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Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson’s got a well-earned reputation for being the sort of swashbuckling character who never shies away from a risk. Which might lead you to think he’d advise would-be entrepreneurs to jump into new ventures with both feet, quitting their day jobs and going all in on their dreams. But on his […]

Solopreneurship is about as small as a small business gets. As a solopreneur, you don’t just run an entire business, you are the business. This means you are the CEO, accountant, manager, marketer, and what have you. Or, simply put, you wear all the hats. Sounds scaringly good, right? The probability of success, however, won’t […]

INTRODUCTION The world of startups is a dynamic place — for entrepreneurs, there is seldom any promise of vested interest or reward once they hit the ground running. Private equity and venture capital firms enjoy a hefty profit because they are supposedly good at identifying which startups sizzle and which ones fizzle, but is there a way […]

    When Jack Zhang decided to launch his cross-border payments start-up Airwallex, he did so without overly validating the idea so he would not talk himself out of it prematurely. The strategy flies in the face of usual corporate practice, but it has more than paid off for Zhang and his co-founders. In March […]

If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.” I recently watched an outstanding presentation called “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek (embedded at the bottom […]

Reason 1: Market Problems A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of their being little or no market for the product that they have built. Here are some common symptoms: There is not a compelling enough value proposition, or compelling event, to cause the buyer to actually commit to […]

This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points. Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting prospective customers into paying customers. The process is often thought of […]

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup […]

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine. JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded […]

Starting a business is an exciting time, and its understandable that you want to introduce your new company to the world and believe that everyone – young or old, male or female, urban or rural, you name it – needs what you’re selling. As a small business owner, it’s important to feel enthusiastic about your […]