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Running a startup has been one of the two most amazing experiences in my life (the other being raising a kid). It's an everyday problem-solving challenge. It's an everyday brainstorm. It requires you to reinvent yourself every other week, to try and outsmart the smartest people, who also happen to have more experience and more money. Holidays and weekends are but an illusion when the fate of 25 co-workers and hundreds of thousands of users rests on the decisions you have to 'sleep on.'
We are thrilled to tell you about our new product release, coFoundrr: the new and simple way to find entrepreneurs to partner with.
Demo days are often the first chance a startup gets at getting in front of investors. For most startup accelerators, this is your graduation event, and a lot of work goes into preparing those slides and those pitches.
If you are an early-stage startup in the tech space and you are looking for money to grow your company, the official term is raising capital, the most commonly recommended instrument to raise funds is a convertible note. However, to understand how those work, we first need to understand how equity (or stock) works.
These are the pitch decks that made companies like Airbnb, Uber and Facebook, the giants they are today. Telling a success story about your idea, team and business model is what will ultimately determine if your deck is appealing or not and these decks have helped companies raise millions of dollars.
This Valentine, we asked each staff member to let us know which is their Valentine’s song and created a playlist to share with the world.
We’ve created this list of the best presentation software to ensure you make the right call in the platform you select. This articles is the result of several weeks of research and review of 50+ presentation tools currently available on the web.
Here are three products we swear by in Slidebean, if you are starting a company, these products may be exactly what you need.
MailChimp is THE standard email marketing campaign platform. To give you an idea of our stack, here's what we use in Slidebean
This we were looking into Ahrefs one of my favorite marketing platforms.
Stripe along with Square are the two main billing processors for startups. While Square focuses on point of sale devices, Stripe is mostly used for digital purchases.
Starting your own business requires a lot of new knowledge. And most of us didn’t have Entrepreneurship 101 in Middle School So sometimes, you have to take learning into your own hands. Thankfully, today is not that day, as we’ve done the heavy lifting for you.
Raising money is hard. It's so hard most companies fail at it. In this article, we'll look into traction requirements, pitch decks, alternative funding sources and on how to find investors and raise venture capital as an entrepreneur. This is seed funding for startups.
Cryptocurrency is booming, and it's going mainstream. Bitcoin broke $10,000 per unit in November 2017, and since then, more and more people have become interested in this internet 'curiosity'.
Do you have fear of public speaking? In this article we’ve covered some practical ways to turn public speaking into something you can face, rather than fear!
A third of startups end up closing shop for the simple reason that they run out of money. That’s why it’s important to know where you can afford to spend your money, and where you can’t afford to. In this article, we’ll show you the best practices to keep up with your SaaS budget!
Think of FounderHub as tools for starting a business, all conveniently located in the same place, and curated by the same people that used them to build and grow their startup.
90 percent of startups fail. Most of them can’t make it. It is a sad reality. Lack of capital, inadequate training of customer support teams and failure to comprehend the needs of the customers are a few of the reasons why startups don’t prosper. In the highly competitive business environment of today, we cannot afford to ignore their customer needs. Delivering a delightful customer experience can make the difference between success and failure of our businesses.
Recently have come up with implementations that you'll love! Lear in this article about our new themes and palettes and other significant changes.
I recently came across a founder database Nathan Latka created where Founders and CEO’s share their customer count, revenue, funding data, and more. Learn all about it in this post!
Lead generation is one of the ultimate business goals of our era, but with so many competitors wanting the same thing as you, it is getting increasingly difficult to hit the bull’s eye. It leaves most marketers wondering – how can I increase the number of leads?
A pitch deck is usually a 10-20 slide presentation designed to give a short summary of your company, your business plan and your startup vision. Pitch decks also serve very different purposes, from trying to get a meeting with a new investor, to presenting in front of a stage, and each one of them should follow a different structure.
Digging deep into what is a pitch deck and how to create a pitch deck for investors. There is a pretty standardized outline that most presentations follow, so we'll look at each slide and dig into what content you should include in each one of them.
