Finding The Right Team For Your Tech Startup

November 1, 2013 By Guest Author Leave a Comment

In the first few years of building your tech startup, you’ll want to be sure to hire the best team members who will help you build your brand into a solid success. When selecting your team members, remember that they of course need to have the technical background and skill set required for the position, but they need something a little extra too. While there is never a guarantee of how long a team member will stay with your organization, it is most ideal if you can keep your retention level as high as possible because your initial team members will play a major role in establishing your company brand and office culture.

Team Players

Even if you hire a graphic designer who will primarily work solo, your startup is bound to have a fairly small staff, in which all team members may have to participate in other projects too. This could be anything from researching new areas of opportunity to having weekly staff meetings in which honest and constructive feedback needs to be given and received. If you bring on a team member who prefers to work completely undisturbed that person may not have the skill set needed to help grow your business, even if they have the skill set required to perform their job.

Varying Skill Sets

When you first launch your tech startup you will likely be performing some of the technical duties yourself and hiring part-time and full-time team members to fill in the gaps. When choosing team members for your tech startup, ensure that you build a team that has varying skill sets. For example, if you excel in graphic design but are not great at writing the code for websites, you will strengthen your team by hiring someone who excels in writing code, as opposed to another graphic designer. However, it is important that all of your team members know enough about the overall finished products and services you will be delivering so that they can best complete their job duties in a manner that supports your objectives.

Committed Individuals

The tech industry is highly competitive, and your skilled team members will be in high demand. When building a startup you want to ensure that you bring on board team members who are willing to commit to your business in the long term, and who aspire to grow from within. Once you identify team members who believe in your vision and want to be a part of your long-term growth, you need to create a company culture that supports growth and recognizes your team members’ valuable contributions. There are many ways to develop a supportive company culture, including by creating development plans for your team members and individually recognizing them for their success. Many startups host quarterly, semiannual, or annual celebrations where they present crystal awards for recognition to celebrate team members who go above and beyond their assigned job duties.

Launching your new tech startup is an exciting endeavor. To best see your vision of success come to life you need to surround yourself with a solid team of skilled, committed, and invested team members. Finding the right fit may take time, but it is time well spent when building the right team to establish your brand.

Tips For First Time StartUp Fund Raising- Tips From Though Leaders

September 19, 2013 By Medha BN Leave a Comment

First time start-up fundraisers make their share of mistakes and yes, it is not just you but many of them who are giants today have had made many mistakes during their first times. But when you have ample of opportunities to learn and not to make any mistakes even as a first timer then why loose opportunities at all? Learn from their hard earned lessons and spare yourself from making ‘the fundraising mistakes‘. Here are 5 tips just for you:

1) Alex Mittal gives some powerful insights on fund raising why’s and how’s-

In one of his recent blog posts, Alex discusses the how about’s of fundraising for the first time start-ups. The first and foremost thing he advises is “Before fundraising, consider not fundraising”. The pressure of making profits and delivering results quick enough to return $10 to the investor for $1 proposition is not good in the beginning. Considering the fact that starting a business or a venture these days is cost effective, Alex makes sense in raising initial amount from family, friends and friends of friends. Another way of getting the funds is from university entrepreneurial grants programs. The thing is raise as little money as possible at first and stay away from the so called Angel Investors and VC’s so that you build your business model according to your views and study rather than they advising you on what is to be done and what not.

2) Michael Skok says “Raising money is like sex”-

Giving some powerful tips on raising funds for start-ups, Michael says- either do not raise money till you have resources to hold it or raise money when you are brand new which at that point is attractive for Venture Capitalists. It is important to solve a problem or meet a need so validation before raising seed fund is absolute necessary.

3) Rick Perreault gives handy tips for success on Angle List-

Pitch video, your road to success- As the whole web is talking about the visual presence, it is a good idea to make a video of yourself pitching and upload it on Youtube. A pitch video could come in handy for your meetings with investors. Create your profile on sites like AngleList and upload your video so you instantly grab your potential Angle investors. Ask for endorsements, comments and profile shares from influencing personalities you know. As you are likely to get dozens of calls form investors on Angle List, it essential to maintain a spreadsheet with contact details, link to the investors Angle List profile, even the rating to the investors to make a good match as a investor for your business.

4) Charles Moldow talks on great pitches to VC’s-

The winning pitch will have precise and to the point concept of company. Anybody who succeed to tell what their company is about in one sentence will surely get what they deserve. Any VC will look for clear answers on what their company is about, why is it important and what they look to solve. Mere presenting an idea is not enough but selling it to the investor is what makes the difference.

5) As seen in the source, the emphasis is on closing date-

Closing date is important in businesses where the amount is huge and the interest even per week is substantial. There might be cases where the investor might delay in releasing funds. The closing date is important but it is equally important to keep the closing date clause flexible enough in the legal documentation to stretch for few weeks even after the closing date.

Fundraising for start-ups looks so much essential but the reality is it all depends upon your business requirements. Before moving on to raise funds make sure if you actually need it or even if you need how much? It is always good to start off with what you have and then show the real potential to attract VCs.

