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If You Don’t Respect Your Customers You Won’t Be Successful

Both Sides of the Table

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. From these meetings you can really tell the leaders that care deeply about their customers and those the look down on them. You’d be very wrong. Contrast that with a VC conversation I had.

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8 New Venture Smarts That You Can’t Afford To Ignore

Startup Professionals Musings

A while back I received a discouraging note from an entrepreneur with a patent and a medical software application who couldn’t find a dime of investment, and was grousing that seed funding just wasn’t available anymore. Failure to prepare for due diligence. Not doing due diligence on the funding source.

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7 Ethical Fictions Lead Many New Entrepreneurs Astray

Startup Professionals Musings

New entrepreneurs tend to focus only on getting the product right, and assume that the right culture and ethics will come later simply by hiring good people. These can be as simple as how to handle customer over-payments, or more complex in how to handle the choices every employee may face between conflicting customer and company interests.

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20 Best Free and Paid Tools for Startups in 2023

Tech.Co

Launching and growing a startup is one of the biggest missions an entrepreneur can undertake. Business tools — from customer relationship management ( CRM ) platforms to accounting software — help to save startups time and money by automating key processes and maximizing efficiency. While Hide.me From its 4.3-inch

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10 Attributes Of The Perfect Partner For Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Very few entrepreneurs have the range of skills and experience to be the solution creator as well as business creator, or operational as well as sales leader. Most entrepreneurs work long hours and weekends to get the job done. The challenge is to recognize and recruit that ideal partner match early with minimal cost and risk.

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5 Keys to Moving From Entrepreneur Thinking To Action

Startup Professionals Musings

As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always surprised by the fact that some never seem to be able to that first startup going, while many others never seem to stop, starting their second or third initiative before the first one is fully hatched. I’m now convinced that serious entrepreneurs relish the startup process more than success.

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Customer Trust Is An Opportunity With A Huge Payback

Startup Professionals Musings

My recommendation to entrepreneurs is to recognize these concerns as an opportunity to make people’s life better, rather than worry and dodge the risk. I see lots of new software put together on a shoestring as a “proof of concept” – but then gets rolled out to customers “asis” due to lack of time or money to “harden” the product.

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