5 Startup Tips to Survive the First Year

Bootstrapping a startup is no easy task. That first year is particularly grueling. Yet these days, a lot of folks are bootstrapping their startups, rather than going the VC-funded route.

It takes a tremendous commitment from the founder(s) to make it through the ups and downs during those early months. You must overcome many roadblocks and hurdles as you travel from idea to side project to full-time gig to thriving company.

To that end, let's cover a few tips and tactics crucial to the survival of a bootstrapped startup during its first year. Whether you’re just hatching an idea or already knee-deep in code, hustling to ship your minimum viable product (MVP), these tips will help to move things forward, and ultimately, compete with larger, funded startups.

Cold Calling Script: Make a Call That Works

While there are other (and usually more effective) ways to generate sales leads, many companies still depend upon cold calling. I've covered cold calls before, but here's a great cold-calling script from one of the world's top experts on cold-calling, Keith Rosen, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cold-Calling.

9 Qualities of Remarkable Entrepreneurs

Good entrepreneurs make money. Great entrepreneurs make serious money.
But remarkable entrepreneurs do more than make money. They are the few who possess qualities that don't appear on balance sheets but do make a significant impact on the lives of their employees, industries, and communities.

Here are nine qualities of remarkable entrepreneurs:

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.

9 Nagging Questions To Tune Out When Launching A Startup [Opinion]

So, you’ve decided to do the startup thing, and you’ve told a few people. Turns out everyone and their dog has an opinion about it, regardless of whether or not they’ve ever been in your shoes. Some are flat-out discouraging you, while others are congratulating you and asking some interesting questions you haven’t yet considered.

You’re quickly discovering that many people are coming along with you for the startup ride: your friends, family, business partners, investors, cofounders, employees, and more. And they’ve all got something to say.

Who should you listen to? How much of what they’re saying is true? What does it all mean?

5 Things Business Owners Can Learn from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs died more than a month ago, and the media has gone through its two stages of grief: Deification, followed by a backlash to the deification.

The latter was hastened by the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio, which presented a warts-and-all version of the Apple founder that contrasted with the airbrushed image that emerged from obituaries.

By now, many are grappling with the contradictions of the more fleshed-out and realistic Steve Jobs, but also attempting to learn from the Steve Jobs story. Many might be wondering if it’s possible to emulate some of what Jobs achieved without the pettiness and obsessiveness. Of course, we’ll never know, but when reading over Isaacson’s bio and reviewing Jobs’ achievements, it is possible to pull out what seem to be transferable traits, ideas and attitudes. Below are five such attributes that any business owner can embrace, even if they don’t have Jobs’ one-in-a-billion eye for design or mercurial personality.