Startup Money Made Easy


Book Description

Let the experts at Inc.guide you through every critical step and potential pitfall as their on-the-ground reporting shows how to locate funding, manage your money, and smart hack your way to a comfortable retirement. Startup Money Made Easy gathers the best advice from the magazine’s pages, spotlighting celebrated entrepreneurs and inspiring stories. You’ll hear from: FUBU founder Daymond John, who mortgaged his family home for start-up capital—and built a $6 billion empire Makeup artist Bobbi Brown, who turned a modest lipstick line into a profitable 30-store enterprise Alexa von Tobel, who dropped out of Harvard Business School to launch the equity-magnate LearnVest.com Mark Cuban, Sallie Krawcheck, Max Levchin, and other founders who overcame financial obstacles on their way to the top Additionally, these stories include on-target tips that explain how to: Raise your first $10,000 in capital Power through the lean years Get friends and family to back you up Round up outside investors Go public or sell, while still staying in charge Reward people with great salaries and benefits Eliminate tax season surprises Grow without growing pains Cash flow problems are the number-one business killer. Whether you’re dreaming up a startup idea or knee deep in the craziness, learn to shore up your finances and safeguard the business.




Startups Made Simple


Book Description

Imagine the perfect business for you. Not only a business that you love, but one that generates consistent wealth and is so well systemized that it mostly runs itself. In Startups Made Simple, small business expert Matt Knee has created a complete guide that takes you from idea to systemized company as quickly and easily as humanly possible. This book is not for the stereotypical Silicon Valley-type of startup that get millions in venture capital. This book is for "the rest of us"-the 99% of entrepreneurs who bootstrap and start real businesses. In this book, Matt Knee pulls back the curtain and guides you through a proven six-step process that he and other successful entrepreneurs have used to build multi-million dollar startups.Whether you have a business now or are looking for an idea to start one, this book will systematically take you (and quickly, using lots of checklists and bullet points) through the process of perfecting and growing your business. This includes how to get out of your own way and even take a real vacation. In addition, you'll discover: - How to supercharge your energy, productivity, and daily routine to get much more done in less time (and not have to work 50+ hours a week like most founders). - How to build a clear vision so you get great ideas and know exactly how to turn them into reality. - How to avoid the fatal mistakes that have destroyed startups in the past. (Most are easily avoidable.)- How to identify that magic cross-section of what you love, what you're good at, and what you can get highly paid for in your business. - How to simply and inexpensively test if your idea is any good before starting the actual business!- A step-by-step process for building your Sales Machine and putting your marketing and sales process on auto-pilot. - Managing and systemizing your business with clear procedures, a simple one-page plan, and a manual that will show anyone how to operate your business (so you can take a real vacation).Table of Contents: PART ONE: The Founder Superpowers1. Energy2. Vision3. Execution4. LeadershipPART TWO: The 6-Step System5. Step One: Imagine It6. Step Two: Plan It7: Step Three: Start It8. Step Four: Grow It9. Step Five: Manage It10. Step Six: Systemize ItPART THREE: The ScorecardsThe Founder Superpowers ScorecardThe 6-Step Scorecard




One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs: Live Your Dreams and Create Your Own Profitable Company


Book Description

From award-winning entrepreneur, inventor, and business owner Stephen Key comes the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestseller One Simple Idea Stephen Key is back, and he’s delivering a proven, straightforward process for starting, growing, and running a business—without the need for an MBA or millions of dollars in funding. Key draws on his own experience as a billion-dollar inventor to offer how-tos and other takeaways you can use to get off the ground and into the black. Case-studies of his most successful students and other innovators further underscore “key” principles from the book, while strategies for testing, protecting, and marketing a product make it easier than ever for you to follow achieve your business and life dreams. Stephen Key has successfully licensed more than 20 simple ideas that have generated billions of dollars of revenue. The course he teaches has attracted more than ten thousand students around the world.




