/01/
If you're going to take a risk, you need to go all in on investing in yourself. I invested in attorneys that understood the gaming world. They had big gaming companies as their clients. Yes, they were a little bit more than another attorney, but they knew the industry. Tina Zwolinski / skillsgapp
/02/
The biggest issue when you talk about costs is the maintenance. It’s not so much for the app, but for maintaining the community, the brand, and the visibility. Those are the areas that I underestimated. Creating an app is one thing, but if you really want it to be successful, that maintenance is really where the rubber meets the road. And that has been hard. Karen Thrower / Kharis Connect
/03/
There's a lot of companies out there that make money off of the entrepreneurial process. You know, whether you're paying coaches or somebody's gonna help you develop that playbook or whatever it might be. It's like the sharks have all those little sucker fish that sit on the side of them. That said, a solid mentor network can save you a lot of time and money. Zeb Parsons / Bricolage Dynamics
/04/
I think what distinguishes us from similar entrepreneur support groups is we are very deliberate in what happens at our events. There's no selling. You can't attend as a real estate agent trying to build business, for example.
And we have a whole team of people whose job is to introduce themselves, figure out what individuals are working on, and then connect them to others in the room who could potentially help with whatever problems they're solving. Jeremy Berman / GoodUnited & Startup Grind
/05/
A lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, make the mistake of waiting to seek financing until we actually need it. When your business is strong, that’s when you should establish a relationship with a financial institution and a cash line of credit, not when you’re struggling, and your financials have been compromised. Herbert Drayton III / HI Mark Capital
/06/
I always tell people I want lose-lose negotiations with funders. You didn’t get the deal you wanted, I didn’t get the deal I wanted, so we’re somewhere in the middle. Kendrick Pullen / LifeTagger
/07/
When I walk into a room of people who don’t look like me and maybe can’t relate to my experience, that’s intimidating. I wish I could tell my former self, five years ago when I first started doing pitches, raising money, and having venture conversations, “Just trust your gut.”
Walk in there confident in the things you know, and it’s okay if you don’t know everything. And don’t apologize about it. This is who I am, and this is my vision. You’ll either get behind it or you won’t, and that’s okay. Robyn Farrell / Sharpen Minds
/08/
Funding capital is not your most important capital; customer capital is. Let your customers be your funder if you can do that. Marlon Brown / LifeTagger