article thumbnail

If You Don’t Define Your Personal Brand the Market Will

Both Sides of the Table

I have long advised startup companies that if you don’t control your messaging somebody else will and your potential customers will form impressions of you shaped by somebody else or by nobody at all. For 1991 I was very technical and also had a lot of practical business implementation experience in technology. ” F**k.

article thumbnail

What is the Right Burn Rate at a Startup Company?

Both Sides of the Table

Gross margin (GM) is the amount of profit you make per sale of your product or service taking into account your total costs of selling that product or service. If you have a very low gross margin (10-30%) it can be very hard to build a large, scalable business because you need to make a lot of sales to cover your operating costs.

Startup 383
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Both Sides of the Table

Good entrepreneurs can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. I spent nearly a decade building software for large companies and then advising companies on the same. Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. Good entrepreneurs are wrong often. obviously don’t read this as zero analysis).

article thumbnail

Better Business Bureau? For who?

Eric Greenspan

Anyhow, I replied and asked who pays who here and found that First Data pays Chad a commission for his sales. I checked with our Director of Delight and she assured me we gave a full refund to both and that we formally responded to this within the required time, but the BBB website had a technical issue. Please advise.

article thumbnail

Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs

Both Sides of the Table

Of course you could start your own company. Of course I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t start a company. ” My friend Ian Sigelow wrote about this last week and advised people not to take on this kind of job. And if you want to be a CEO one day you need the messaging to reflect that.

article thumbnail

7 Pitching Tips to Help You Crush Your Next Investor Meeting

Tech.Co

Try to compile all the different types of questions you could be asked about your business, like technical details, financial assumptions and projections, marketing, IP, etc., I would advise trying not to get into an argument with an investor. Of course, if you’re none of those things, you might want to have someone else pitch.”.

Tips 70
article thumbnail

Frank Addantes FounderBlog: Startup 5.0 – I’m just going to chill out for a bit… (OK, for a month…)

Frank Addante

I decided that I was going to consult/advise a few companies and relax for a bit. He went from recruiter to IT manager to technical sales… Then, he did such a great job in sales that we had to build up more infrastructure for our ad-serving and email delivery platform to support the increased demand.

Startup 40