photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Entrepreneurs (most of them) see insurance as a ‘cost’ that you can get away with. Let me remind them – insurance is an investment, not a cost for a startup.

Future is uncertain, and so are the associated risks. Businesses can’t predict a ‘disaster’. May be these risks are small or even affordable, but there is a good chance you are underestimating them. The chances of your business catching fire or getting hit by a flood are low, but can you imagine the disruption that it may cause?

A criminal act, calamity or anything minor can cause major disruption. Entrepreneurs leave the insurance phase for later, but I would suggest getting your startup insured as soon as your business is launched.

Many clients also ask for insurance details before they are prepared to do business with you. Public liability is important for many clients. It also helps you build credibility.

For more information on this, please visit:
http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842907520208545/why-you-need-insurance.html

Despite not being able to trade, you will still have to pay your staff, rent and other costs. You could lose a very significant amount of business or incur heavy costs while attempting to maintain it.

photo credit: wili_hybrid

The task of naming a startup may sound easy, but believe me; it requires a lot of thought and brainstorming.

What’s in a startups name? Everything – the branding and marketing stems from the name. It is not only important but crucial for a startup’s success.

Compare Lycos and Vidoop with Brightmail and Paypal - the latter clearly standout and are easy to pronounce and remember. You can notice the difference yourself. Looking at many successful brands today, there are two things we can find in common;

1.The name relates to what the company actually does. It establishes (a direct or indirect) an association between the brand and product/services of the company

2.The name is not ‘literally’ related to the product/service but it creates a differentiating characteristic or feeling

Other points to be kept in mind when naming a startup:

•A name that can be remembered easily

•Refrain from being too creative with the names

•Think about acronyms (like AT & T for American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc.)

•Do not trade on existing business names (using parts of other well-known brands)

•It should be scalable (think long term growth)

There is a great post on ReadWriteWeb where it talks about naming of mint.com.

Patzer and Mint went through this very process themselves, first purchasing mymint.com at roughly $3,000 before inking a deal with the owner of mint.com

photo credit: Neil Boothman

Today I came across one of the most creative and informative presentations on SEOmoz regarding Search Engine Optimization for startups. The presentation was made for the YCombinator SEO for Startups event.

Here are a few tips from the post/event:

1. Employ SEO in the concept phase (not after the site is built) – It is quite hard to do but take advantage of being a startup. You’re building your website from scratch, so be sure to apply SEO from the beginning.

2. Build accessibility first – Make something search engines can find. Unique content that users and search engines find valuable

3. SEO is a strategy, not a tactic – Don’t do the usual SEO stuff by following certain guidelines and tactics. Explore, experiment and form a proper SEO strategy for your startup

4. Remember: SEO is not a one-time event – It is constantly evolving, not only because Google keeps changing its algorithms but more because hundreds of competitors keep adding content and updating their site.

5. Analytics = Religion – Researching, tracking and reporting, all is possible through analytics. It’s the soul of any SEO initiative

6. Have other sources of traffic to your website (not only Google) – Pass links in e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, press releases etc. If 90 % of your traffic is coming from Google then that is certainly very dangerous.

For more tips, visit SEOmoz

I promise that no hairbrained scheme to manipulate the search rankings by registering thousands of sites or scraping the web for open places to link or contacting 6,000 “friends” for a link exchange are either A) new or B) going to work.

photo credit: johnxlewis

Mr. Kevin Rose created Digg.com – a user driven social content website that attracts 38 million visitors each month. After you submit content to the site, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives the most Diggs, it’s promoted to the home page for other visitors to see – a unique concept which caused a revolution in social media.

Digg.com was launched in 2004 and has been a successful in luring millions of visitors. But achieving all this wasn’t as easy. Kevin Rose had a tough time launching Digg.com – a once upon a time ‘startup’.

Kevin Rose worked for a television company and worked on Digg in his spare time to keep costs down. He says “If you are really passionate about something, it is possible to work a fulltime day job and have that side project, but be prepared to make sacrifices”.

