Managing humans takes time.We are going to go over the hacks that we did to scale our staff and tips to know how to manage a remote team.
To stir your thoughts in the right direction, here’s a full read on why startups fail (and only some succeed)
Dan Bilzerian was named the King of Instagram. But at what cost did he earn that honor?
By the end of this article, that concern over an investor outreach not working will find a reliable alternative.
Bird seems to have failed in their attempt to change commuting.
Have you ever wondered what's the difference between a Seed Round vs. Series A? Or how startup funding rounds differ in general?
We put together a list of our best slide deck templates and examples divided by 5 categories:
The real story behind the Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort.
This article brings about the best investor search tools you can use for free.
Our recommendations of the best productivity apps currently out there can really boost our use of time.
When starting your company it's important to understand how exits work and what possible outcomes may look like.
Bernie Madoff: A $64 billion disaster that left immeasurable tragedy for thousands of victims, orchestrated by a Wall Street sociopath.
The promise that lies behind the question of what's a friends and family round? is a helpful answer. How to raise a friends and family round is a matter of getting loved ones around us to trust our business decisions.
Are accelerator programs still worth it when it comes to your startup?
Networking is a critical asset for a startup in its starting stages. That’s why figuring out how to network with investors effectively becomes quite a business need, especially for CEOs and startup founders.
Celebrity endorsements weren't enough for Quibi to succeed.
The dangers with convertible notes when raising capital.
We’re facing Slidebean vs. Pitch.com in this article. And we’ll start by tackling the question of what the best pitch deck tool should do.
Our top 6 tips on how to find investors are here to help you find the most suitable type of investor for your business - and give you a bit of valuable insight on the matter, too.
In a parallel universe where SlideRocket wasn't acquired, we would have been direct competitors. We will share their insights on how to sell a company for 2x its price.
It is undoubtedly the most popular channel for professionals in all areas right now. How to find investors on LinkedIn?
Apple might be the archetype of a rags-to-riches story. They seem to have done it all. This is Company Forensics: How Microsoft saved Apple from Bankruptcy.
Softbank, is a giant in multiple industries, with aggressive investment and fast expansion. But also, controversy and very costly mistakes. We'll tell you about Softbank in this episode of Company Forensics.
In the light of a supposed second round for Microsoft making phones, let's remember the OG Windows Phone.
Our app keeps evolving. Every version brings a new set of Slidebean features you might not be aware of!
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.
In May 2020, Shopify became the largest Canadian public company when it surpassed the Royal Bank of Canada by raising its market capitalization to $120B.
She rocked magazine covers, and the media called her the female Steve Jobs. Theranos was worth billions. But it was all a lie.
No one saw it coming. At least not the millions of teenagers and young adults who played Fortnite on iPhones or iPads. On August 13, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store for good. It is a high stakes dispute, and yet all this Fortnite affair is probably just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Welcome to Slidebean Forensics: the App Store battle.
Choosing a revenue model that fits you perfectly isn’t easy. As the framework of how a startup will generate income, a proper revenue model needs to consider prices, revenue sources, income and expense statements, and many other elements. It’s crucial to get this right, too, because a perfect match needs to help your business out in those diverse aspects. From sales to growth, choosing the right revenue model is especially vital for long term projections. It’s just central to any business model! To help your final choice, we put together the best 5 steps to a revenue model for startups. We hope these aid in making the right kind of difference for your company to make positive game-changing decisions.
The year is 2007. Imagine that you aim to disrupt the mobile phone market. You are sure that your idea is the way to go, and your team spends endless hours developing the star product. As you are on a business trip, you hear the news and reality sets in: someone has beaten you to it, and their idea is much, much better. That someone is Apple, and you are Google. Your choices are limited, so you decide to go back to the drawing board. Google had to reinvent its proposal for a smartphone. But this ended up being a good thing. In this episode of Forensics, we'll tell you all about how the first Android phone rose from the ashes of a failed project.
Robots you may see killing humans in recent Netflix shows, look a lot like robots that are available in the market. Yes, you may have seen that Black Mirror episode where a robotic dog hunts people, and you may notice the uncanny resemblance with Spot, the newest robot dog from Boston Dynamics.
