Vertigo in the Funding Vortex

Squeeze that last cent!

Jack of All Trades or Master of One?

If you are launching a service business, you have choices: 

1. Be everything to everyone
2. Be very targeted with a niche service to a small subset
3. Be some combination of the above

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"The opportunities are endless."  You may have heard that when you embarked on your startup journey. However, little did you know that it is an understatement.

Bare It All: Income Potential as an Entrepreneur

“As excited as I was at the beginning about the possible upside to my income potential, I was equally scared when my business got sued and I realized they could take all my current and future assets.”

Evolution of an Entrepreneur

Are you an entrepreneur, marching to progress? 
Everyone has seen the famous scientific drawing, showing the compressed evolution of 25 million years. Entrepreneurs also go through a mental evolution as they go deeper into their businesses.

Brutally Honest Fortune Cookies

Polished off that Chinese takeout? Now you're ready to crack open your fortune cookie. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, you may find much truth in the fortune that awaits you. We've collected some common proverbs and adages below that you'd find in a fortune cookie, and applied them to the entrepreneurial experience:

An Entrepreneur: The Fixing Machine

Attention budding entrepreneurs: How handy are you with tools?

Entrepreneur's Palm Reading: Certain Uncertainties

What would you do if you knew, right now, how successful your startup would be in the future?

If  you knew it wouldn't be successful, would you still pursue the entrepreneurial journey? 

And if you knew it would be successful, would you work as hard at it, or just leave it to fate?

Entrepreneur's Piggy Bank: Forgotten Startup Costs

A recent article stated that financial reasons are the cause of 80% of startup failures. This makes sense since everything costs more than anticipated in a new venture. Especially for those jumping to a startup from a corporate role, there will be plenty of surprises as the corporate role probably provided "extras" as a part of the job.

I’m All In: Why is Entrepreneurship Like Poker

I played my first poker game recently. Although my hope for beginner’s luck didn't pan out, I learned a lot during that game and saw many parallels to starting a company. And the more I understood poker, the more it made sense as to why poker was declared a game of “skill”, instead of a game of pure chance. Entrepreneurship is much more like poker than other games in that:

Dwarfed by your Business Plan

THWUMP: Your 80-page masterpiece plops on the table.
If you are referring to your business plan, you've fallen into one or more of the following #entrepreneurfail traps:

1. Assuming that quality and quantity are the same thing
2. Babbling because you are just not focused on one idea or clearly identified your customer
3. Assuming that if it looked like a book, the business plan would sell itself!
4. Not realizing your plan won’t stay the same when you actually start launching and executing
5. Forgetting that its a constantly changing document that will re-mold itself a million times in the future