The years, when doing business meant focusing just on your product, while customers, with little choices and badly informed, used to buy them, even if not really satisfied, are gone. Forever!
You've probably heard about Bellabeat, FlyKly, or Layer? Well, three years ago they didn't exist! Now they are at the top of their industries, but how did they do it? Was it enough only to have the right idea or did they also need to have knowledge to conduct business in today’s competitive environment? Specifically, what kind of knowledge do startups need to succeed and not repeat the many mistakes of the 90% of startups that fail?
"I am sick and tired of the word startup. It seems like everyone and their mother has a startup today, I might even start calling the Vietnamese grocery store next doors a food startup."
Dealing almost exclusively with first time startup founders, we at Credo tackle the following question with basically each of our CEOs: How much equity should they give to the employees?
Bulgarian venture fund LAUNCHub just announced the 14 shortlisted technology startups who will attend the Long Weekend Event next week in Zagreb and receive intensivetraining with coaches and mentors, to polish their final pitches for the finale on July 5, when the winners in the Long Weekend to be offered investment of up to 200 K Euro.
The team, the product and the size of the market: these three ingredients are typically preached to us as the key to a successful startup. But what if someone much bigger or much better funded comes along, essentially copies the product, devotes a much larger team to the task, and spends heavily on sales & marketing to grab the market?
After it secured 1.5 million dollars and another 6 millions in seed investment, American-Slovenian communications platform for apps Layer announced that it raised 14.5 million in Series A funding from Homebrew, AME Cloud Ventures, CrunchFund, Fuel Capital and others.
European startups are able to raise just a fraction of the capital at home compared to their U.S. counterparts. And they receive a lot more value from their investors. Why would I ever fundraise anywhere outside of Silicon Valley?
Croatian consulting company DC&T, specializing in creative, efficient, and humane office space design, is setting out to conquer the world markets. First step: Dubai.
