By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Every entrepreneur wants the market to validate their product or service through purchases, positive reviews and referrals. But before any of that can happen, you must first create awareness and persuade customers to buy your product. To achieve those goals, you need to formulate and implement a [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker One of the biggest mistakes you can make when pitching to investors is to claim that you have no competitors. As investor Marc Andreesen said in a posting on Quora, “It’s almost always a red flag when someone asserts that they have no competition – from an investor standpoint, [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker How will you assess the market opportunity for your new business? Success stories like Nike, Apple, and Tesla show that the greatest opportunities lie in industry sectors that are growing and changing. You, too, will benefit from knowing your market, fully understanding the business you are in, and [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker A pre-order is an informal commitment from customers to purchase your product before it is formally offered to the market. Pre-orders are vital to any new business because they validate your business idea before you launch. Like many entrepreneurs forming B2B startups, I had the advantage of a [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker "The Real McCoys of Entrepreneurship," five extraordinary people and entrepreneurs, have paved the way for others to follow their dreams. One entrepreneur comes from the pages of history, and four others are history-in-the-making entrepreneurs that live among us today. Elijah McCoy The Original “Real [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Why do some startups succeed, while others wind up in a death spiral? A recentBloombergBusiness article, “A Not-So Rosy Path to U.S. Expansion for Flower Delivery Startup BloomThat,” by Ellen Huet, provides an example of one of the most common reasons startups fizzle and fail. [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Most of us were brought up hearing the story about George Washington cutting down his father’s prize cherry tree and coming clean about it in a grand gesture of integrity and honesty. The point of the story is to set up and use a [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker With the recent downturn of some unicorn valuations and its potential effect on more than 150 unicorns worldwide, a face-off is brewing between investors who are first in line to get their payback and the holders of common stock, such as employees (or even founders), [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Can you turn the tables on startup success? Although a July 2015 report by Statistic Brain research says that 25% of businesses fail in the first year, 36% in the second year, and 44% in year three, we believe you can defy those odds. You can turn [...]
Previously Published on LinkedIn By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The startup ambitions of MBA students and college undergrads have spawned discussion about whether aspiring young entrepreneurs should launch new business ventures while still in school. Students, graduates, professors and investors have varying opinions on whether startup fever should be [...]
