09Oct

Bootstrapping for Young Startup Entrepreneurs

Todd Crosland Young Startup EntrepreneurA recent article in Young Upstarts deliberates the developmental phase that every startup company goes through: taking the idea and implementing it into a real, tangible product that creates revenue. A lot of young entrepreneurs might turn to accelerator programs, venture capital, or angel investing. However, this leads to sacrificing equity and freedom at an early stage of their company, which isn’t necessarily ideal.

The term bootstrapping is where young entrepreneurs will max out their credit cards and turn their homes into permanent working locations where they work late nights and early mornings. The article continues to give five pieces of advice from entrepreneurs who have gone through the bootstrapping process and come out the other side.

The first words of advice are from Samuel Huber, founder of Betify. He states, “Budgeting is king.” It is important to know exactly how long your company can last without revenue and external investments. Huber says to create a month-by-month revenue log and multiply that by 1.5 to be on the safe side.

The next word of advice is from Martin Brinkmann, founder of Deez.io. His word of advice is “prioritize.” Prioritizing funds and development is crucial to getting the product out on the market. A lot of time could be wasted nitpicking on “your baby” when the product is ready to hit the market.

Steven Lammertink, founder of cirqle.nl, tells us to master the pitch. The products pitch is how an entrepreneur will let investors and high-profile individuals know about the product. It is important to have a strong pitch to act as a good first impression. The pitch should include what the product is, the market opportunity, and value propositions.

Entrepreneurs should take on investors on their own terms, says founder of chekk.me, Pascal Nizri. A startup needs to be at the right stage of development to take on investors. Entrepreneurs are ready to take on investors if they want to expand their business or receive mentorship. Bankruptcy and last resort should not lead an entrepreneur to seek investors.

The last piece of advice is from our very own, Todd Crosland, founder of Seed Equity Ventures. His advice is to preserver. Nowadays there are thousands of venture capitalists controlling the startup industry, but soon enough individual investors from all around the world will start influencing the startup industry more and more. There are more funding options in the future, so there will be plenty of more opportunities for entrepreneurs in the near future.

31Jul

Salt Lake City and their Emerging Startup Environment

Todd Crosland Salt Lake CityA recent article in fast company discusses the advantages of developing your startup company in Salt Lake City. The first advantage that the article talks about is cost effectiveness. Simply put, the rent is lower in Salt Lake City than it is in most developing startup ecosystems.

A large portion of the population is comprised of Latter Day Saints and the Mormon Church, and this has its advantages for the workplace. The population is generally healthy and hardworking making for stable work conditions. Many citizens are sent out on missionaries to different countries around the world. This makes it so that they can speak another language, and hopefully they picked up some good sales skills while in a hostile environment. The area is known for their legacy startups. Novell, Altiris, and WordPerfect have all started in Salt Lake City and encountered great success within the state. Loyalty is big within the community, so that is a big plus for emerging startups looking to keep long time employees. Since there is a large religious community, many family members leave the area, accumulate wealth, and return to invest in their family and home state.

The University of Utah and BUY are ranked number one in various aspects of commercialization and technology, so an emerging tech startup environment is almost natural in Salt Lake City. One thing that Utah can do better with in the labor market are software engineers. Utah does not have the right number of software engineers for their tech startup environment, and not many software engineers are relocating to Salt Lake City. Relocating c-level executives to take startups one-step further is tough in Salt Lake City and this is an area of improvement for the state.

Overall, there are multiple billion-dollar enterprises that have started in Salt Lake City, which citizens hope to cause a snowball effect that opens up doors for other tech startups to join in on previous success.

This article is based off of this article from fast company.