Icebergs

How Much Will Your Startup Have To Pay For Insurance?

How Much Will Your Startup Have To Pay For Insurance?

Launching a startup is a wonderful and proud moment. However, most entrepreneurs won’t have much time to enjoy the moment before it’s time to get down to serious business.

When you start creating a list of everything you’ll need to put in order before your business is fully functional, you’ll realize that simply getting started is just the tip of the iceberg. And rest assured - there will be plenty of challenges along your entrepreneurial road. Once you reach the end of your checklist, you should go ahead and write down another essential matter that you might have forgotten along the way - business insurance.

A Principle and Two Numbers for Startups

A Principle and Two Numbers for Startups

In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday, we saved this blogpost until Monday…

In the “little known facts” category about the Titanic, we thought we would share some seemingly random factoids that had an interactive effect to help sink the Titanic. It involves a principle and two numbers—I know, it sounds like an episode of the high school musical show “Glee” (but that would be PrinciPAL…).

For Startups at the Scaling Stage - What are the Biggest Icebergs?

For Startups at the Scaling Stage - What are the Biggest Icebergs?

In our last blogpost, we discussed the biggest debtbergs in the Growth stage. This blogpost is focused on the Scaling stage. The startup is selling something. It is moving to a growing venture in terms of products, customers, and employees. It may have the opportunity to get more significant funding through angel groups, and perhaps even A-round funding with venture capital investors. Significant investments in product development and support, marketing, and sales may follow. It likely now has a board of directors as well as one or more advisory boards. It is trying to accomplish extraordinary growth, or become a “Gazelle” (check the glossary in the book to find out more). Scaling requires moving from experiments to having known processes to escalate sales. Once again, the biggest challenges change across our Oceans of debtbergs…

For Startups at the Launch and Growth Stage - What are the Biggest Icebergs?

For Startups at the Launch and Growth Stage - What are the Biggest Icebergs?

In our last blogpost, we discussed the biggest debtbergs in the MVP stage. This blogpost is focused on the Growth stage. The startup is selling something and has moved from one to a number of paying customers. Hopefully by now, there is a team in place and an advisory board. It may even be seeking some type of outside funding. At this stage, the startup is balancing making progress in the Human, Marketing, and Technical Oceans simultaneously. So, the biggest debtbergs now include…

The Most Important Marketing Iceberg by Startup Stage

The Most Important Marketing Iceberg by Startup Stage

We’ve started doing workshops using key ideas from our book, The Titanic Effect: Successfully Navigating the Uncertainties that Sink Most Startups. The goal of these workshops is to help startups identify which icebergs can be the biggest challenge by startup stage. Because, the primary tasks a startup undertakes changes by stage. So too, do the challenges they face.

Our Origin Story

Our Origin Story

Like every superhero (#Glass and thanks @StanLee @Marvel), every startup has an origin story. We shared a few pieces in our first blog post, Click to Send - which documented the moment of truth when we actually committed to being done writing so that @MorganJames could begin the publishing process. With the final book on its way, we thought it might be opportune timing to share our own origin story with the genesis of The Titanic Effect idea.

But first, an update on our journey -- last week we received (and signed) our first set of “pre-release” printed books…