September, 2019

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6 Steps to Grow Your Small Business with Cold Email

ReadWriteStart

Can business run only on cold emails? Who reads emails these days? I know these questions must be popping up in your head. But let me tell you, cold emails can still help you in generating new leads for your business if done in the right way. Use the six steps to grow your small business with cold emails. Many businesses still are using cold emails to drive sales.

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3 Successful Strategies Used By a Reputable Reputation Management Agency

The Startup Magazine

Hiring a reputation management agency is a major step in growing your business. First of all, it means that you actually have the funds to outsource your reputation management tasks. Secondly, it means that you are developing some semblance of an online reputation for your brand. Hopefully, consumers are saying only positive things about your company, but one can only dream. .

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5 Financial decisions to manage your personal finances if you are starting a business

Our Own Start-up

Financial planning is a key cog in a company.

Finance 67
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3-Step Burnout Prevention Plan

YoungUpstarts

by Nicole Lapin, author of “ Becoming Super Woman: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Go from Burnout to Balance “ I thought I was Superwoman. I’d wrapped up shooting for the second season of my TV show and had just finished touring the country promoting my second book. I was a badass New York Times bestselling author who preached badassery to other women.

New York 218
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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Pitch Deck Month: The Team Slide

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Of all of the slides in a pitch deck for VCs, the team slide should be the most straightforward. However, we’ve found that it’s frequently the most over-engineered, and often filled with extraneous information.

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How to Do Keyword Research for Content that Generates Leads

Duct Tape Marketing

How to Do Keyword Research for Content that Generates Leads written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. I’ve written about the importance of keyword research before. It’s the critical first step in developing your SEO strategy , and making sure that your business ranks well in organic results on the major search engines. But the way that you undertake keyword research for your homepage will be different from how you settle on the right search terms for your content like

More Trending

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AgileFall – When Waterfall Sneaks Back Into Agile

Steve Blank

This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. It often produces a result that’s like combining a floor wax and dessert topping. I just sat through my a project management meeting where I saw AgileFall happen first-hand.

Agile 65
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I’ve Built Multiple Growth Teams. Here’s Why I Won’t Do It Again.

ConversionXL

I love running growth teams. It’s everything I could want from a job. It directly impacts the company, is fairly autonomous, works great with a few high-caliber folks, and involves a ton of A/B tests. I’ve spent years running these teams—but I don’t know if I’ll ever build one again. I doubt that I’ll even have a growth team at any company I’m managing in the future.

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How To Prepare For The Future Of Accounts Payable Processing

YoungUpstarts

by Chen Amit, co-founder and CEO of Tipalti. The accounts payable process is often the biggest thorn in a small business’s side. And accounts payable processing is poised to become even more significant and complex over the next three years, according to the Institute of Finance & Managemen’s research. To start, the use of electronic invoices is set to explode, completely eliminating paper invoicing.

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Pitch Deck Month: The “Where Are You Going?” Slide

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. So you’ve covered the “who”, “what”, “why”, & “when”. Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. As a seed-stage company, it is understandable to have a nascent (or non-existent) product and a barebone team relative to the great ambition of the company.

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10 Startup Challenges and How to Overcome Them

The Startup Magazine

Starting your own business is not nearly as intimidating as some people may believe it to be. After all, about 97 percent of Australian startups have less than 19 employees (some have as few as 3 or 4). These teams aren’t hard to run efficiently and the organization itself isn’t hard to manage. However, even with this on your side, there are so many enterprises that fail every single year.

Startup 123
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8 Strategies To Avoid The Entrepreneur Arrogance Trap

Startup Professionals Musings

In my years of mentoring entrepreneurs, a problem I have seen too often is low self-esteem, and over-compensating through arrogance and ego. These entrepreneurs find it hard to respect customers or team members, and their ventures usually fail. As a team member, low self-esteem leads to low confidence, poor productivity, and no job satisfaction. Fortunately, both can be fixed.

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25 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Names

Hearpreneur

The idea of exactly what your business is going to usually come first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.

Naming 103
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Progressive Web Apps: What Do Marketers Need to Know?

