How an Innovative Startup Turned Retail On Its Head [VIDEO]

While Harvard Business School grads Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna were looking for a business idea, they noticed that the beauty product industry was seriously behind the times on the online retail side. They discovered that some of the biggest pain points for customers included the overwhelming selection of products and the inability to get a hands-on experience with the items before making a purchase. With that in mind, they created Birchbox, a company that mails women a box containing four to five deluxe beauty products every month. Their customers can test out a handful of new products from home and brands benefit from follow up purchases when the samples run out.

Their unique approach to connecting qualified customers with deluxe brands got the attention of New York’s venture capital community and landed them a seed investment of $1.4 million, followed by a series A round of $10.5 million. Having hit their third year’s sales target in just seven months, Birchbox is now scaling their business model rapidly, as well as planning a new subscription offering targeted at men.

Check out the interview with Beauchamp and listen to her tips on what entrepreneurs should be thinking about before meeting a potential investor, how she and her business partner manage the personal dynamics between co-founders and a look at the logistics of rapidly scaling a company.
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This post originally from Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.

It's Tax Season... Again!

It's that time of year again. The W-2s and 1099 are starting to arrive in the mail and before you know it, it will be March and then April 15th.  No one enjoys paying taxes, but there are several reasons to do the best job you can of accurately reporting your income:

5 High Risk, High Reward Steps to Starting Your Dream Company

So, you want to start a company? That’s a very exciting decision. But first, you must cover all your bases.

For instance, generate a clear and simple idea, then determine what industry or market you plan to target, what type of corporate organization you’ll implement and where your business will be located.

Each is an important decision, but the main consideration when starting a company is how to manage risk. Risk is the heart of entrepreneurship — defined as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Risk is the sole determinant whether you will succeed or fail.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson follows a principle called “protecting the downside,” which means that by looking at any situation and determining all options before making a decision, one can identify the worst case scenario and work backwards from there to find the optimal route forward. Protecting the downside is all about identifying and understanding risk.

Here are five risky steps that will actually help protect the downside of a new company and, counter-intuitively, set you up for success.

Why Startup Founders Need to Talk to Customers [Video]

Lean Startup Machine is a weekend-long startup competition, as well as a workshop for educating entrepreneurs on lean startup best practices. Founded by NYU business school drop out Trevor Owens, Lean Startup Machine plays host to a list of tech royalty, who come in to advise participants and teach teams how to understand their customers, quickly build, validate or invalidate their initial assumptions and then persevere or pivot, based on that feedback.


In this interview to learn how Lean Startup Machine has helped participants figure out if their ideas are valid and pivot if they’re not. Owens elaborates on why he feels that sometimes the best way to give entrepreneurs a dose of reality is to kick them out of the building and what he looks for when reviewing applications for his program (hint: demonstrate that you’re truly dedicated to being an entrepreneur).
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 This video from Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.

Non-Profit Workshop Update

 

Fundraising and development expert Linda Seligson has dispensed many practical tips and pearls of wisdom to our nonprofit mentees and guests.  The first two sessions were fully attended, and our final session is on Tuesday, January 31st.

Please contact Doreen if you wish to attend, or if you would like to receive materials from all three sessions. email: doreen@b-a-f.org  phone: 516-883-0488

Lessons from Some of the Worst Product Launches

We all (hopefully) learn from our mistakes. Entrepreneurs, especially, are bound to make them -- and it's those early stumbles that can make (or break) them.

Of course, it's always better to learn from other people's mistakes. The business world is full of blunders, and watching them can be great sport. As 2011 drew to a close, we saw obituaries for ill-conceived gadgets like the TouchPad, HP's attempted iPad killer. And who can forget Qwikster, Netflix's brief, doomed spinoff DVD service? Looking ahead to the coming year, here's our prediction -- products will flop, mergers will fail and ad campaigns will fizzle. We've seen it all before.

With that in mind, we decided to take a look at some of the worst product launches -- and pull out the lessons that entrepreneurs of all kinds can learn.

7 Steps To Scoring New Business In A Bad Economy

Today’s economy is certainly lousy, but you might as well get used to it. Some financial experts think the de-leveraging process we’re now going through might last for another decade or two, with interest rates near zero for years to come. Ugh.

Commerce will still take place, however, and the most competitively successful companies can still prosper. But getting a prospective business customer to say “yes” when his own economic world has deteriorated so much requires a deft and nuanced sales effort. So if you sell to business customers, here are seven suggestions for improving your competitive chances: