Six Online Learning Resources to Help You Run a Better Business

It seems like every day someone’s pitching a new online tool that’s going to “triple productivity!” or “help you scale your business quickly!” or “make doing payroll more fun than 10 barrels of monkeys!” OK, maybe not that last one. Payroll is never that fun.

However, you rarely get around to implementing that tool. Why? Because you take one look at the site, shake your head in confusion at the seemingly extensive steps to get started, and go back to canoodling with the Excel spreadsheet you rode in on.

Or, perhaps you actually do try and get started, but the FAQs don’t shed too much light on how you actually use these tools. So you sort of try to teach yourself, and everything you ever end up doing seems like it might be correct. But it also seems like your efforts might lead to the eventual implosion of your site, because, well, you don’t really know what you’re doing.

What’s an entrepreneur to do? As with learning any other skill, practice helps, but so does good instruction. Check out these resources that can help you develop skills you need to run your business — so that next time, you know how to get the job done right.

How to Assess the Market Potential of Your Idea

The facts are sobering: the majority of small businesses fail within five years of starting up. While there are many reasons that businesses fail, including some that have nothing to do with an owner's skills, it’s also possible that many of those same businesses collapsed simply because they couldn’t get enough customers to buy their product or service. In other words, the owners founded their business on a strategy of “build it and they will come” where, unfortunately, the customers never came. In fact, a recent study undertaken by the Blackbox seed accelerator found that many tech start-ups failed because they focused more on their product than on their potential customers.

What Does It Take To Be an Entrepreneur [Infographic]

Where does the ideal startup founder come from? Whom is he or she connected to?

LinkedIn was curious, so the business social network decided to find out. It mined the data of its more than 115 million users to understand the background of entrepreneurs. The result is an infographic that dives into the educational and corporate characteristics of the typical startup founder.