At some point net entrepreneurs will have to decide between quitting their jobs and committing to their ventures, but the longer they can work without taking help from investors, the more equity they will maintain in their start-ups.

Some other suggestions for startups from Mr. Kevin are:

•Dispensing with an office – Digg didn’t have one for 6 months
•Renting and not buying server capacity for testing
•Skipping expensive conferences and networking at after-conference parties instead
•Not to design too many features in your startup product initially
•Hiring people from the start so they can see the big picture right from the beginning
•Avoid taking money from unknowledgeable ‘dumb investors

Mr. Kevin also mentions that being worried, tensed and hyperactive about your startup product is perfectly alright. He also had a stressful time after Digg’s launch, ensuring the site wasn’t hacked or taken over by spammers – “it was really scary. I can remember waking up early in the morning because I didn’t know what was going to be on the homepage.”

A lot of advice for startups from the founder of Digg.com himself

For more details visit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3358151/Digg-com-founder-boosts-startups
 

photo credit: alexanderdrachmann

It is easy to glamorize the life of an entrepreneur – but what isn’t easy is to imagine all the difficulties that come along. However, without a doubt the benefits of being a startup entrepreneur outweigh all the problems.

There are millions of people every year who step forward and take a plunge and start their first ventures. So should you take the plunge as well? As a potential entrepreneur, it’s the ‘gut’ feeling of succeeding that is important. There are strong internal drivers that compel us to startup our own venture.

Yes we have the idea, motivation and zeal, but do we really have everything needed to be successful startup entrepreneur?

Take this 2 minute test (Isenberg Entrepreneur Test) and find out. Simply answer yes or no to the questions and be honest (to yourself):

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/should_you_be_an_entrepreneur.html

I am sure Zuckerberg, Larry Page & Steve Jobs will score well in the quiz 

"I want to get rich" is not on the list either. All else being equal (and all else is rarely equal in the real world), on the average, people who set up their own businesses don't make more money, although a few do succeed in grabbing the brass ring.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

So you create a Facebook Fan Page and have 200,000 fans in two weeks. How do you get the benefit out of this? Well this is a 100 percent opportunity to become an ‘entrepreneur’ (in good faith).

The dilemma is – can a famous Facebook page become a real startup?

We have two kinds of people here;

1.Intentional – who form a Facebook page or open an account with Twitter before launching a website (bona fide startup.

2.Unintentional – who form a Facebook page, get massive number of fans and then decide to launch a website with the same idea

In both cases, the biggest question is whether the popularity of a Facebook Page can be easily harnessed to build a standalone website. The obvious advantage is that Facebook has a huge number of users who are very active (Trust me – Facebook is extremely engaging). If a user becomes a fan of your page, then updates you post on your page will automatically show up in the user’s profile. Building an audience through Facebook is comparatively easier.

Now the problem is that users might be reluctant to visit your website when they can get all updates from Facebook (user friction)

It will be a long way before a Facebook page can turn in to a sustainable and profitable business.

Econsultancy explains the topic elaborately in this post by citing an example of Secret London

As a standalone website, Secret London will have to convince its users to visit and use yet another website. That means far more

PS: My friend launched a Facebook Fan Page yesterday and has above 300 fans already – she is already thinking on the same line

photo credit: wili_hybrid

Crowd Funding can be described as a trend that aggregates small amounts of money from many people for a certain cause which can range from helping a charity to funding a clothing design. The networking and pooling for funding is usually done through the internet.

Companies have been tapping funds for customer service and product design for quite some time now but tapping the crowd for funds is a bit trickier. However, there is great potential for startup financing through crowdfunding.

An entrepreneur who wants to use crowd funding makes use of online communities to solicit pledges of small amounts of money from individuals (typically not professional financiers).

The biggest problem with crowd funding is that if a small contribution obtained via crowd sourcing is actually an ‘equity investment’ (or even a loan) then crowd funding companies may soon run faulty of security laws. For example: If you raise money from over a certain number of people, you are subject to a full-fledged list of security laws. (Rules vary according to country). Also crowd funding scams can be huge but where money is involved, scammers will come automatically.