ConversionXL

Often, marketing creativity encounters technical limitations. A web page can load only so fast. UX is constrained by browsers. Cutting-edge solutions are accessible only to those with large budgets. Native applications resolve some of these issues but bring their own baggage—development costs, platform irregularities, download requirements, update needs, and issues with search indexability.

Web 103
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Rebranding Your Business? Key Things To Keep In Mind

YoungUpstarts

Rebranding a business is a marketing strategy wherein a new name, design, concept, term, symbol, and combination of these elements are created for a brand. The aim is to develop a differentiated and new identity in the minds of consumers, competitors, investors, and other stakeholders. If the execution of business rebranding is done poorly, you might end up suffering extreme consequences.

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Pitch Deck Month: “What Do You Do?” Slide

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. After you’ve covered the team and have established some credibility around your company, it’s time to talk about the “what”. What does your company actually do?

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Why Your Startup Needs to Track and Manage User Feedback

The Startup Magazine

No one has ever said it’s easy to start a business. Many people try but even more fail. Startup companies often face numerous obstacles that stand in the way of their desired level of success—from lack of planning to inability to scale up or poor management to neglecting marketing. Among these obstacles exists the idea of product viability and adaptability.

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Some Good Startups Don’t Qualify For Equity Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Angel investors and venture capitalists don’t make equity investments in nonprofit good causes. The simple reason is that it’s impossible to make money for investors when the goal of the company is to not make money. Yet as an active angel investor, I still get this question on a regular basis, so I’ll try to outline the considerations in common-sense terms.

Equity 235
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How to Achieve Tech-Powered Collaboration in the Era of Remote Work

ReadWriteStart

Forever gone is the era when workers assembled each day at the office. Today, they’re just as likely to be working from home or spread across the globe. Collaboration has always been important among teams. But with team members no longer literally sitting side by side, collaboration tools are vital to preventing ineffective silos. Business leaders are increasingly aware of the value of modern collaboration tools in ensuring teams stay connected.

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How to Build Robust User Personas in Under a Month

ConversionXL

Customer personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well. [This post contains video, click to play]. There are certainly companies doing them well, but not a lot of detail goes into instruction, and the blog posts out there on how to build personas are generally pretty bad. I recently created robust user personas for CXL Institute (on inspiration from a course in our CRO certification program taught by Stefania Mereu and Eric Taylor ), an

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5 Practices To Keep Your Legacy Business Relevant For Modern Consumers

YoungUpstarts

by Kelly Bosetti , CEO and founder of CEA Marketing . Small businesses offer the sort of personalized care and customer service that corporate giants can never match. While they have stayed alive for centuries by catering to the needs of their clientele, those businesses are struggling to remain relevant to modern buyers. When you’re running a legacy business — or any company, for that matter — it’s incredibly important to keep pace with consumer trends.

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Bold Titles to Increase Customers

Mike Michalowicz

Bold titles are compelling. Maybe you have a business podcast or you’re writing a business blog, book or a keynote speech. One of the first steps in building a profitable business is to attract your audience. To do that, you need to create bold, eye catching titles. A bold title that speaks to people is one of the most powerful keys to attract and increase customers.

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Autonomous Cars: Driving towards a Better Future

The Startup Magazine

Imagine this – you are cruising down the Interstate-5. You see another car pull up by your side. The car looks strange, with a claw-like fixture on top. As it passes by your car, you see it has no driver! The passengers are looking down at something and the car moves ahead. Congrats, you just saw your first self-driving car, a truly autonomous vehicle!

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6 Founder Actions That Can Kill A Promising Business

Startup Professionals Musings

In my experience as an advisor to entrepreneurs, business startup founders most often point to a shortage of funds as the primary cause of their startup failure. Yet I often see evidence that points right back at the founder or business owner, attempting to maintain excessive power and influence over of the effort, leading to a wide range of problems and a dysfunctional team.

Founder 223
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Meet Summer: Our Portfolio Company Changing The Student Loan Landscape

View from Seed

Student loan is a generational crisis – there are 45 million borrowers in the U.S. on the hook for $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, tripled in the last 10 years. When we think about money in the context of everyday living for the next generation of consumers, it’s impossible to ignore the weight of the student loan burden. . Unlike many other aspects of personal finance, student loan is incredibly complex.