We are considering the option of opening our product once again, and have started a few experiments and case studies to understand the real potential of a freemium business model, and how it could reshape our business in the months to come.
A pitch deck is the standard document used by startups to present their case to investors; it’s a brief deck comprised of about 10 to 20 slides. There’s a standard, widespread pitch deck outline, mostly because it’s what an investor expect to see before meeting a prospect, and even an extended version of that presentation is what ends up being used most meeting.
Keywords were widely regarded as the main ingredient in running a web marketing campaign. What is that they used to say -- “keyword is king” or was it content? In any case, people used keywords as a basis for evaluating results and making quick judgments about whether a campaign is profitable or not.
Slidebean will continue accepting guest post submissions for our blog. We are working to organize our content according to our followers interests, and have condensed our blog into the following sections.
We've collected some startup elevator pitch examples from successful businesses like Airbnb, Facebook, Buffer, for you to get some inspiration out of it! By having a good elevator pitch, you can make the best of brief encounters with potential investors at parties, business events, or.... actual elevators.
We started experimenting with Youtube as a content marketing channel a couple of years ago. Came up with a few series concepts, including; Startups and Spirits: conversations with investors and key startup people over drinks. Blog to Vlog: a video-version of our most successful blog articles. The Good, the Bad and the Tip: inspired by the legendary (and discontinued) ‘Winners and Losers’ by L2Inc, but adapted to presentations and design- related topics. The (Startup) Office: A weekly 3-minute sitcom of mostly real stories from our office. All of these FAILED. Why? The views weren’t there. There was no organic visibility, needless to say virality. No direct route to conversion. Expensive compared to other brand awareness campaigns
It's essential to have well-thought-out slide deck design before facing not only customers but also investors, who are the ones that will help you secure seed funding. This deck needs to easily communicate and sell your ideas to them. In this article, we'll show you how to build an effective deck.
The Fyre Festival pitch deck it's a 43 slides presentation that managed to receive $26 million in investment. In this article, we’ll show you the specific reasons that made such an anticipated festival an epic failure.
Landing pages are the most important thing for your business right now. Get your landing page right, and it’s basically a money generator. Get it wrong, and you’re leaving money on the table. In this article, learn what you might be doing wrong with your page and how to fix it!
I definitely do think that it makes a difference or at least, we should be aware that there's a difference but I don't think that investors, or the VC community is deliberately trying to be racist or deliberately holding people back, deliberately being sexist or things like that.
It would probably be spend more time with our target customer in the very beginnnig before building the product and before investing our time and effort into the product.
It would probably be spend more time with our target customer in the very beginnnig before building the product and before investing our time and effort into the product.
"That's a great question man. Actually know exactly what I would do."
"I think remote works really well for some types of roles. I think it depend on the type of product."
That's about the only strategy. And keep doing that: keep trying to grow ourbusiness, improve our product, bring on more customers and make our customer as happy as we can possibly make them.
I think every company's is to decide for themselves, whether it's in their best interest, I suppose. Some of our customers do it, but yeah, it hasn't been an emphasis.
Well, there's pros and cons, right? Right now, we benefit from lower costs in Berlin, and being maybe, one of the coolest SaaS companies in Berlin.
Doing on average is half of them raising their next round within six to nine months and then usually an "A round" or a seed extension a heavy seed extension. if I'd had two standouts, plus another three or four doing well, still had a chance of also becoming standouts that would have been a good if not great group.
Series A it's different. You can raise a little bit on the dream, you could raise on the potential. By the time you're getting for A around a lot of the investors are looking for a $1M-$3M annual recurring revenue, and also the slope of the line, right?
I still feel like there's a slightly different mindset. Like I joke around that there are these the "West Coast A rounds", "East Coast A rounds" and the"Midwest A rounds".
