When launching a new company or marketing campaign, your major concern shouldn’t be whether or not you can execute on the plan. It should be whether the idea is worth investing in at all. This was the major theme behind a discussion my company hosted recently with “Lean Analytics” author Alistair Croll. He suggests that [...]
It’s Valentine’s Day and who can resist the chance to wax poetic about well….love. Our team has spent a lot of time (definitely not surfing the internet) on market research (definitely not looking at your Facebook pictures) to figure out how to capture your attention in today’s culturally sanctioned sea of squishy, kissy, chocolate-covered digital [...]
Editor’s Note: This post is part of our series of posts from startups participating in the MassChallenge accelerator program. Learn more about MassChallenge or see all the posts in this series. Monday, July 9th. That’s the day my startup, Vsnap, announced that we closed a $750k angel round. Because we are finalists in the MassChallenge [...]
Congressman Peter DeFazio (Oregon, D) stopped by the Palo Alto Software office yesterday and discussed the important role small businesses play in their local economies. While many cities and regions spend time and resources trying to attract and convince large corporations to relocate to their area, DeFazio says a focus on the local businesses can [...]
The common tone going into 2012 is cautious optimism. Economies remain very fragile and so lavish spending on your marketing would be a high risk activity. Instead, focus in 2012 on your high payoff activities and leverage the abundance of low cost, no cost marketing tools available to you. From a budget standpoint, try to [...]
Business planning is about determining your business future. Where do you want your business to go? Where should it be in three years? What are the steps to get there? Wouldn’t it be great if you had someone who could help you through the hard parts of business planning? Maybe give you a guiding hand [...]
It was a pleasure to meet Sean on a sunny May morning in Austin while I was there for an event. Gooden Sweet turns out to be a great example of how a business can be built around meaning and purpose, and making the world better in a small but specific way. It starts as [...]
I remember two years ago listening to a Web expert predict that eventually websites would be all video instead of print. While it hasn’t quite reached that extreme, it’s hard to ignore the impact videos and YouTube are having as a marketing tool. As a small business owner, you may want to take a close [...]
I stumbled on this short video from ABC with Susan Solovic talking about the business plan for starting a new business. It’s a few months old now, but it’s also a really good summary of why and how you want to have a business plan for a startup, and what that plan should include. If [...]