Startup founders don’t talk about it, but one of the worst, most damaging uses of your time as an entrepreneur is dedicating yourself to a good startup idea. Wait, what? How could a good startup idea be a waste of time? A good startup idea will show you just enough promise and progress to keep […]

Entrepreneurs dream about building the next big billion-dollar company. But the Apple, Google, and Facebook-shaped stars in their eyes end up clouding their vision. It’s easy to get caught up imagining your company going viral and getting to millions of users — all before your business has made a single dollar. All the hopes and […]

Successful entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, exhort startups to write down their core values on Day 1 and make company culture a first-order concern from the very beginning. Have you tried it? The problem is that after you look at what you wrote, you’ll probably see a bunch of boring clichés. Many of your […]

As marketers, we’re always searching for a formula for how to be successful — but there’s no formula for this: While watching Wistia’s recent dance video promoting a feedback survey, I realized that it wasn’t the production, the camera, or the lighting that made the video so compelling, or explained why I watched and shared it with […]

One of the most painful experiences as an entrepreneur is to invest your heart and soul into a product that, when you finally bring to market, no one cares about. That’s exactly what happened to my friend Elizabeth Yin. Before she got into 500 Startups and raised close to $1 million with her new startup […]