Andrew Ackerman is a successful serial entrepreneur, startup mentor, and occasional angel investor. He runs Dreamit's UrbanTech Accelerator and see over 2000 startups each year, selecting fewer than 20 to work with. He works with partners such as Jeff, Vinik's SPP, Penn State, and Blackboard to develop and execute on their strategies for sourcing external innovation and encouraging internal innovation.
"It's very interesting, I was actually more active as an angel before Jordan DreamIt. It's weird so, I still haven't figured out a way to invest in one of my companies without that sending a signal to others that, you know..."
Even if you raised five million dollars? It's a brutal pain to try to get it at fifties and hundreds. You can argue Demo Day doesn't work at all... period. I do believe that if you're not one of the top ten, or top five even, accelerators, demo date doesn't usually deliver.
If it is the best, you want to be in the best, so, they get their choice of the best. So, that's great and I don't envy them that at all. In fact, part of the reason DreamIt went later stage, is because we're all pretty competitive guys, and well you know we could be top five and our fund would do really well, we could make good money... F*ck it, we wanna be number one.
So one of the things that really makes a difference is your ability to bring customers to the table; customers who are ready to partner, and want to do it quickly, that's basically air to a startup.
If they're not top five, top ten, maybe top twenty or if they're not really deep in your industry, and no bullshit, but really can make those custom introductions.
This week, we cover public speaking examples from the most recent iPhone and Samsung Galaxy launch events- and what we can learn from each one of them.
Stock photography is a multi-billion dollar market, expected to reach $20B by 2020, but your standard Google search will still yield watermarked iStockPhotos and Shutterstock and they are all pretty much the same crap.
Facebook (and therefore, Facebook Watch) had a paradigm shift since its inception back in 2003. While social, and the ability to interact with others has always been at the core of the platform, the type of content that you go to Facebook to consume has shifted drastically.
Using Calibri for a presentation speaks almost too much about you, especially if you call yourself a designer of any sort. I can read that you didn’t bother to find a replacement font for your document, or even worse, that you thought it looked good. But fear not, here are some amazing alternatives so you never have to use Calibri again.
During January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. I’m going to go over the growth hacking strategies that we followed and implemented during this period!
NASA designed some fantastic travel posters as part of a brilliant marketing stunt for their Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 'Visions of the Future' posters feature planets and moons that we could potentially reach in a few thousand years, and presents them as traditional travel posters.
A great public speaker connects with his or her audience beyond proper grammar and a logical train of thought. The intonation of voice, the rhythm, pauses and body language all convey beliefs or ideas beyond the words themselves. Few are born with a rare talent for stage presence; so the rest of us must rely on time and practice to stand out.
The New York City subway was the work of Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, who worked for years to improve the mess of a system the NY Subway has become.
We can't think of a better resource for icons than The Noun Project. This LA-based company founded in 2011, has created one of the most comprehensive icon databases available out there.
This is the most common question that businesses have when working on Social Media. How often to post on Instagram and other channels is 100% determined by your audience, but we want to shed some light in common best practices to keep in mind.
This month, we are sending all our aid to Puerto Rico through Unicef, and encourage you to do the same. Puerto Rico was hit hard by Hurricane Maria and most of the country still has no power. Aid has been slow, and that is why, we felt, we could create more impact by calling your attention to them, and by helping out.
We did a bold experiment in Facebook: Creating one live video every day as part of our Slidebean LIVE initiative. The idea was to leverage Facebook's Live features and the social/organic variable to publish relevant content to our users and potential customers. Here're the results!
Our August pledge is The Global Peace Film Festival. We support this initiative because it uses the power of the moving image to further the cause of peace on earth. Learn more about this Film Festival here!
If you are a US company or a foreign startup that is looking to incorporate in the US for billing/investment purposes, this article will help you with the number of corporation costs that you should be prepared of, in order to avoid a hit to your company.
Our July pledge designs with disadvantaged communities, and empowers them to create the world they dream of. The architecture charity, AzuKo, uses design as a tool for sustainable development and provides opportunities for people to be involved in creating a more just world!