An overview of financial models is a critical review of any business owner’s journey. Going into financial modeling permits forecasting the future of a company, for instance, which is especially useful in terms of startup performance. However, there are quite diverse examples of financial modeling.
Go-to-Market Strategy is a super important item investors really want to understand, yet most startups don’t really know what the term means. They struggle to describe their go-to-market strategy in a clear and focused manner.
$125 BN. That's how valuable Yahoo! was at its peak; that was more than Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors combined. And it all began as a hobby. Yahoo! brought us many of the services we take for granted today, including cloud storage and setting up your website. But the name Yahoo! has disappeared, consumed in the food chain that is the tech world. How did it get to this? We'll tell you all about Yahoo! in this episode of Company Forensics.
Tough times can leave us hopeless, and it might be challenging to see through setbacks in a way through which we know how to take action. Coming out of that rough patch is hard. There’s no point in denying it. But we hope these 7 steps on how to take action can kickstart your plans and get you to do what you desire the most, whether that’s at a personal or at a business level.
Most startups are obsessively focused on finding investors to back their idea. Someone to take a chance on them. Someone who wants to get behind the “next big thing.” But often founders are perplexed on how to find those investors, why it’s taking so long, and how to speed up the process. Let’s dive in.
Beautiful AI vs. Slidebean: A comparison lots of people want to make. Presentation software comes in so many forms now that there’s no point in sticking to an old program—especially not one we’ve used for years.
If you want to challenge the number one in any market, you need to have a good, rather an excellent product. But, most importantly, you need to believe in what you are bringing to the table. If not, you're doomed. In the mid-2000s, Microsoft was riding high on the successful Xbox and established itself as the leading software for PCs. So, to them, it seemed natural to take on and dominate another market: mp3 players. But they were up against the iPod. To win, they needed to have all the parts of the equation right from the start. They didn't: what followed was an embarrassing attempt at being cool, with odd mistakes and even more unusual colors. We'll tell you all about that other mp3 player, the Zune, in this episode of Forensics.
Podcasts enrich our lives. They certainly make commuting a much more enlightening experience, for example. Because of that and their late boom, it’s only natural we want to look at the best podcasts in 2020 list.
Creating a business model slide in a startup pitch deck can be a confusing puzzle to solve for many entrepreneurs. Therefore, and over the course of this article, we will not only define what a startup business model is, but we will also share key facts any presenter should consider when attempting to answer the question of just how to make the best of a business model slide for a business pitch deck.
Raising venture capital is no easy task; many variables need to come into play and align for a round of funding to happen. We've covered extensively what a pitch deck should have and what your financials should answer, but today we are going talk about the deal-breakers. The stuff that (ourselves included) didn't know was working against us until it was too late. Let's do it.
In life, there are some hard questions, like Pepsi or Coke, iPhone or Android, Mac or PC, but when it comes to music and podcasts, it seems the answer is clear: Spotify is king. How did this small company beat out giants like Apple at their own game?
SaaSOps stands for “software as a service with automated operations.” They provide extra protection to workers who use software as a service solution. SaaS apps are everywhere! A network at any company might have 100 or more interactions with SaaS solutions a day. Every time we chat with coworkers, download, upload, or log in to an app while collaborating on a cloud, those interactions are secured to keep user privacy and a company’s information safe. And SaaSOps is the way those interactions are secured.
If you’re an early-stage or pre-seed entrepreneur, we’re here to tell you not to give up on this year just yet. Plenty of competitions and startup accelerator deadlines for 2020 are still open, looking for the perfect startups to fit their programs and the good news is that some of them are taking place remotely!
Especially now, with virtual classrooms making it into daily reality for teachers and students, from kindergarten to doctoral programs everywhere, we need presentation software designed with education in mind. Here’s a summary of some of the best presentation software for teachers and students to save your day.
The backbone of Slidebean's growth has diligently and accurately tracking our customer acquisition costs. It's really easy to track where a customer came from when you are using digital channels. Some channels, however, are much harder to measure. We'll go over the tactics we've used to track conversions over the years, and a few hacks that might be useful for harder-to-track channels like YouTube.
