Startups

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The Advantages of Being a Solo Founder

July 17, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of advice out there for “solopreneurs.”

Ever since Paul Graham published The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, back in 2006, in which he listed “Single Founder” as the first in a lengthy list of missteps, many people have argued against striking out on your own. The article was published just after Y Combinator was established. Since then, countless accelerators and VCs have looked down on the solo founder.

These days, being a solopreneur is almost as stigmatized as lacking a technical cofounder.

I may be only one person, but I’ve cofounded three successful startups. I founded my most recent startup, Podia, by myself. Your mileage may vary, but I think I’ve learned a thing or two about launching a startup on your own.

The Top 21 Tools for Social Sharing Across Every Channel

July 10, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Your customers don’t hang out in one place online. They’re scrolling through their Facebook feed first thing in the morning to catch up on updates they’ve missed, firing off a quick tweet or two as they grab a coffee and browse their Snapchat feed throughout the day.

Your customer’s attention is split across a ton of different platforms, so your content has to be everywhere as well if you’re to have a chance of getting noticed. That’s why it’s important for you as a marketer to know your audience and speak to them in the places they spend time.

Treating social media as a one size fits all strategy means you end up missing opportunities to engage with a wider range of customers in your target audience. Plus, if you have goals like increase ROI or conversions, you have no way of tracking data if you aren’t clear on who you’re marketing to and why.

The right set of tools will help you figure out where people spend time online, help you engage with customers and expose your brand to more people.

We broke down the top tools according to category, from social sharing to content management, to help you figure out where and how to share your content. Here’s a list of the top 20 tools to get you started.

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

June 26, 2018 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.

They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.

Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.

For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.

For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.

Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

April 17, 2017 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

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Time is in short supply at every startup. Everyone wears at least four different hats, and you need every second you can get to make sure things get done.

You have to be as productive as possible—which is why it’s tempting for your business to neglect security concerns, or make them an afterthought. But at the same time, all your hard work can go away in an instant if you let yourself be vulnerable to a cyber threat.

This is the phenomenon known as the security paradox: you need time to create work worth protecting, but you also need time to protect that work. But in the growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) economy, security and productivity don’t have to be a tradeoff. You don’t need to hire an IT team or develop complicated code to keep your data safe—external services can do it for you.

18 Best Places To Store Your Team’s Documents

December 28, 2016 by Georgina Parfitt Leave a Comment

Documentation is to your business what water is to the fishes. It’s everywhere. You need it to survive and grow. A good documentation process prevents information bottlenecks, supports collaboration between departments and individuals, and allows your business to learn quickly and improve.

But to access the advantages of documentation for your business, you need a proper way of storing all those documents. Here’s our list of 18 great tools you can use to store your team’s documents, whatever they may be, and go into the new year super organized. We’ve broken them down into 4 main purposes:

For teamwork
For operations
For design
For development

Have a play and explore which tools could bring a new level of productivity to your team.

How I Done This Says Thanks To The Open Source Community

August 11, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

I Done This was built by thousands of developers, but we only know two of them.

The same goes for the majority of products popping up every day. Developers aren’t building software from scratch anymore. They’re mostly building on top of Open Source software—software whose source code is publicly available.

I Done This wouldn’t exist without this community, but we’ve never found a way to say thanks. GitHub doesn’t provide an address for thank you cards, and there certainly isn’t a “donate today” button on Stack Overflow. But thanks to a new platform called Open Collective, we finally have a way of giving back to that community.

Open Collective serves as a virtual but completely transparent bank for any sort of community— from Open Source, to Boy Scouts, to Art Collectors—to get funding. This means that the Open Source community finally has access to the resources it needs to grow and continue being the bedrock of the tech industry.

open source community

At I Done This, we’re proud to be taking advantage of this awesome platform to finally support a community we’ve long known and loved.

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

July 26, 2016 by I Done This Support 1 Comment

This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

14 Learning Apps That Keep Your Mind Sharp

May 31, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina 2 Comments

Studies have shown that the average person only retains about 10% of what they read. In the Information Age, we have so many resources at our fingertips that our brain doesn’t get the practice it needs to stay sharp and retain information.

A few years ago, UCLA Professor of Psychiatry Gary Small found that spending a lot of time online actually rewires our brain. Because of all the skimming that we are forced to do, we replace deep, careful learning with hurried, shallow thinking.

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But all hope isn’t lost. Instead of using technology as a crutch to free us of having to do calculations or remember information, we can use it to improve our thinking and our capacity for learning. There are tons of activities and exercise that can be found in mobile apps that actually improve our cognitive functions.

Here are some iOS and Android learning apps that will get those brain muscles flexing.

The 7 Best Podcasts For Entrepreneurs

October 8, 2015 by Blake Thorne 1 Comment

[Image Credit: MusicOomph.com]

Many gigabytes of text were spilled out all over the web about 2015 being the ‘year of the podcast.’ It seems like there may have been something to that. The medium is exploding. Apple last year reported that podcast subscriptions on iTunes have surpassed the 1 billion mark. And more than 39 million Americans listen to podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research.

Looking to up your podcast intake and grow as an entrepreneur? Here are seven suggested podcasts.

12 Tools for Growing Your SaaS Business

September 25, 2015 by Walker Donohue

Chances are, your SaaS business is built around a product that makes processes faster and more efficient. And thanks to companies like yours, many of the formerly time-consuming activities of business strategy have become faster and more efficient.

So why aren’t you using their tools to grow your own business?

From customer service to email analytics, these twelve tools will give you the competitive edge you need to really distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Startups

The Advantages of Being a Solo Founder

The Top 21 Tools for Social Sharing Across Every Channel

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

18 Best Places To Store Your Team’s Documents

How I Done This Says Thanks To The Open Source Community

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

14 Learning Apps That Keep Your Mind Sharp

The 7 Best Podcasts For Entrepreneurs

12 Tools for Growing Your SaaS Business

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