A single mistake can make or break a company. As a startup, you need to be very careful with every modification that is applied to the product or service. Although there are countless examples of startups mistakes that have caused them to fail, I've compiled four known cases, so we can learn from them.
Video Series, Startups & Spirits Su Sanni - Startups & Spirits Sarah Bennett August 7, 2017 This time we have talked to Su Sanni from WeDidIt. Su is an experienced web, software and music entrepreneur, who is passionate about SaaS, Sales, team building, social impact and small business. Su is the CEO at WeDidIt, a Brooklyn based tech company that helps nonprofit organizations fundraise. Su shares his thoughts about equality, racism and diversity in the workplace, the importance of cultural and gender parity, which is more significant in order to succeed in worldwide markets nowadays. As part of his entrepreneurship and professional career, Su worked at the Meltwater Group, a Fortune 500, some companies and national nonprofit organizations like RR Donnelley, Sherwin Williams, the Boys Scouts of America and UNICEF. Su is currently a mentor at New York Needs You. He is also a member and alum of the Boys' Club of NY. Su was first hit with the “entrepreneurial bug” in 2007, when he cofounded a music recording studio and production company in Harlem, NY called the ALLSMiLES Media Group.
Founder of Femgineer, Poornima is often invited to sit on panels and give talks on entrepreneurship, women's leadership, management, product development, and software engineering. This time, our CEO had an interview with her for our Startups & Spirits series. Take a look!
Elizabeth Yin is co-founder and CEO of LaunchBit. She frequently speaks at conferences and events and has previously spoken at Women 2.0 partner events, Web 2.0, Lean Startup events, TechStars, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Babson among others.
A great presenter must be able to break the invisible barrier that lies between stage and audience. That said, removing this barrier is only the first step of many in pursuit of a memorable presentation. Here are some worthwhile tips to help you on your way!
I’ll show you some hacks that worked for our startup, Slidebean, when we decided to get serious with our content strategy, and that increased our blog traffic by 110% in 50 days.
From speed dating to business meetings, we're taught that people form opinions of us quickly—so we should always put our best foot forward immediately. With this article, learn how you can craft a killer Elevator Pitch that lands you the gig!
We’ve been through 3 different accelerators with my companies: Startup Chile, in South America; DreamIt Ventures in New York and 500 Startups in good old Silicon Valley. The success of our accelerator application was based precisely on timing those stages correctly.
An outline is a roadmap to a more successful business pitch — a general plan that summarizes what you want to say to prospective customers, clients or investors. This presentation outline template will help you cover the key points of what to include in your slides.
The versatile elevator pitch can be used in many situations faced by startups. It can be used in any scenario where we need to grab our audience's attention and pitch a product quickly. Use this article lo learn how to write an effective elevator pitch!
Having an MVP doesn’t prevent you from failures to find an investor. You need to back up your idea with extensive data like a marketing strategy and a business plan. This post aims at finding out how to get funded with just an MVP and don’t get insane in the process.
If there is one thing that has allowed us at Slidebean to grow fast AND efficiently, is our obsessive marketing ROI analysis. Back in 2015 when we only had about $2,000-$3,000 worth of marketing budget to spend each month, getting the most out of our buck was fundamental not only to grow but to survive.
TechCrunch Disrupt is an annual conference that takes place in different parts of the world, such as San Francisco, New York. London and Beijing. This year, the team at Slidebean collected the most relevant highlights from the TechCrunch Disrupt NY conference and created a deck for each day. Here, you can find them!
After deciding to attend an important event such as a tech conference, you need to learn how to spend your time wisely and ultimately, make the best out of it. No matter if you've been to a major tech conference before or you're a newbie, we have the best advice for any scenario.
If research is to be believed, this article has about 8 seconds to capture a reader's attention before their attention span disintegrates. Start-ups face the same problem when pitching their start-up to potential investors. Learn with this post how to nail your deck when trying to close the deal.
You only get one chance to make a first impression and it's likely that your sales deck will be the tipping point that decides between a closed deal or a prospect passing on your product or service.
