Having lived through an acquisition, CEO of Spredfast Rod Favaron offers some valuable entrepreneur advice on handling the transition.
An acquisition is a huge undertaking. There are plenty of nooks and crannies that can go overlooked as you begin to merge with your new parent company, many of which can go unnoticed until it’s too late. Rod Favaron, President and CEO of Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), offers a bit of entrepreneur advice on the things he’d do differently if he had the chance.
Struggling to find a co-founder for your startup? CoFounders Lab has the answer to all your entrepreneur networking woes.
Think it’s hard to find love in this crazy world? Try finding the perfect co-founder for your business idea. There might be less awkward small talk and confusion about how to split the bill, but there’s no less anxiety involved. But CoFounders Lab has come up with an interesting solution for entrepreneur networking, explains Elisha Hartwig in this post at Mashable.
The breathless mentality that fuels startups is ideal for a company’s early days, but it doesn’t age well. SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains that as companies mature into the growth stage, that fast-paced approach can sometimes do more harm than good.
A Better Motto for Scalable Company Growth
As your company grows, so should your approach to leading it. In a recent interview with OpenView, Fishkin explained that changing his mindset around speed was the first major shift he had to make.
If you’re starting a company with an end game in mind, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice focusing on becoming a target for acquisition.
More often than not, a startup is founded with dreams of eventually becoming acquired. It’s a natural thought — most entrepreneurs fall asleep dreaming of a big payday. But according to Rod Favaron, President and CEO of enterprise social media software company Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), setting out specifically to make yourself a target for acquisition not only has a tendency of not leading to that result — it can also be a critical mistake.
Whether bootstrapping your way to hiring help, or navigating toward profitability under investors’ eyes, an entrepreneur’s path is often a long and lonely one. Dino Dogan, founder of blog amplification platform Triberr, talks about the lessons he’s learned firsthand while carving out a new space in social media for his company.
The story behind Triberr will sound familiar to many entrepreneurs: founder Dino Dogan saw a common problem without an easy solution. “I was doing SEO for a long time,” he says, but optimizing content “didn’t work for what I was trying to do.” Dogan wanted to build a community around his blog to include more than immediate friends who would comment on and share his posts, but that required “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Enter Triberr. Dogan’s social network “allows you to set up a blogging tribe” of like-minded writers who share each other’s work in a “streamlined, frictionless, no-heavy-lifting kind of way.” He recently spoke with OpenView to share how he’s learning from criticism, educating customers, and bootstrapping “a Facebook for bloggers.”
Taking these growth myths as truth will not only stifle your ability to develop business growth strategies — they can even kill your business.
You want your company to grow. It’s a natural progression of a developing business. But it can be a tricky road to navigate, and it’s filled with soothsayers and false prophets. As you make your way towards growth you’ll encounter more myths than Aesop could ever hope to document.
In order to develop business growth strategies that are successful it’s important to understand and debunk these myths, say entrepreneurs Keary Crawford and Wayne Simmons at VentureBeat.
Like a house, your business is only as sturdy as the foundation, which is why achieving product market fit is crucial to success.
When it comes to human history, it might be all about BC and AD. But as far as your business is concerned, it’s all about BPMF and APMF. For those unfamiliar, that’s Before Product Market Fit and After Product Market Fit.
These two time periods divide the life of any startup. In a post at Startup Marketing, Sean Ellis, CEO of Qualaroo, says achieving product market fit is the first step in the startup pyramid.
Going from a grandiose idea to an actual, profitable business takes multiple steps and multiple skillsets, which is why you need this nugget of entrepreneur advice.
The seed of a business might be a spark of inspiration at a dinner table, but ultimately you want it to evolve into a conversation about revenue over a conference room table. It takes a wide variety of people and skillsets to get from one conversation to the other, though. In a post at Forbes George Bradt lays out the key to transforming your idea into reality, offering a crucial bit of entrepreneur advice you won’t want to miss.
Known for his rampant openness and generosity, Brad Feld has learned a thing or two in his career about navigating entrepreneur burnout.
As a VC partner at Foundry Group and a cofounder of TechStars, Brad Feld has helped numerous young companies and entrepreneurs get through their rocky startup phases. He knows first-hand that it can be a draining business, but after years of experience he’s learned how to manage entrepreneur burnout, deal with failure and stay fresh. He offers advice on those topics and more in an interview with 99u.
WP Engine and SmartBear founder Jason Cohen discusses the bare necessities of software success: intuition, testing, validation, and iteration — all based on frequent interaction with your users.
It’s the classic startup tale: a company is founded on one idea, and then pivots dramatically after market feedback. SmartBear Software founder Jason Cohen describes his company’s shift once early adopters saw the true potential of his product and led SmartBear to the honeypot (achieving product market fit).
