Brainstorming Brand Names Using Value Propositions
In this guest post, Grant Polachek from Squadhelp offers a guide to how you can create a great brand name through brainstorming.
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What Founders Need to Know: You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event – Start Looking
In this syndicated post, Steve Blank reminds founders who've taken funding that they need to look for potential acquirers and lays out a strategy for doing this without obsessing about it.
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My first Product Hunt launch
Valentino Urbano's inspiring story of how he launched Free My Desktop on Product Hunt.
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Deep domain expertise but no CTO? Here's a guide to hiring one
When you need to add a technologist to your founding team of domain experts, how do you go about finding the right person?
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Marketing Communications
In this syndicated post, Steve Blank lays out everything you need to know about marketing communications.
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The Tools Your Startup Should be Using and Why
Infographic about the tools your startup should probably use, and why.
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GDPR: The Quick and Dirty Guide to Getting Compliant for Startups and Small Business
In this quick and dirty guide, you get a simple set of steps you can take, if you fit a profile like many small businesses and startups, to become compliant enough with the GDPR to avoid fines, to treat your users fairly under the new regulation, and to work towards fuller compliance over time as the regulation gets interpreted and more best practices get established.
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100 Startup Tools of the Week
In honor of our issue #100, here are the 100 tools so far that made it to be tool of the week.
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Pitching your startup: Lessons learned
In this blog post, we'll focus on pitching in general, i.e. the art of promoting your startup through an in-person presentation, and on the type of material you would include in a pitch deck if you are pitching to attract investors.
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The $0 Subscription Startup Stack 2/4: Start selling
We'll talk about sales in this second installment. My recent background is from my B2B SaaS startup CrankWheel, so this and the next installment will be significantly slanted to the type of sales and marketing you do for a startup like that, but many or most of the tools and approaches will be relevant for most types of startups.
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The $0 Subscription Startup Stack 1/4: Build something and run it
I've been building a SaaS startup for a couple of years now, and one of the things I noticed after a few months of operation is that all those small subscriptions I had for various things needed for the operation of the startup really start to add up. We have enough revenue now that those subscriptions don't matter so much, but there was a time when they were a burden, particularly since we were bootstrapping. I got to thinking whether it would be possible to build a startup stack with $0 in monthly subscriptions, and after putting together a list of the various tools we've been using, and looking for replacements for some of them where you can avoid the monthly subscription, I figured that this would be quite doable.
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9 Tactical Tips on how to be #1 on Product Hunt all day
9 Tactical Tips on how??to be #1 on Product Hunt all day Last Friday, my site StartupResources.io, a collection of categorized tools for Startups, rode the #1 spot all day on Product Hunt. It was a long and glorious day. I wanted to share with everyone how to be #1 on Product Hunt, so that others can be successful too. But first, here are some of my stats: Unique visitors Friday: 5200 (first day on Product Hunt) Saturday: 2655 Sunday: 1826 Monday: 3637 Tuesday: 1794 Wednesday: 1006 Mailing list [read more]
How To Use Twitter To Butter Up Influencers So That They Will Let You Guest Blog
How To Use Twitter To Butter Up Influencers So That They Will Let You Guest Blog While trying to launch Ignite Your Match (a startup that provides critiques of online dating profiles so that they can be improved), I needed to find influencers within the online dating world, and then ask them to allow me to write guest posts on their blogs. I found that Twitter was the easiest way to do this, and after several weeks of "buttering up" influencers, I'm now writing guests posts, and getting [read more]
User surveying to find and fix conversion issues
User surveying to find and fix conversion issues You can’t see what your users see If you’ve built your own website, you’re blind to the issues there. You of course know how everything works, and it all makes sense to you, because you built it. Well designed and easy to use and understand? Obviously, but only to you. You’re immune to your own usability issues, because you’re not an end-user. You’ll need to hire eyes to look at your site and find the usability [read more]
Researching Customer Fears
Using research to figure out what your customers are scared of and then altering your copy based on your findings isn't evil. It's incredibly effective. Word tell and emotions sell, but fear closes Why it works People are emotional creatures. Last year, I launched IgniteYourMatch.com, which provides critiques of online dating profiles, and I foolishly had the Field of Dreams syndrome (believing "if you build it, they will come") and thought people would just order because it's such a [read more]
Why You Need Customer Discovery
What are you building? Who will want to use it? Why? Will they care about your startup? What makes you sure that you're not the only person interested in your solution? How do you know that you're building the right solution to the problem your trying to solve? Furthermore, how do you know that you're even solving the right problem? You don't know. Unless you do proper Customer Discovery and find out. Customer Discovery is part of the Lean Startup methodology, and encompasses a [read more]
Could Mechanical Turk be the best content marketing research tool possible?
What if I told you that for eleven measly dollars you could find out what your target audience wants to read and where they look for articles about that topic? Before I sat down to write this blog post, I spent that much on a club sandwich. And where is that sandwich now? It's gone, but $11 worth of content marketing research could lead to a long lasting return on investment. I'm a Mechanical Turk evangelist. I love it for research and for paying a ton of people a dime each to do little [read more]