One of the privileged industries experiencing growth during the current pandemic crisis is the gaming industry. Yet in this atmosphere of growth and opportunity, many were affected when all of a sudden the game-streaming platform Mixer, owned by Microsoft, announced that it was shutting down, recently in June. Does this mean Microsoft lost the battle for game-streaming services? Are they relying on Facebook’s social and streaming DNA; while they can focus on making games available to more people?
A financial model is an essential tool for every business owner that’s built in Excel or any other spreadsheet processor to calculate their business’ financial performance into the future. The calculation is typically based on the company’s historical performance, or assumptions about the future. How to build a financial model is usually answered into its sections SG&A (Selling, General, and Administrative Expenses), COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), Revenue, and CAPEX (Capital Expenditure).
It was bound to happen, and it just happened. Last June, Segway's president, Ms. Judy Cai, announced that the company was utterly ceasing the Segway PT production, or as it was initially named, the Segway HT, for "Human Transporter."
Historically, the stock market seemed impossible to get into, especially if you were a younger, inexperienced investor. But, in 2013, an app came to make trading more accessible. Robinhood had arrived. Its recipe became a magnet for rookie investors, with hundreds of thousands flocking to use it. Some called the software disrupting, while others called it democratizing. One thing was clear: Robinhood shook the trading world.
We deal with thousands of companies in the process of fundraising. Last year, I spoke to over 1,000 founders, and I've set a personal goal to beat that this year. These companies mostly come to me for office hours, and most of the time, their questions revolve around fundraising. One thousand people are enough to detect some patterns: the mistakes these companies are making when approaching their fundraising.
When we hear about Tesla, we think of cars. But the company is much more than Falcon doors and crazy trucks; Tesla aims to revolutionize how we see sustainable living. This special Company Forensics will cover Tesla's rise to the top as well as its vision for the future. If you want to learn more about Tesla, with excellent analysis, be sure to check out Ben's channel.
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!
We have talked about phone companies in the past. Remember those episodes about Blackberry or Motorola, companies who once were at the very top of the industry and somehow ended up falling in battle. Today, we will not exactly talk about a phone company but about a phone, yeah, a particular one. A phone that, for better or worse, had everyone's attention just by existing, just because it was created by one of the largest internet companies in the world: the Amazon Fire Phone.
Knowing how to create an excellent presentation doesn’t necessarily have to be a nerve-wracking exercise. It can actually be a measurable practice. So much so that we’ve narrowed the process down to give you at least 8 steps on how to prepare a business presentation deck.
America Online (AOL) was a company that helped shape the internet as we know it today. It became a giant of the Dotcom world and was even a part of the biggest corporate merger in history.
The best live chat software for startups can fundamentally assist a business with conversions. Especially in times as digital as today, virtual options for customer service, such as chatbot assistance and live chat support, are crucial for a business to stay competitive.
Nokia is a Finnish multinational corporation that goes all the way back to the nineteenth century and started with wood mills that produced mainly paper. Yes, the same Nokia that a hundred years later created cultural icons like the 1110 phone model a lot of you probably rocked at some point, back in the early 2000s.
Huawei went from a small, rural operation to the second biggest phone manufacturer in the world. But we can't ignore that its might in another, much more controversial sector: telecommunication networks.
TikTok is a cringe-fest, filled with lip synching and quirky dancing, but it's also the most downloaded app in a quarter, ever. During these times of isolation, the app's popularity skyrocketed.
Big-name companies are boycotting Facebook, yet another controversy. But should we be surprised? If we look at history, not really. Ever since its inception, even before it was Facebook, it has pushed the boundaries of ethics.
YouTube’s a perfect platform to get quick and highly useful information. A lot of learning happens on YouTube every day now. From fixing a sink to learning how to play an instrument, YouTube is the perfect hub for how-to videos. And business is no exception to that. That’s why we’ll list the best YouTube channels for entrepreneurs, hoping you can add significant value for your business to your subscription list. Let’s get started!
Last week, we celebrated our 100,000th subscriber on YouTube- we had pizza and beer and fun... on a Google Meet session. Our office has now been pretty much empty for the last three months, and there is no sign of when we'll see it full of people again. But, hear this, we are not considering canceling our lease.