Keeping the information updated about your job and the goals that you've achieved is necessary in order to prove that you're doing a fantastic job. This is when having a top-notch sales and marketing report steps in. It allows you to showcase your hard work with numbers that smile. Here's how to successfully build one.
A quick search of “Sales Deck” will give you Zuora’s deck, a company that sells a SaaS platform for subscription billing, as the top result. Andy Raskin, a messaging and positioning expert responsible for crafting some of the most successful pitches in Silicon Valley called this particular template The Greatest Sales Deck. Here you can find the teardown and redesigned version!
Startups have changed the way small and medium-sized businesses work and they just keep on doing it all over again. In recent years, a new trend has appeared: the merger between marketing and sales at startups, causing to close the gap between both activities such as customer acquisition.
LEVO is a lifestyle brand focused on building the products, content, and services to empower home chefs and amateur herbalists. Christina Bellman, Co-Founder and CEO, is sharing her insights around self-funding, competition and blazing a trail in an ever-evolving industry in our Spotlight Series!
By learning how to write a case study, you'll be able to create one of the most effective marketing tools at your disposal. Instead of just talking about what your product or service does, it allows you to show potential clients why your product or service is useful. Also, you can include the positive experiences your past clients have had.
Retargeting ads are a powerful yet unexplored tool for companies. While tech giants like Amazon have been using them for years, few small business has actually tapped into their potential. If you’re new to the concept, retargeting lets you create ad campaigns for users that performed (or didn’t perform) specific actions on your website or platform.
In order to grow your business on Facebook, you need to understand that this platform is a little different than other because their users are not that ready and eager to buy right away, and you need to nurture them a bit more. Still, you can grow your business by following these guidelines!
Nowadays, customers have become smarter and more discerning regarding products and services that are being sold every day. The rise of this new breed of consumers, has changed the traditional sales presentation into a more personable and customized selling experience. Here's how you can create the ultimate sales pitch!
Be on top of your business budget with our financial model template! Not only it can make the difference, but also it allows managers and founders to make game-changing decisions. Download the template today!
We had concluded a while ago that Bunkr was struggling and that this acquisition would come to soft-close the company while bringing some returns to their investors.
It's crucial to be prepared for a board meeting in order to impress and influence your audience. Still, this doesn't have to be a challenge. You just need to take into consideration that before heading into the boardroom, you should create a pitch deck, change your communication style and provide solutions to problems.
It's imperative as a company to measure the success of a pivot in order to accurately know if the path chosen was the right one. Slidebean has gone through two major pivots in the past year, the first took place during 500 Startups and the second one was more recently. Take a look at or MoM Growth since then!
As an early stage startup, getting featured in any major tech blog is huge. It brings a big boost of users, and it comes with other less obvious treats like credibility and SEO. Yet, this is not an easy job. You need to be full time committed on doing PR for your company. Here's how we got featured on TechCrunch!
In the next few hours, Hurricane Otto will hit the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. We are deeply concerned for the people that will be affected by the storm, especially considering that part of our team is based in San José, CR.
A pitch deck needs to showcase the company's business plan and startup vision. Although there are many platforms that can help you build your outstanding pitch deck, here are the best softwares online!
Marta Kagan is a branding and communication master who has generated over 10 Million views on social media by making presentations, such as "what the f**k is social media?”. Today, we have it as our first guest in our "Slidebean Spotlight" series.
The Airbnb pitch deck has become an increasingly popular reference for entrepreneurs around the world. The company founders, Brian Chesky raised $600K in 2009, from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures. The company has since become a giant in the Travel Industry, closing a round in early 2015 on a valuation of over USD $20 Billion.
Pitch decks templates can serve very different purposes, from trying to get a meeting with a new investor, to presenting in front of a stage, and each one of them should follow a different structure! Here's a few pitch deck examples every startup founder needs.
CEO at Slidebean/FounderHub. TEDx Speaker. 500 Startups Alum. 40-under-40.
