Entrepreneur’s Handbook
Check out: If Your Startup Passes the Toothbrush Test, It Could Be Worth Billions
What do we love about this blog post in particular? They compare successful products to toothbrushes. We are here for it. The Toothbrush Test is so simple it’s groundbreaking.
Here’s a tidbit:
“How often do you brush your teeth?
Few entrepreneurship or business articles talk about teeth, so [we] wanted to break the mold here.
What makes Netflix, Instagram, Google, Waze and other unicorns billion-dollar companies?
You could dive deep into their brand, intellectual property, innovative business models, etc.
But Larry Page puts it down to one very simple rule:
“Is this something you will use once or twice per day, and does it make your life better?”
In other words, if you create a product or service once or twice a day — the same way you would use a toothbrush — you have the potential of owning a billion-dollar company.
This is The Toothbrush Test.”
TechStars The Line
Check out: 5 Things I learned in VC that they don’t tell entrepreneurs
Former VC and current founder, Ashley Yesayan, breaks down her lessons learned from both sides and shares her insights with you in this blog.
Check it out:
“How to get a job in venture capital — and how to get money from venture capitalists — seem to remain some of life’s big mysteries. This may explain, in part, why the industry is so intriguing: I know that to many entrepreneurs, VC can feel like a black box.”
On Startups
Check out: 5 Mistakes Every Startup Founder SHOULD Make
“The problem with the movie “Field of Dreams” is that it planted the phrase “If you build it, they will come” firmly into the common parlance and specifically, into the heads of countless, impressionable startup founders.
The popularity of the phrase (and its confirmation in the movie, when Costner builds “it” and “they” magically come) leads some founders to believe, and predict to investors, that they, too, need only to build their amazing new thingy, and the users will come running until the rest looks like a hockey stick.”
We love this important reminder. There is SO much more that goes into selling your product than meets the eye. It involves many moving parts, a detailed strategy, and persistent execution of that strategy.
Success doesn’t happen overnight.
Quick Sprout
Run by Neil Patel, this blog dives into common problems encountered by startups to guide you through starting, running, and growing your business online.
Check out: How to Write a Business Plan for Your Startup
While this blog breaks down what many would consider the “basics”, formulating a proper business plan and covering all your bases is imperative for a successful startup launch.
“Launching a startup company is exciting. It’s easy to get so caught up in the moment that you rush into things.
If you want to set yourself up for success, you need to take a step back and plan things out.
Going through the process of writing a formal business plan will increase your chances of securing an investment and also improve your potential growth rate.
The market research you’ll need to conduct in order to write this plan will also help you determine whether this is a viable business venture to proceed with.
…
Writing a business plan may seem like a tedious task right now, but I promise it will keep you organized and save you lots of headaches down the road.”
Shopify
Shopify might not come to mind as a resource for inspiring ideas and solutions beyond what they are so obviously known for, but you can find fun and original content to get you thinking.
For example, we love this piece on 6 Creative Ways to Say Thanks for Customer Purchases. The blog offers some interesting ideas, and will get your creative juices flowing when it comes to creating moments of delight for your customers!
“Companies that focus on creating meaningful customer experiences can choose to compete on loyalty and word of mouth, beat the behemoths, and carve out their own place in the market.
In this pursuit, thanking customers for their purchase goes a long way. In fact, 68% of businesses have lost a customer because they feel a company is indifferent to them, and nearly half of US consumers say customer appreciation is an indispensable part of providing excellent care.”
Read the full article here.
HubSpot Blog
Check out: 10 Email Templates with 60% or higher open rates
We love that HubSpot’s blog is all about not only great advice and blog content, but actual templates and resources that you can pull from and use! They are a great resource to turn to when it comes to providing concrete examples and starting points.
Emails can be tricky, but they provide some great templates in this blog! Here’s a sneak peak:
“Let me see if this story sounds familiar to you: you send a sales email to a prospect.
They don’t open it.
That’s it. End of story.
If a prospect doesn’t open the email, the deal is, well, dead before it even began. They won’t read your value proposition, understand how your company can help them grow, or give you a chance to warm them up to the idea of buying your product or service. Regardless of your sales strategy, a sale begins with an email.”
Read the full blog post here.