So is crowd funding a Web 2.0 twist or the future of online fundraising?

I believe that crowd funding is here to stay and has enormous potential. It is still in its initial phase but it’s going to get better.

On this note I remember an online platform for crowd funding for web and mobile startups was launched recently - GrowVc

For more information we suggest you read this post and an article in businessweek

photo credit: thms.nl

The best way for a person to remember something is to have a ‘visual aid’. I believe most of us are visual learners. I would definitely remember a face but not a name.

How can businesses use this concept to market their products/services in the online world?
Through Video Marketing – quality video content which is correctly tagged, distributed at the right places online and shared via social networking sites has tremendous power to reach wide audiences globally. Complex ideas, thoughts and emotions can be communicated easily through viral videos. Two distinct advantages from a marketing point of view are; visual aid advantage which engages more users and the power of a video to engage in search engines. So videos don’t only influence customer buying decisions but also boost your visibility on search engines.

The phenomenal rise of “how to” concept has given video marketing an extra push. People who want information actively search for this type of content. People who have the information and who want to share it for free can form a video and distribute it online.

There are various online video sharing platforms with YouTube undoubtedly being the most popular one. YouTube is the third most-visited site on the internet which receives over 70 million unique visitors a month (and the number keeps rising). And it also appears in Google search results – what else does an online marketing strategy want?

Other sites such as Vimeo, Justin.TV, Blip.tv, Photobucket.com, Viddler.com & Ecorp.tv are also good for distributing and sharing videos.

The whole idea of making a video and distributing it online can be quite intimidating but an advice here is - just do it. Video marketing can be very effective and it will definitely be the new marketing for 2010 with many companies adopting it already.

A video marketing strategy can be ideal for your startup as well – it’s cheap, helps in search engine rankings and has a viral tendency if correctly made and distributed.

For more information regarding this we suggest you visit StartupNation Blog

It’s my opinion that not having a video presence in 2-5 years will be like not having a web site in 2010!

photo credit: Aidan Jones

Incubators (or business incubators) are programs aimed to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurial companies by providing them with an array of business resources and services. Incubators may vary in the style in which they deliver these services, in the type of clients they serve or the organizational structure they have.

Incubators are especially dedicated to growth and development of start up companies. Research and Technology parks on the other hand support large scale projects that support everything from corporate, government or university labs to very small companies.

A successful incubator I would like to mention here is Y incubator launched by Paul Graham in 2005. It has funded over 60 startups and still continues to inspire many others. The model followed by Y incubator has been imitated widely through out the world and hence there are many incubators around the world offering good services and seed funding to startups.

If you’re a startup founder looking for seed funding, here are a few incubators suggested by ReadWriteWeb: Y Combinator, TechStars, SeedCamp, Summer@Highland, Launch Box, Bootup Labs etc. For more details on this please visit

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guide_to_seed_fund_incubators.php

While Graham may not like it, there are a large number of start up incubators following the model he created with Y Combinator and handing out microinvestments in web startups in return for a small stake.

photo credit: jmmcdgll

Forming a sales proposal is one of the most complicated tasks for startups. While they’re extremely important to a business, they’re not really the easiest thing to form and manage. An interesting service (startup) is launching today – Proposable, which aims at simplifying the process of making proposals (with some nice new web features)

Proposable is a web- based application that allows you to create and deliver sales proposals. It has a number of templates and tools that offer high customization and standardization. The most interesting part of the app is the analytics features such as instant notification when your proposal is being viewed, for how long viewers spend time on the proposal and what they’re exactly looking for.

Another fascinating feature is that updates can be made and viewed in realtime. Recipients can add comments and get feedback via SMS or email. All of this online – another brilliant cloud computing based web app for startups.

Talking about the cost, the most impressive feature is that it offers a 30 day free trial (of any package) .If you wish to continue using it you have 3 packages to choose from and all are quite reasonable.

This web app will save time, effort and is good value for money - recommended for startups. For further details we suggest you read this post in TechCrunch