Checkthis Is The New Addition To The Budding Social Media Start-ups

December 16, 2012 By Medha BN Leave a Comment

 Are you done with tweeting your micro blog?
 And did you finish posting on your Facebook fan page?
 How are your pins working for you on Pinterest?
 Then, your blog on tumblr, did you update it?

Okay, after you have done with all of them don’t forget to create a social poster on checkthis. checkthis is a startup out from Beligium and Frédéric della Faille is the Founder & Designer of checkthis who is accompanied by Melvyn Hills, the Co-founder & Developer.

As the social media marketing is making huge impact on web for individuals and businesses across the globe, new and innovative startups are budding out in full swing trying to fill the existing gap. Be it small website owners or the giants in businesses everybody is trying to make the most out of social networking sites. After Facebook and Twitter reached the heights of success, many other social media sites took shape in no time. Here another such site with a twist, checkthis!

So, what is CheckThis anyway?

checkthis is a social media site which was started with the aim to bridge the gap between regular social media enthusiasts and occasional content creators. It also had the vision of providing a platform where you can talk more than twitter and little less than a blog post. checkthis is a social poster making site which can be used only as much as you want. You decide how frequently you want to create posters or if you want to vanish from web for sometime without worrying to build your fan base by providing uninterrupted content. This is possible because every poster you create is independent in itself. Every poster has a live time-line next to it so you can see the likes, votes, comments, and much more.

The procedure and the features:

You can start creating posters without even creating an account unless you want to login and edit it later. Just choose one of your options, tell (write), sell (create a classified posting), ask (a survey), or invite (event invitation) and get started. You get a unique URL for your poster to share with family and friends.
All your collections of posters are visible in one place and the best part is you can share your posters created on checkthis outside say on twitter, Facebook, etc.
It’s useful for businesses and idea generators especially the ones who do not have all the time to commit for a blog. Create posters as per your requirements anytime and you don’t have to be regular.
Share on other social media platforms, get people talking about your poster, get traffic and see your business growing.
Every poster created is independent and has its own real-time interactions of comments and shares by visitors on a clean and neat time line. It even shows you if your poster is on fire!
You can let your creative juices flow and release your imagination of any bondage. It allows you to embed rich content like images, maps, polls, videos and even a PayPal button to enable purchases. You are also provided with rich editor which is easy to use without a perquisite for technical knowledge. Change the themes, upload custom backgrounds, and just do what you are pleased to.

Are you still thinking why use CheckThis over other mediums?

When every body on web is talking about SEO and SMO (Social Media Optimization) making use of all the availabe social networking platforam, why not you? More over its free to use and that too without registering or logining in, isn’t that great? And you have something to say but it’s more for twitter and does not qualify for a blog post. And also because you want to share something that is more visually powerful than just text, full of graphics and design (or may be just plain text if you choose so).

The Rising Culture Of Startups- Are You With It?

November 25, 2012 By Medha BN Leave a Comment

As stated by Paul Graham on his site “Startup=Growth” which means if there is no growth for an enterprise venture it is not a startup! So, startups are always good for personal as well as National growth.

Definition of startup

As stated in this source, startup is- “Early stage in the life cycle of an enterprise where the entrepreneur moves from the idea stage to securing financing, laying down the basis structure of the business, and initiating operations or trading”.

In another , Steve Blank states as- “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

Some argue that startup is just confined to starting something in the technological field and others think it should be more inclusive. Whatever be the definition, many employees find ways to kick their boss in the a*s and get self-employed and love the word “entrepreneur” on their profile!

The question is- why people are getting so much obsessed with this startup culture? Is is just about money or is there more to it?

Why are people going ga-ga over start-ups?

People think of startup as it gives them the creative freedom. A startup begins with a great idea and grows without leaps and bounds not only making huge business and money but also bringing in entrepreneurial satisfaction.
People also get into this new culture purely for money. If things go right and the atartup business clicks it is likely that an established company will acquire it either to kill the competition or to make more business out of it. Thus you will earn a huge lump sum and also the required fame for your next atartup! Yes once you are in this culture you will follow the chain reaction and end up starting, owning and selling companies to companies.
Do you have a dream job but do not know how to find it? Then a good option is to go for a startup. Here’s why? You are starting an enterprise which will give you your dream job, you are the owner of this business, you are the terms setter, you are the profit owner, meanwhile you are also making monitory benefits out of your aptitude, interest and hobby (may be!).

Is this culture disrupting the economy or helping it grow?

Looking at the employment opportunities created by start-ups things look positive for sure. Directly or indirectly most of the start-ups once getting into the growth arena hire employees helping in bringing down the unemployment rate. For example: Facebook which was once a startup is now a family of 4,331 employees at the end of September 30, 2012 as disclosed by the Facebook newsroom. Apart from this direct employment it has created jobs for apps designers and business co-ordinates in-addition to small businesses worldwide making their living virtually through fan pages!
Startups also contribute to the economy of the country through public stakes and keep going even during recession. Most of these start-ups grow like mushrooms during the down time of economy and surprisingly make good companies in future! In-fact according to Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient, startups aid in economic recovery.

Continuing this argument that the startup legends have started let us put in our thoughts on why startups are essential and how they contribute to the economy. Now is your turn…

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