Startup Equity: should you give up equity in your company?
How do you give up equity in your software startup? Should you do it? And if so, how much? Consider the outcome of these options.
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How to value your startup – understanding the common startup valuation methods
Maybe you are fund raising or considering selling a portion of your startup to an investor. Either way you need to value your startup to figure out a fair price for the equity being sold and money being added to the business or being taken out by you. There are a few approaches to valuation
Read MoreThe 8 books I want all startup founders to read
There are so many business books out there and you have limited learning time with your startup. It is hard to know where to begin but learning is absolutely essential to your journey. There are many ways to learn: You can figure things out on your own by making mistakesYou can learn by watching your
Read MoreShould you bootstrap a software startup business? The pros and cons
Let’s go through the thought process to decide if you should bootstrap your software startup. What is bootstrapping? Bootstrapping in the business world is the practice of starting your business without any external capital (money). The business is forced to operate with very minimal expenses and uses its own revenue to grow. How much money
Read MoreStartup founder or salesperson? Should you be both?
Common advice given to founders is to be the sales person in their startup and only hire sales people later. This makes some sense as the founder is usually the best person to sell the startup’s product/service. This is because they are passionate about the problem area and really understand the industry. This makes them one
Read MoreHow to Grow a Cybersecurity Startup to $20M/year – my podcast interview on Millionaire Interviews
I was interviewed by Austin Peek of Millionaire Interviews in February 2018. The podcast is now live and you can listen to it here. In the podcast, we walk through my story of starting and growing Thycotic from a services business into a cybersecurity product company. Thycotic did over $21m in revenue in 2016. In
Read MoreCustomer pains: Know them, fix them – and you’ll get new customers
Startups should focus on specific customer pains and provide a solution to solve those customer pains. Customer pains should be things that the customer is prepared to pay money to solve. This is advice for product management, marketing, demos, business strategy and even sales. In fact, this is something that should be engrained into all
Read MoreCore values and how you can use them to build company culture in your startup
One of the best presentations I have seen about building company culture is from Mikey Trafton – this video is definitely worth watching! (it is near the bottom of the linked page) At my company we really tried to avoid the bullshit “mission statement” stuff. We found our personality based on being a team of
Read MoreHow to fire bad customers, and why it’s good for your business
Fire bad customers – some of them just won’t be worth keeping. Either they pay too little and want too much or they take up too much of your time. You can try to change your business model and make more money from these customers if possible. But sometimes it is easier to just let
Read MoreDo you have the qualities of a successful entrepreneur?
I am sometimes approached by people thinking about starting a business or going out on their own. Unfortunately some of these folks don’t seem to have the right stuff. So how do you tell – are you an entrepreneur? There are checklists on websites and probably personality tests you can take but I can only
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