You have a great idea. So what? No matter how awesome your idea is, if you can’t convince people to buy into it, your business is as good as dead in the water. And one of the major people you’ll be selling the idea to is an investor. Say hello to the art of the pitch deck. A pitch deck is a brief presentation (usually based on slides) that provides your audience an overview of your business. When you remember that the audience are most likely investors, and you’re trying to raise either $5,000 or $50 million, it’s possible you get cold feet and scattered brain. Continue reading →

Picking a co-founder is as important as finding a suitable spouse. It’s a huge decision that will have long-lasting effects on you and your business. Mess it up and you’ll be visiting the lawyers in a few years. Get it right, well, you’ll be able to take vacations in Seychelles for weeks at a time. Starting a business is hard and running a successful one is even harder. So, cue the “two heads are better than one” quotes. Having someone who’s as invested in the success of your company as you is not only good advice, it’s quickly become standard practice. Continue reading →

  As entrepreneurs, there is just one thing that matters- Winning. And believe it, winning is not going to happen if you don’t build a great team that is fully committed to your vision. To be honest, your team is one of the most important differentiators between success and failure, and though you might be reluctant to employ because you are terrified of hiring the wrong person, eventually you have to take the leap of faith and hire. Continue reading →

Purple Squirrels are the trophies of the talent acquisition world. They are the dream candidate of any entrepreneur. They are multi-skilled, dedicated, independent and can work for peanuts (pun intended). Okay. Let’s back up. Purple Squirrels? Continue reading →

When building your startup, a chief executive officer (which is you) and a chief technology officer are really all you need.

Hiring any other top-level management staff is a waste of fund. You don’t need a vice president of sales when you are still building out your product. And you don’t need a human resource manager when it’s just you and the CTO working late nights. Continue reading →

Content marketing works. “Brands relying on inbound marketing save over $14 for every new customer acquired,” says Hubspot. But your story is probably different. Content marketing isn’t giving you as much return on investment as you anticipated. It could be because you are doing any of these five things we outline in this article: Continue reading →

Any marketing exec worth their salt knows that inbound marketing is more than just developing content. Success from content marketing is highly dependent on distribution. The famous saying “content is king” is still true. But we are also beginning to see that content by itself is not effective if it’s not being seen. Continue reading →

Traditional outbound marketing has given way to inbound marketing. At the center of all that is content marketing. Everyone is doing content marketing these days. 88% of surveyed companies say they are doing content marketing [PDF]. That’s everyone. And content marketing works, in case you were wondering why everyone is on the wagon. 82% of those who publish a blog post every day acquired at least one customer, according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing study. Continue reading →