Get advice for creating a new product and launching your idea. Our authors are faculty, staff, students and professionals. Read what lessons they can share about ideation, prototyping, company formation, law, marketing and more.
TROUGH OF SORROW: The period in a founder’s journey where everything looks like failure and victory is nowhere in sight. You’re an entrepreneur because, like thousands of others, you’ve been told stories of men and women who have changed the world against all odds. You dream of building a product and/or service that will add […]
This isn’t a step-by-step guide to starting your first company; there are a million self-help books and TED talks with people who will tell you their “guaranteed method” to starting a million dollar company. But rather it’s a collection of the most important lessons I learned in my experiences as a college entrepreneur that I […]
Earlier this year, we witnessed one of the largest tech IPO’s since Facebook back in May 2012. Snap and Facebook have swiftly become tech-media giants, collectively reaching billions of people, and generating billions of dollars in revenue. What else do both of these companies have in common? Through a series of events that will likely […]
It didn’t take a lot of effort. Not much time either – about a day or two. All I used was a bit of basic statistics, and by basic, I mean being able to compute percentages. Although I’m doing a Ph.D. in math, I didn’t use any of the fancy artificial intelligence, machine learning or […]
Bootstrapping,” an idiom familiar among emerging businesses, is believed to have originated from the phrase “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” an impossible task. Now the term has become associated with growth notwithstanding limited resources. In this context, bootstrapping doesn’t mean blind attention to certain issues, to the exclusion of other (sometimes unknown) issues. Bootstrapping isn’t gambling. Instead, successful growth of bootstrapped businesses can be attributed to prioritization and efficiency.
When Thad Kelling, marketing and public relations director for the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, outlined for me the mission of their big, new, copper-clad building on campus (1701 Student Life Way), I was understandably impressed. The ground floor of Lassonde Studios and its resources, he stressed, are open to all students on campus — not just […]
Every entrepreneur should know how to be environmentally conscious. Learn how by considering the five things below. My intention is not to prescribe guidelines for conduct, but rather to initiate a conversation so that we can collectively decide what the right vision of the future is, and how we act in accordance. 1. Realize that we […]
When I was in Logan last year my friends and I went to a place called The Crepery, where they sell, what else, crepes. It took us a long time to get a crepe because people love them! There were people always there! When coming up with a business idea, I thought, “Why not sell […]
A common thought among early entrepreneurs and product designers is to build the final version of a product or software before they start selling it. This is wrong. My goal is to walk you through three examples of how I built a minimum viable product, an MVP, to gain feedback and even sales without ever […]
If the startups that entrepreneurs created were reflections of their minds, Mark Pittman’s Blyncsy – a company that generates and aggregates big data from any internet-connected device – would fit the bill. It’s because of Pittman’s desire to make sense of an interconnected world that Blyncsy successfully secured $2.6 million in venture capital from Pelion Venture […]
