Resourcing The Start Up Business

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Drawing on the most up-to-date and relevant research, this concise textbook is an accessible guide to harnessing the appropriate resources when launching a new start-up business. The focus is on the wide range of tangible and intangible resources available to entrepreneurs in the early stages of a new venture. This second edition brings in material on crowdfunding, digitalization and Covid-19, and dedicates new chapters to: lean start-ups and business models idea generation and opportunity development and business incubators and accelerators. The book supports students with learning objectives, a summary, discussion questions and a practical call to action in each chapter. A teaching guide and slides are also available for instructors. Resourcing the Start-up Business will be a valuable textbook for students of entrepreneurship and new venture creation globally.

Starting a business successfully requires numerous skills and resources. The alarming rate of failures associated with new ventures suggests that potential entrepreneurs would welcome expert advice at the most vital stage in the life of any business. The expert author team focus on those resources, skills, capabilities and learning required by any entrepreneur in the process of starting a new business. Specifically, this text aims to: Introduce and explain those resources (including finance) that are essential to successful business creation Identify the key skills and capabilities that are required by entrepreneurs Highlight the ways in which new resources are combined with the entrepreneur’s existing resource base to develop the business effectively Explore the way entrepreneurs learn in the process of developing their business Drawing on the most up-to-date and most relevant research, this concise textbook provides students and academics of entrepreneurship with a practical guide to acquiring the appropriate resources in order to start a new firm.

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

According to John Warrillow, the number one mistake entrepreneurs make is to build a business that relies too heavily on them. Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren't confident that the company-even if it's profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency. Alex turns to Ted, an entrepreneur and old family friend, who encourages Alex to pursue three criteria to make his business sellable: * Teachable: focus on products and services that you can teach employees to deliver. * Valuable: avoid price wars by specialising in doing one thing better than anyone else. * Repeatable: generate recurring revenue by engineering products that customers have to repurchase often.

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better--and smarter--solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

Business startup advice from the former president of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation and cofounder of Global Entrepreneurship Week and StartUp America, this “thoughtful study of ‘how businesses really start, grow, and prosper’...dispels quite a few business myths along the way” (Publishers Weekly). Carl Schramm, the man described by The Economist as “The Evangelist of Entrepreneurship,” has written a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to help you get your big idea off the ground. Schramm believes that entrepreneurship has been misrepresented by the media, business books, university programs, and MBA courses. For example, despite the emphasis on the business plan in most business schools, some of the most successful companies in history—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and hundreds of others—achieved success before they ever had a business plan. Burn the Business Plan punctures the myth of the cool, tech-savvy twenty-something entrepreneur with nothing to lose and venture capital to burn. In fact most people who start businesses are juggling careers and mortgages just like you. The average entrepreneur is actually thirty-nine years old, and the success rate of entrepreneurs over forty is five times higher than that of those under age thirty. Entrepreneurs who come out of the corporate world often have discovered a need for a product or service and have valuable contacts to help them get started. Filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs who drew on real-life experience rather than academic coursework, Burn the Business Plan is the guide to starting and running a business that will actually work for the rest of us.

Have you got a business idea in mind? If so, let's test it out, step-by-step Even if you don't have an idea, this book will show you how to start a business where you know there are customers who will want what you're going to offer them! The major topics covered by this book include: Starting a new business: Contractual agreements for hiring staff, trademarks, company formation, keeping financial records and tax considerations, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and Intellectual Property (IP) and their significance to you. You'll find lots of signposts to direct you towards startup-friendly law services and legal documents that you can review and consider. Researching your idea: In this section of the book, there are plenty of interactive exercises which will show you how to assess any business idea, along with tips and techniques you can start using for free, including little-known ways to automate the gathering of your research once you know what sort of information you are looking for. Save time and collect information even as you sleep! You'll also find resources to help you prepare a business plan in minutes. Identifying your target market and target customer(s): This book will explain how to create a customer avatar with lots of suggestions, diagrams and examples to show you how to do this. You'll also be shown how to hold professional "customer interviews" to gather feedback on your idea and refine it further. These interviews will help you get to the heart of what customers want and need, and most importantly, what they will pay you for. Raising funds for your business: We'll cover a number of ways to raise money to build your product - choose the ones that are right for you. This book comes with templates, scripts and free resources including an online workbook and spreadsheets to help you stay organised as you start to plan ahead. Reach for the stars, whilst keeping your feet on the ground. Avoid unnecessary risks, and Develop Your Idea before you invest money in a new venture! This book is for you if you: - Are planning to start a new business venture and are at the idea, or early planning stages. - Would like some techniques and a process that you can follow to research and test out your idea before you take the next step. - Would like to know how to protect your interests when starting a new business. - Are short on time and money and want some useful methods, and resources to help you avoid the pitfalls associated with starting a new business. NOTE This is the first book in the Building Your Business series, that leads on to the 25-chapter software survival guide: Don't hire a software developer until you read this book, for startups and entrepreneurs that want to start, or grow their tech business the smart way. It builds on the concepts seen in Develop Your Idea! A wide range of topics are covered, including: The pros and cons of building different types of software app, agile development principles and processes, pricing tactics and generating revenue from your app, basic marketing and SEO, creating prototypes from scratch and product development. The book also explains some of the different programming languages used to build apps, how to find and interview developers, how to project manage the build of a software application, product testing, managing a Beta software launch, customer care, support and more!