Business growth doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires a long-term strategy that lays out what it will take to achieve such growth, exactly how you will pull it off, and at what cost. That last part, the cost, is critical. Aligning a growth plan with a budget is something so many entrepreneurs struggle