Save the big announcements for big deals — If you want to give your new business a decent shot at success, you need to build traction — clear, measurable evidence that people are interested in what your company is offering. And that won’t happen on Day One. So why do startups make big, splashy announcements the day they…

The more revenue you have coming in, the better the chances you can raise (and not waste) investor funds — At startups, the difference between survival and running out of runway always comes down to taking our eyes off revenue. We don’t want to do this, and we certainly don’t do it on purpose. But when we’re in the middle of the startup run, it’s pretty easy to fall into…

Before you invest, make sure you’re not just feeding a startup money pit — Joe Procopio is a 20-year-plus tech entrepreneur with multiple exits (Automated Insights, ExitEvent) and a few failures. He is currently the Chief Product Officer at VC-backed Spiffy, a mobile vehicle maintenance startup, and also the founder of Teaching Startup, an on-demand advice project. He writes a recurring column for a…

You don’t need marketing consultants. Yet. — The line between success and failure in business can be razor thin, and sometimes the difference comes down to the amount of attention that a company can attract. Unfortunately, a lot of companies try to attract the wrong kind of attention. I’m not talking about tasteless advertisements or sketchy funding…

Part 2: Foster Engagement Beyond the Landing Page — In Part 1 of this series on marketing and sales funnels, I opened the discussion by asking why most startup marketing fails. There are a lot of answers to that question, probably a separate answer for each individual and unique startup. But that diversity is also the root of the…

Part 1: Developing the Strategic Infrastructure — This is part 1 of a two-part series on how a startup can create effective funnels for digital marketing and sales (and not just throw advertising dollars at the wall to see what sticks). When discussing marketing and sales strategy in the digital age, it helps to first ask this…

Ambition can fuel behavior that can actually set you back — One of the most difficult things for me to come to grips with is that the success I’m constantly striving for always takes longer than I want it to. If it happens at all. In my last post, I wrote about how quickly entrepreneurs need to run with their startup…

Innovation expiration is real, so you’ve got to act now — Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great ideas executed to perfection are multi-million dollar diamonds in the rough. The gap between the two is often stated but rarely discussed. That gap is a bridged by a complicated path that requires an uncomfortable but necessary push to get your best…

Identifying the difference between quality time and wasted time — One of the best ways to kill a startup slowly and painfully is to spend too much time on activities that produce a low return on the time invested in them. Yet we entrepreneurs do this constantly, and sometimes for good reason. When does quality time become wasted time? Let’s…