Portfolio 295
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How to Hire a CRO Agency: A Process to Get It Right

ConversionXL

Historically, CRO has taken a backseat to SEO, PPC, and other forms of digital marketing. But it’s on the rise— 60.8% of businesses are making CRO a priority. As more companies think about starting or expanding CRO programs, the “agency or in-house?” question is also earning more attention. Hiring an agency can make sense for companies that don’t have the time or resources to build an in-house team.

Hiring 94
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Comparium – A Cross-Browser Website Testing Application

YoungUpstarts

Why should you be looking for the best cross-browser testing tool? If you own a website, then a cross-browser testing tool is very important for you. Cross-browser testing is a technique used in evaluating the functionality of your web application on different browsers before you add changes in production. For a website where the users belong to a specific group and use the same browser, you can test the changes manually.

Web 127
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Mission Model Canvas – the Videos

Steve Blank

In 2016 Pete Newell, Alexander Osterwalder and I developed the Mission Model Canvas for our Hacking for Defense Class. We’ve now created a series of videos that explain how this variant of the Business Model Canvas works – 11 videos totaling 17 minutes. Thanks to BMNT and the National Security Innovation Network for support of this project. — When Pete Newell, Joe Felter and I built the Hacking for Defense class we modeled the syllabus after my earlier Lean LaunchPad and NSF I

Video 53
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Oracle OpenWorld from afar

deal architect

I have been watching bits and pieces of OOW from afar. Some observations Larry, can I please have some of the anti-aging stuff you are on? Damn you look good Marc Benioff and Aneel Bhusri, I know you are good.

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New Entrepreneurs Are Rebuilding Our Business Engine

Startup Professionals Musings

Large corporations and conglomerates, the engines of growth and vitality in the twentieth century, have lost their edge and their image. They have proven themselves unable to innovate, and they have lost more jobs than they create. My friends who “grew up” with lifetime careers in General Motors, Exxon Mobil, or even IBM, are now often too embarrassed to even mention it.

Engineer 219
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Pitch Deck Month: The “Ask” Slide

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Here we are, at (one of) the final slides. The reason that you’re crafting the pitch deck, after all, is to raise funds. The closing slide of a pitch deck’s main section should be explicit about the ask.

Cap Table 211
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Thoughts on WeWork

This is going to be BIG.

I got asked by a reporter yesterday what I thought about WeWork’s IPO situation and I’ll summarize what I said here: First off, let’s pull back for a moment and acknowledge that WeWork has built a huge company that generates a ton of value for its members. Real estate was previously a huge headache for small businesses before WeWork made co-working mainstream.

Ratchet 138
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10 Tips To Promote Your eCommerce Website On Social Media That Increase Traffic And Revenue To Your Store

YoungUpstarts

There are dozens of channels on which you can promote your eCommerce website, but few compare to the performance of social media. Statistics show three in four consumers use social media during their purchasing journey. Some consumers search for product reviews on social media before making a purchase, whereas others search for how-to videos on You Tube or other product information.

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5 Financial Concepts Every Startup Founder Should Know

The Startup Magazine

So you’ve started a business: you’ve made a great product, achieved product-market fit and have an extraordinary road map laid out. But to build a scalable business you need more than just product-market fit. There’s more to your business’s success than how great your product is. How your company works operationally, and the financial concepts that help you measure performance, greatly impact the ultimate success of your business.

Founder 137
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Occupation: Advisor, Analyst, Author

deal architect

In my four decades of global travel, I have always hesitated about the correct occupation to list on a landing card or tell a passport officer (apparently I am not the only one who agonizes about that answer).

Global 50
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Great Entrepreneurs Rush To Embrace The Right Risks

Startup Professionals Musings

Outside of dreams, there is no real business opportunity without risk. Serious entrepreneurs know that, but too many “wannabes” still fall for that elusive get-rich-quick scheme with no risk. As an active angel investor, I still hear entrepreneurs asserting large opportunities with minimal risk and no competition. My conclusion either way is that they have no market, or haven’t looked.