Business Made Simple


Book Description

Is this blue book more valuable than a business degree? Most people enter their professional careers not understanding how to grow a business. At times, this makes them feel lost, or worse, like a fraud pretending to know what they’re doing. It’s hard to be successful without a clear understanding of how business works. These 60 daily readings are crucial for any professional or business owner who wants to take their career to the next level. New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Donald Miller knows that business is more than just a good idea made profitable – it’s a system of unspoken rules, rarely taught by MBA schools. If you are attempting to profitably grow your business or career, you need elite business knowledge—knowledge that creates tangible value. Even if you had the time, access, or money to attend a Top 20 business school, you would still be missing the practical knowledge that propels the best and brightest forward. However, there is another way to achieve this insider skill development, which can both drastically improve your career earnings and the satisfaction of achieving your goals. Donald Miller learned how to rise to the top using the principles he shares in this book. He wrote Business Made Simple to teach others what it takes to grow your career and create a company that is healthy and profitable. These short, daily entries and accompanying videos will add enormous value to your business and the organization you work for. In this sixty-day guide, readers will be introduced to the nine areas where truly successful leaders and their businesses excel: Character: What kind of person succeeds in business? Leadership: How do you unite a team around a mission? Personal Productivity: How can you get more done in less time? Messaging: Why aren’t customers paying more attention? Marketing: How do I build a sales funnel? Business Strategy: How does a business really work? Execution: How can we get things done? Sales: How do I close more sales? Management: What does a good manager do? Business Made Simple is the must-have guide for anyone who feels lost or overwhelmed by the modern business climate, even if they attended business school. Learn what the most successful business leaders have known for years through the simple but effective secrets shared in these pages. Take things further: If you want to be worth more as a business professional, read each daily entry and follow along with the free videos that will be sent to you after you buy the book.




UX for Lean Startups


Book Description

p>Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market. No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product. Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle Understand why you should design a test before you design a product Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality




Founders at Work


Book Description

Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.




The Lean Startup


Book Description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.




All In Startup


Book Description

If Owen Chase can't find a way to turn his company around in the next nine days, he'll be forced to shut it down and lay off all of his employees. He has incurred substantial debt and his marriage is on shaky ground. Through pure happenstance, Owen finds himself pondering this problem while advancing steadily as a contestant at the World Series of Poker. His Las Vegas path quickly introduces him to Samantha, a beautiful and mysterious mentor with a revolutionary approach to entrepreneurship. Sam is a fountain of knowledge that may save his company, but her sexual advances might prove too much for Owen's struggling marriage. All In Startup is more than just a novel about eschewing temptation and fighting to save a company. It is a lifeline for entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching a new idea or for those who have already started but can't seem to generate the traction they were expecting. Entrepreneurs who achieve success in the new economy do so using a new "scientific method" of innovation. All In Startup demonstrates why four counterintuitive principles separate successful entrepreneurs from the wanna-preneurs who bounce from idea to idea, unable to generate real revenue. You will likely get only one opportunity in your life to go "all in" in on an idea: to quit your job, talk your spouse into letting you drain the savings account, and follow your dream. All In Startup will prepare you for that "all in" moment and make sure that you push your chips into the middle only when the odds are in your favor. This book holds the keys to significantly de-risking your idea so that your success appears almost lucky. Join Owen and Sam for this one-of-a-kind journey that will set you on the right path for when it's your turn to put everything on the line.




Lean Startup in Large Organizations


Book Description

Large corporations must become far more agile in implementing new products and new business models. The pace of technology change, the blurring of industry boundaries, and the agility and resources of startups in almost every industry segment demand it. Many companies have begun to adopt the principles of Lean Startup in order to increase the pace and agility of their innovation initiatives, but most have had limited success in doing so. Although the principles seem intuitive and straightforward, there are challenges to using them inside an existing company, especially in a manufacturing environment. The biggest requirements, beyond those espoused for startups, are: Developing a business model for the new venture that not only works in the marketplace but also works within the constraints of the corporation Managing the conflicts that inevitably arise with the current operating business; every business that has operated over decades has well-established ways of doing things that may not fit the required pace and flexibility required of a new venture Conducting business experiments with physical goods as well as with software offerings Managing the risk of investing in a new domain for executives that are used to investing where the risks are more clearly understood This book describes a systematic approach for implementing Lean Startup in large organizations. It builds on the principles of Lean Startup and adds additional practices required to manage the realities of the corporate context. The book describes how it is done, with examples from practice in companies that have successfully used the methods. It complements Lean Startup methods with elements of corporate innovation practices developed by leading academics and practitioners. It brings these practices together for the first time in a practical and integrated way.




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.