Startups & Spirits Video series

The Early-Stage Startup Track
From idea to MVP and first revenue.
All Articles:
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've collected some startup elevator pitch examples from successful businesses 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.
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!
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.
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!
These are few tips I’ve discovered along the way to iron them out. Hope it saves you some time.
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.
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.
While some of the world’s best presenters are certainly artists, we know that their presentations obey the kind of narrative structure that allows even novice public speakers the opportunity to deliver great presentations. Learn here how you can create a great presentation!
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.
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.
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.
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. If you’re new to the concept, retargeting lets you create ad campaigns for users that performed (or didn’t perform) specific actions in your website of platform. In this article, learn how we get conversions for less than $1 using retargeting ads!
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 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!
For the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of speaking internationally. I was invited to speak at the Frontiers of Interaction, a design conference in Milan, Italy, and Twinkle a business conference in Tampere, Finland.
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.