The Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords (And How to Target Them in Your Search Campaigns) On the heels of Google’s blow-out Q2 2011 earnings announcement last week, we wanted to find out what keywords demand the highest costs per click and are most competitive...

Why You Should Eliminate Titles at Start-ups There has been a recent dialog around a theme I'll call "hacking the corporation" - creating novel approaches to building young companies, particularly when they are in their formative...

Leadership at the Expansion Stage: Dos and Don’ts Please do not read this as a pedantic piece of presumptuous exhortations that are typically seen in “leadership” and “self-improvement” articles and books. I do not presume to...

Must watch videos from MassChallenge Bootcamp MassChallenge recently kicked off their startup competition and they wrapped up their Bootcamp last week. One of the great things...

How To Communicate With Investors. Tips For New CEOs Andy Swan, one of my angel investors, asked if I would publish some of my investor emails. I’m not ready to do that, but I do think investor communication is important and difficult...

The 5 Things You Need to Have Before Evaluating your Sales Team So perhaps you are curious given all this talk about sales force evaluations? We do mention it a lot and it is the foundation of everything we do. In the right situation a Sales...

Octane - Interviews with Boston Entrepreneurs! As the 4th of July weekend is here, we thought it would be a great time to provide links to all the great Q&A sessions we've had with several Boston based entrepreneurs...

Giving Due Diligence Calls Their Due One of the most boring things to do in any business decision is making reference calls. Usually you’ve already made a selection of whatever type (hiring a new employee...

The One “Process” Every Startup Should Have Most young entrepreneurs (including myself) have an allergic reaction to anything with the word “process” in it. So before you break out in hives and curl up in ball with cold...

Are you practicing too much? Practice makes perfect. Whether memorizing lines for a play, learning to play a rockin’ guitar solo, or pitching your company, practice is an important part of getting...

Field Guide to VC Decision-Making I recently met with an entrepreneur who posed a seemingly innocent question to me: “Can you tell me how your firm is structured and how you make group decisions on new investments?”...

We have a deal for our readers! Udemy's Startup Courses - 70% off! Udemy has an amazing series of highly relevant video courseware for startups and entrepreneurs. We have partnered up with them to provide an incredible deal for our readers...

Are you a hot dog stand or a hotel? During a recent conversation with one of our partners, I wanted to illustrate a point about pricing. So I asked a simple question: "are you a hot dog stand or a hotel?" You can...

Sales Process - Six Great Outcomes My peers and I have talked many times about the benefits of an effective sales process. There are the obviously essential things that a sales process needs to be - be repeatable...

Failure is just experience on the way to success Failure gets a bad rap. It is actually an important element of success. When I speak at conferences...

The Curve of Talent Back in 2005 at Brontes, I was working hard with our VP Engineering, Ed Tekeian, to convince a talented engineer to stay at the company and not take another job offer. I was...

Octane: Philip Beauregard - CEO, Objective Logistics

We are excited to have Philip Beauregard as our guest on Octane! Philip is the CEO & Co-Founder of Objective Logistics in New Bedford, MA. Objective Logistics is an angel...

How to Not Lose Your Shirt as an Angel Investor I’ll be attending Angel Boot Camp II in Boston on June 14. It’s a terrific event run by Jon Pierce, with lots of opportunities for talking strategies, meeting lots of angels...

Way Too Early – On Market Timing Market timing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for venture success. Obvious, right? The problem is that timing is obvious only in retrospect. Predicting...

Ten Things the New CEO Needs To Do You’ve just been hired as the first ‘professional manager’ in a growth company run by the founder. What’s your plan for the first 100 days? I asked David Patrick to address...

How to hire front-end engineers Chris Zacharias, a YouTube front-end developer, had a very thoughtful post around the challenges of hiring front-end...

LinkedIn: The Series A Fundraising Story LinkedIn went public last week. As a shareholder I'm obviously pleased with the investor reception LinkedIn has received, but more importantly it's a great milestone for...

The Key Business Metrics That Really Matter When startup and expan­sion stage com­pa­nies are court­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists and seek­ing invest­ments, it’s easy for them to get caught up in mind-numbing met­rics that show...

Four tests for if you have a good startup idea Everyone has a few ideas for a startup company. But how do you know if this is the one big idea you should do? There are...

Three Characteristics of the Best Start-up Plans I’ve been reading MassChallenge plans as a judge for a few weeks now, and I want to share some of my feedback on what distinguished those plans I recommended from those I did...

3 Required Tools in a SaaS PM's Toolbox Let's take a specific example. before 300pxTo the right is a screenshot of a table in my current SaaS app. Let's say we want to add a column showing the Average Deal Size...

Conviction The currency of the startup and venture capital community is conviction. Startups are born out of the conviction to leave a job and start a company that most people think...

A Tale of Two Ventures Whatever happened to Groove Networks and Bowstreet? Both were founded in the late 1990s by industry veterans, and backed by smart investors. Groove Networks created collaborative...

Tips on Delivering a Successful Product Presentation If you’re building a web product you’re essentially responsible for the core of the business. It’s become so important for CEO’s of product businesses that I truly recommended...

The 7 Ways Your Key Competitor Is Going to Eat You For Lunch! Every week your key competitor is getting better and its competitive advantage is growing. You don't even realize it because you are busy fighting fires or accepting good...