Mastering how to write a pitch presentation requires practice and improvement with time. This is not a skill to hone overnight. However, there are indeed 10 steps on how to write a commercial pitch that we can provide you. And we’ll throw additional tips at that, as well. Following all of these will undoubtedly help a better start as you set out to accomplish an excellent business presentation.
You may have heard the argument that this company was meant to be what Netflix is today. But it may not be all that simple. So, let's talk about Blockbuster, the movie rental giant that dominated the market and delivered home entertainment to virtually everybody in the US during a couple of decades, reaching its pinnacle in the late 1990s; and then succumbed to the changes that the new millennium brought.
We have a policy of sharing some of our finances and our lessons as part of our transparency marketing. We started doing this back in 2015, inspired by companies like Buffer and Baremetrics, whose own blog posts and materials were an inspiration for us. We are taking a trip down memory lane to understand how Slidebean was formed, where the first money came from, and how we spent it.
Slack has become one of the preferred tools for organizations, big and small, to communicate between teams and individually. As more people turn to remote work, Slack has seen a considerable increase in paid memberships and simultaneous users connected. But just as the software is successful, it’s also divisive. Some love it, others, not so much. With so many productivity tools out there, Slack seems to stand out. So, is there a secret to their success? We’ll tell you in this episode of Company Forensics.
When creating presentations, we tend to look for help and inspiration in online templates. In doing so, we usually come across terms we probably hadn’t ever heard before. And they might be a bit confusing, too. For instance, when people talk about PowerPoint deck or slide deck instead of a pitch deck. To help clear a few basic queries, we came up with 7 facts about a Powerpoint deck that we’d now like to share with you. Let’s start off with a basic one.
We talk about SpaceX, and today, we dive deep into its history, filled with crazy anecdotes and valuable lessons, to see where the company aims to be soon.
We usually cover a lot of news and data on how to write a business pitch. Yet, there’s always tons more to learn before an excellent business presentation can be at the top of its game. So we made room for more!
When you start creating a pitch deck, you have to think about the ultimate goal behind it. A great pitch means getting potential funders interested in your idea. It also involves being able to engage in a conversation with them regarding your company. For that, a pitch deck format can make it easier to follow the steps of a proven successful presentation.
Are you having to give a presentation and looking for a PowerPoint online alternative? We'll throw around the main differences between Slidebean and PowerPoint to help you create an excellent presentation. Especially if you're after a solid pitch deck, give our templates and platform a try! We'll explain here a bit of how that goes.
Chances are you heard the news, but in case you haven’t, Hertz, one of the biggest rental companies in the world, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
If you are new to our brand or our YouTube channel, you might assume I am just this guy that makes videos on failed companies. But no. Our company, Slidebean, actually, around 30 people, is a venture-funded startup. And our core business is not video, but presentation design.
Businesses are starting to reopen, and, as the world carefully comes out of the stay-at-home phase, the process can be daunting and stressful. That’s a new normal! At this point, no one knows how everything’s going to play out. To help, we put together 5 tips on how to create a reopening plan. We hope this eases how you prepare to go back to business.
This starting a business checklist can be helpful for any startup founder and entrepreneur. That's why we're giving you a business startup checklist divided by categories. The idea is to make it easy to follow up with your progress as you start a business.
Zoom vs Skype: A face-off! Our Company Forensics episode about Zoom has now over 200K views. In it, we not only tried to tell the story of Eric Yuan’s success with this video conferencing platform but the reasons why it defeated others like Meet and Skype during these pandemic times.
Today, we talk about traveling. Before all of this happened, chances are we used Airbnb to find a place to stay, and we discovered that some of those options were great and others, well, not so much.
Mastering a business pitch can take an entrepreneur a considerable long time. Experience gives many lessons along the way, yet sometimes it does so in the hardest of ways. We hope these 8 thoughts on how to write a project pitch can ease a bit of that learning curve and help you prepare for your upcoming business presentation.
I am going to show you how to estimate the business scale for an eCommerce platform with our financial model template.
