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Five essential things to consider before starting a business

At age 16, I started my first business. I was among the throngs of a community that gathered on muggy summer nights to cheer on the home team at our high school football games. Cheering means one thing: yelling. And yelling means that people will have tired, sore, dry throats. For the penny pinchers unwilling […]
Dreams invite you to make the unimaginable happen

Better Future started with a trip to Gambia. Founder Dave Jongeneelen visited the country’s leaders, who valued his background in business development. At the end of his trip, Better Future was born. The company offers strategy and leadership consultants for corporations, microfinance institutions, and social entrepreneurs all over the world. He then brought on like-minded people who […]
The meatball as an API: It’s time to rethink marketing partnerships

API. Application Programming Interface. By definition, an API is traditionally thought of as functions or routines that help technical software interact and converse with one another. As marketers or business development professionals in the tech startup world, we often constrain the idea of API integration solely to tech and use it as a main source to […]
When you realize there’s something you have to do, you just do it

For this edition of Do What You Love — a series that showcases the entrepreneurs behind emerging companies — we sat down with Kaiyi Chu, the founder of Votopin. Here’s what he shared: I quit my job last October [2012]. We launched the product at the end of [this past] October. I was a marketing manager […]
The knock ‘em dead presentation style that doubled my revenue

Every time you get the chance to present to a good prospect, you have the opportunity to develop a new client relationship. So it matters how good a presenter you are. In fact it matters a lot. Because if you could double the number of people who say yes to your presentation, you could double […]
Lean biz dev: partner development

Over the past few years, the teachings of the Lean Startup methodology have become common practice when developing a new product: talk to customers and validate your ideas before you invest too much time in them.  Customer Development, as it’s called, is now standard operating procedure. And yet when we think about pursuing partnerships, it’s […]
Social customer care: there’s no such thing as too fast

Audience expectations in social and the parameters in which we measure ourselves change constantly. First it was not responding enough, then not responding to a high enough percentage of your audience, and then not responding quick enough. You know social changes quickly when you come across an article from just two years ago that seriously […]
How to hire a programmer if you don’t know how to code

I’m one of those founders who can do everything besides code. Marketing? A breeze. Accounting? Accounted for. Operations? Cake walk. Code? I’ll be right back! Not being able to code has put a damper on my ability to hire the right programmer and further grow my businesses. I have hired three programmers who all seemed […]
Keep on punching

Do What You Love is a series that showcases the entrepreneurs behind emerging companies. In this edition, we sat down with Adam Bellin, Principal at Redhouse Capital Management. Here’s what he shared: The biggest thing I learned from my family is perseverance. Everyone in my family is a serial entrepreneur, and my grandfather is the […]
The five most important things to remember when planning a business event

How To Plan A Business Event So you’re planning on hosting an event to showcase your business and generate sales, but you’ve never done anything like this before or your previous efforts have not been as successful as you had hoped. How do you navigate the waters without sinking the ship? As the owner of […]