Imagine the perfect business for you. Not only a business that you love, but one that generates consistent wealth and is so well systemized that it mostly runs itself. In Startups Made Simple, small business expert Matt Knee has created a complete guide that takes you from idea to systemized company as quickly and easily as humanly possible. This book is not for the stereotypical Silicon Valley-type of startup that get millions in venture capital. This book is for "the rest of us"-the 99% of entrepreneurs who bootstrap and start real businesses. In this book, Matt Knee pulls back the curtain and guides you through a proven six-step process that he and other successful entrepreneurs have used to build multi-million dollar startups.Whether you have a business now or are looking for an idea to start one, this book will systematically take you (and quickly, using lots of checklists and bullet points) through the process of perfecting and growing your business. This includes how to get out of your own way and even take a real vacation. In addition, you'll discover: - How to supercharge your energy, productivity, and daily routine to get much more done in less time (and not have to work 50+ hours a week like most founders). - How to build a clear vision so you get great ideas and know exactly how to turn them into reality. - How to avoid the fatal mistakes that have destroyed startups in the past. (Most are easily avoidable.)- How to identify that magic cross-section of what you love, what you're good at, and what you can get highly paid for in your business. - How to simply and inexpensively test if your idea is any good before starting the actual business!- A step-by-step process for building your Sales Machine and putting your marketing and sales process on auto-pilot. - Managing and systemizing your business with clear procedures, a simple one-page plan, and a manual that will show anyone how to operate your business (so you can take a real vacation).Table of Contents: PART ONE: The Founder Superpowers1. Energy2. Vision3. Execution4. LeadershipPART TWO: The 6-Step System5. Step One: Imagine It6. Step Two: Plan It7: Step Three: Start It8. Step Four: Grow It9. Step Five: Manage It10. Step Six: Systemize ItPART THREE: The ScorecardsThe Founder Superpowers ScorecardThe 6-Step Scorecard

Let the experts at Inc.guide you through every critical step and potential pitfall as their on-the-ground reporting shows how to locate funding, manage your money, and smart hack your way to a comfortable retirement. Startup Money Made Easy gathers the best advice from the magazine’s pages, spotlighting celebrated entrepreneurs and inspiring stories. You’ll hear from: FUBU founder Daymond John, who mortgaged his family home for start-up capital—and built a $6 billion empire Makeup artist Bobbi Brown, who turned a modest lipstick line into a profitable 30-store enterprise Alexa von Tobel, who dropped out of Harvard Business School to launch the equity-magnate LearnVest.com Mark Cuban, Sallie Krawcheck, Max Levchin, and other founders who overcame financial obstacles on their way to the top Additionally, these stories include on-target tips that explain how to: Raise your first $10,000 in capital Power through the lean years Get friends and family to back you up Round up outside investors Go public or sell, while still staying in charge Reward people with great salaries and benefits Eliminate tax season surprises Grow without growing pains Cash flow problems are the number-one business killer. Whether you’re dreaming up a startup idea or knee deep in the craziness, learn to shore up your finances and safeguard the business.

From award-winning entrepreneur, inventor, and business owner Stephen Key comes the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestseller One Simple Idea Stephen Key is back, and he’s delivering a proven, straightforward process for starting, growing, and running a business—without the need for an MBA or millions of dollars in funding. Key draws on his own experience as a billion-dollar inventor to offer how-tos and other takeaways you can use to get off the ground and into the black. Case-studies of his most successful students and other innovators further underscore “key” principles from the book, while strategies for testing, protecting, and marketing a product make it easier than ever for you to follow achieve your business and life dreams. Stephen Key has successfully licensed more than 20 simple ideas that have generated billions of dollars of revenue. The course he teaches has attracted more than ten thousand students around the world.

Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

A predictable pattern of success Entrepreneurs who have read early drafts of The Start-Up J Curve responded, ''I wish I had this book years ago.'' A start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern; the more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it. Author Howard Love calls this pattern the start-up J Curve: The toughest part of the endeavor is the time between the actual start of a new business and when the product and model are firmly established. The Start-Up J Curve gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to get through the early challenges so they can reach the primary value creation that lies beyond. Love brings thirty-five years of start-up experience to this comprehensive guide to starting a business. He outlines the six predictable stages of start-up growth and details the activities that should be undertaken at each stage to ensure success and to avoid common pitfalls. Instead of feeling lost and confused after a setback, start-up founders and investors can anticipate the challenges, overcome the obstacles, and ride the curve to the top.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

p>Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market. No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product. Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle Understand why you should design a test before you design a product Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

Everything You Need to Start and Succeed in Your Own Venture Trevor Blake built three successful startups and sold them for more than $300 million. Now he’s written a complete instruction manual that covers everything the budding entrepreneur or existing business owner needs to know to build the career or business of their dreams. Unlike the many theoretical guides out there, this is a practical handbook based on Blake’s wildly successful in-the-trenches experience. It incorporates leading-edge strategies that cover every aspect of running a business — including funding, developing systems, and marketing. Blake presents in-depth insight into managing effectively, maintaining cash flow, and adapting to the changing needs of customers in volatile economic times. One of his most innovative contributions is an emphasis on cultivating the right mindset, and he tells you exactly how to do that. “The secret to success isn’t in the plan,” he writes. “It’s in the person holding it.” His proven methods will give you the confidence to take the entrepreneurial leap and turn your winning idea into an efficient, profitable company.

Lead a life of adventure, meaning and purpose—and earn a good living. “Thoughtful, funny, and compulsively readable, this guide shows how ordinary people can build solid livings, with independence and purpose, on their own terms.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project Still in his early thirties, Chris Guillebeau completed a tour of every country on earth and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and focused on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise”—even if you don’t consider it such—and what other people will pay for. You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick. Among Chris’s key principles: If you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish—sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold. Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable book will start you on your way.

The book that makes business start-up simple! In this book you'll find the strategies and methods I have used to organically build a global online business. When I first started out in business (twelve years ago at the time of writing), I found myself feeling overwhelmed with all of the rapidly changing advice out there. I felt like I had to do EVERYTHING and yet felt so confused about what to implement next or how and when, and I felt like I wasn't moving forward. Fast forward twelve years and my favourite thing to do is to simplify EVERYTHING - Business, life, mindset. At first, I was asking myself... 'SHOULD this be more complicated?' 'Can it REALLY be this simple?' And the answer is a simple 'yes'. YES, it can! The truth is, business is WAY MORE FUN when it's simple.I now teach business startups, my step-by-step business model, to make business start-up simple. This book is a compilation of many of the strategies you will find in-depth in my monthly $7 membership group Simple Startup Success for beginners in business. In this book, you'll learn how to: Start your business-Market yourself online organically-Position yourself as the go-to expert-Make consistent sales. I was a make-up artist for advertising for over a decade and have worked with almost one-hundred brands at the time of writing. Whilst I now work fulltime as a business consultant (www.simplestartupsuccess.com.com) I still work on the big advertising campaigns when they come in. You can check out that business at www.emilyrosebraithwaite.com. I hold qualifications as a Master Practitioner of Coaching, NLP, Hypnosis, Multiple Brain Integration Techniques and as a Professional Speaker & Trainer. I'm also a published author of two make-up books sold globally. The strategies I'm providing within this book will help you start your business, market yourself online organically, position yourself as the go-to expert, find and attract clients consistently, and sell conversationally. These strategies have helped my clients and students globally. Don't stay stuck in overwhelm! The information I provide you with in this book will simplify everything for you, and teach you the steps you need to get things moving.