Starting a business is no easy task. Its demands of time, smart strategizing, much hard-earned expertise, measuring, and effective translation of needs into solutions along with considerable efforts in terms of startup funding are only a relative part of all it takes to start a company. To help, we bring our best advice on how to start a startup. We'll begin with the topic of having a great business idea.
Raising venture capital can be so hard that most companies fail at it. Seriously! According to CB Insights, “nearly 67% of startups stall at some point in the VC process and fail to exit or raise follow-on funding.” That fact alone is a good enough reason for us to now focus on sharing our company’s experience with you aimed at how to raise venture capital.
All of a sudden, video calls have become a part of our daily lives. From university classes and business meetings to birthdays and yoga. Online is the new normal and will be for a while. Fortunately, there are plenty of options, Zoom, Meet, and Microsoft’s own Teams. But, there’s a name that seems to have disappeared. A name, mind you, that no so long ago was the go-to program for video calls. It’s safe to say that, if all of this happened, say, in 2010, we would’ve been Skyping. But now, we’re doing anything but Skyping. What happened? We’ll tell you, in this Company Forensics.
Pitching a business idea requires something out of the ordinary. The difference between raising funds or going home unfunded can lie in how well a business presentation is delivered, or an outstanding pitch deck. For that, a fantastic pitch PowerPoint template is more than a handy tool, especially for those who don’t precisely have top-notch designing skills - or the right tools for it.
The fundraising process for a startup requires a crash course on some terminology that you've probably never heard of. So, to better explain all of this, we are going to tell the story of a startup company, from funding to IPO. This is Startup Funding Explained, part 1.
In high-tech, moving at a high pace is a natural part of its rhythm. And, while this global pandemic has many businesses at a regretful halt, the latest news on Silicon Valley startups is an interesting catch-up. If you're familiar with the valley and startup concepts altogether, feel free to jump ahead to our Silicon Valley news update. If not, let's get to a bit of basic before we jump over to the news, shall we?
Some states in the US are already looking to reopen business and reactivate the economy safely. As that happens, entrepreneurs might be battling to do so safely, and we want to help them achieve that. Here’s a summary of the most significant aspects outlined by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as we attempt to answer “What are the CDC reopening guidelines?” For the full set of them, you can always visit the official CDC website directly.
This is a rare occasion. I am going to pitch you a new business today. It's a real business; I made a real pitch deck for it. I am going to assume you guys are investors, and this is our first call. And I'll pitch it. Then- I'll breakdown some of the key slides and how I solved them. Let's do it.
We’ve all probably given hundreds of presentations over our lifetime. Even so, we’re still most likely making some of the most common presentation mistakes out there. That’s why they’re common as most people keep on making them.
Today, we take to the skies. This plane broke grounds with its technology, speed and looks. But it was a financial failure. What seemed to be the future of aviation instead became a luxury item for a select few. And though it was very safe for most of its history, one crash sealed an already bleak fate, as to how we fly changed.
We've created an easy-to-follow guide on how you can choose the best pitch deck template, based on your company's stage and use case. Pick the best set of slides and skyrocket your business!
Everything changed for us recently. The new coronavirus came around, and we needed to switch many of our routines. How we work and interact, where and how we shop are all part of that list. Especially how we tend to our medical needs shifted! Are we ready to go 100% virtual, though? We’re taking a look at changes across tech, health care, and real estate to give that answer a try. Stick with us!
There is no clickbait here. The backbone of our company success has been Google, and by extension, Youtube. Hear me out. Our website gets around 250,000 organic visits per month. I'm excluding all paid and all social media traffic from that number; those are visits to our website that came from somebody looking for an answer in Google and stumbling upon our content.
A market analysis is a tool to understand your customers better. With it, you should be able to learn critical aspects of your target audiences. As an entrepreneur or business owner, you naturally want to know who your buyers are.
Towards the end of March, the world’s leading provider of vacation rental data & analytics, AirDNA, tweeted about rising Airbnb host cancellation rates. With a foreseeable spike towards mid-April, the new update on April 16 was an average length of stay increase in global bookings of 133%. Airbnb’s newsroom claimed hosts were playing a critical role in longer-term stays, as well.
We’ve created the best presentation software list with tools 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.
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