Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I’m often approached by people with a “million dollar idea,” but I haven’t seen anyone pay that for one yet.
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Martinzwilling voted on the following stories on BizSugar
Five Problem Solutions to Motivate Your Startup
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4754 days ago
Startups With Real Revenue Can Get Venture Capital
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4755 days ago
I just read the Q1 2011 report from CB Insights, which shows venture capital is back. Overall, investors put $7.5 billion to work across 738 financing deals with U.S. startups. That represents a $1.5 billion jump in funding over the same quarter of 2010 with a similar number of deals, so it clearly
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Social Entrepreneurs Don’t Need Profit For Success
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4756 days ago
A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change.
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How to Market Your Startup to People Not Like You
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4757 days ago
Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter
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Technology Attacks the Venerable Business Card
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4758 days ago
In a second, with Google, I can find a phone number that was assigned to you ten years ago, but it takes me an hour to find your phone number on that business card you gave me last week. That’s just wrong. We need instant access to the most important of all resources, current contact info.
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Four Common Startup Issues Which Threaten Survival
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4759 days ago
The best survival guides tell you how to be proactive and avoid the probabilities of ending up in a worst case scenario. Of course you need to learn how to recognize a bad situation before it bites you, and you need to know all the secret ways to wiggle your way out, before you succumb.
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Entrepreneurs Must Minimize Friction For Feedback
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4760 days ago
Entrepreneurship is not a job for the Lone Ranger. Every startup requires building and maintaining effective relationships with people, including partners, team members, customers, and investors. That means giving and asking for feedback, and learning from it, especially negative feedback.
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Look For These Five Qualities of a Great Solution
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4761 days ago
Every entrepreneur wishes that he could predict whether his idea could be the “next big thing,” before he spent his life savings and years of energy on it. Investors, on the other hand, typically don’t even look very hard at the product or service, but prefer to evaluate first the entrepreneur, and
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Six Key Factors in the Right Outsourcing Decision
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4762 days ago
Since my background includes software development, I often get the question about when to build a solution in-house, versus outsourcing it to a local company, near-shore service, or off-shore organization in China, India, or Eastern Europe. In the USA, “near-shore” is a euphemism for connected coun
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Many Websites Look Like Zombies to Google Search
Posted by martinzwilling under StartupsFrom http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 4763 days ago
A while back I emphasized how important is to have a company website these days (Publish Your Website Or Customers Won’t Find You). I should have added that a website not optimized for search engines is lost in the heap of a billion dead websites. Unless someone searches for your company by name, i
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