Robert Schmidt sur Twitter : "15 of the Best Free Marketing Tools for Startups. 8 Surprising Startup Lessons - What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know. It takes more than a big idea and a thorough business plan to start a new business.
Most entrepreneurs aren’t quite sure what else it takes until they’re well underway, and many are shocked to discover important elements of startup success that they simply hadn’t considered at all. To find out what startups learn they really need but never though of, we asked eight successful young entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) for their input. The results may surprise you as much as it did these startup founders: 1. Adaptability During the early days of our startup, we were bringing on people with very specific experiences and skill sets who had previously worked at larger organizations that were more structured and reliable. 2. Many startups focus intensely on growth - sometimes to a fault. 3.
After raising our angel round of funding, my company decided to greatly increase our marketing and advertising spend. 4. 5. 6. I know, it sounds boring. Different types of risk. The idea that founders take on “risk” is a misleading generalization.
It is far more informative to separate the specific types of risks that founders assume, including: - Financing risk: You can’t raise money at various stages because you haven’t hit accretive milestones or your space isn’t appealing to investors. - Product risk: You can’t translate your concept into a working and compelling product. - Technology risk: You can’t build a good enough or, if necessary, breakthrough technology. - Business development risk: You can’t get deals with other companies that you depend on to build or distribute your product. - Market risk: Customers or users won’t want your product. - Timing risk: You are too early or too late to the market. - Margin risk: You build something people want but that you can’t defend, and therefore competitors will squeeze your margins. At the early stage, the main way to mitigate these risks is to recruit great people as cofounders or early employees.
The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile. Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures.
You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!)
And raw computing power is taken for granted. What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). Copycat Startups: When is it OK to Steal Ideas? There are differing opinions in our field when it comes to the fine line between using a website or idea as inspiration and blatant copyright infringement. Some feel that getting inspired by other designs and utilizing elements of them in your own is completely natural, even necessary. Others argue that copying anything, even a fairly generic layout structure, is copyright infringement. No matter which side you’re on, you can’t help but notice copycats in almost every successful new web service or social network that launches.
In many cases, the copycats out-innovate and eventually become market leaders. Facebook wasn’t the first social networking website … there was Friendster (which actually patented social networking), MySpace, and then Facebook. More recently, Pinterest has come under the spotlight as an innovative way to bookmark, categorize and share ideas, photos, and links. Where is the Line? Where is the line, and have Pinspire, OpenPin or Clipix crossed it?