Browsing Tag
customer feedback
28 posts
3 Excellent Ways to Bootstrap Your Startup’s Product Launch
You’ve finally decided to embark on the entrepreneurial journey of your dreams and be your own boss. Congratulations! Now that you're in the planning stages, you've likely started thinking about how you’ll fund your dream company. While bootstrapping isn’t for everyone, starting a business with your own funds keeps you from relying on investors for...
How to Create Consistency in Your Customer Service
Building strong relationships with your customers is one of the most crucial aspects of starting and running a successful business. Without a clear understanding of who your customers are, what they’re looking for, and how you can inspire them to purchase again, you’ll constantly be stumbling around in the dark, searching in vain for growth...
What is Product-Market Fit? How to Leverage Customer Development to Move Your Business Forward
So, you've got a startup idea. The first major challenge you'll need to overcome is achieving product-market fit. So why do so many entrepreneurs leave this up to chance? Creating a product that solves a real problem starts even before you launch your business. This is the process of customer development; and too few entrepreneurs...
4 Ways to Boost Brand Awareness and Earn More Sales with Email Marketing
As an entrepreneur, you likely rely on email every day. You send transactional messages and make sure your customers have everything they need to navigate your products or services successfully. But beyond that, are you using email marketing, like a startup newsletter, to grow your business? If you don’t have a newsletter and you aren’t...
Fresh E-Commerce Marketing Tactics to Try
Today’s savvy e-commerce companies are putting their Q3 and Q4 marketing and inventory management strategies into place right now. With the disruptions 2020 saw, it’s never too early to start planning for the latter part of the year, the e-commerce marketing that drives it and the order fulfillment that keeps people coming back. We've put...
Why Your Startup Must Incorporate Customer Needs to Drive Growth
Companies with above-average customer experience financially outperform their competitors in 73% of cases. But while being consumer-centric has its undeniable benefits, the journey is not necessarily an easy one. First, you need to discover what your customers actually want. Then, this knowledge needs to be incorporated into every layer of your business, including product development,...
How Frustration Led This Entrepreneur to Start a Workwear Company for Women in STEM
Frustration sparks an idea After completing my bachelor’s degree in international project engineering in Germany, I moved to the U.S. to start an exciting career as a project management consultant. My responsibility was to help client teams succeed in delivering critical multi-million-dollar construction, manufacturing and event planning projects. I got to fly around the world...
Is Your Big Idea Investor-Worthy? Ask Yourself These 4 Questions Pre-Launch
Entrepreneurs certainly aren’t lacking for ideas — but that doesn’t mean every concept is worth pursuing. It’s not enough to separate the good ideas from the bad. It’s about identifying the great ones. Investors want to know you have an idea that can scale and deliver an attractive return on their investment. For an early stage tech...
3 Smart Ways Businesses Can Collect Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is one of the most valuable forms of data entrepreneurs can obtain about their consumer base, from positive moments to unsatisfactory experiences. Why do brands need this feedback, even if it’s negative? There are a few reasons why it matters to collect customer feedback. Feedback allows brands to better improve or adjust their...
Why Adding SaaS is Essential to Scaling Your Service Business
All ascending companies will eventually face the choice of whether they should channel their efforts into growth or continued profitability, whether they like it or not. Some entrepreneurs welcome the challenge, while others find it hard to deviate resources from what they know already works. Regardless of personal reaction to the issue of growth, it is nonetheless...
5 Essentials of User Testing to Ensure a Successful Product
No matter how innovative, a product isn’t successful unless its users deem it so. This is why user testing is such an important part of the product development process. User testing is a method to validate an idea or the execution of a concept. Through user testing, customers experience your product and provide feedback that...
Former Chick-fil-A Chief Marketing Officer on Innovating to Maintain Brand Relevance
The following is taken from "Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A: How Faith, Cows, and Chicken Built an Iconic Brand" by Steve Robsinson Copyright © 2019 by Steve Robinson. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.thomasnelson.com. Innovation has always been key to Chick-fil-A’s success, beginning with the creation of the sandwich itself. We continued to engage in...
How to Maintain Confidence in the Market for Your Small Business
Customer demand can be fickle. What’s hot one day can be totally counter-culture the next. How, then, can a startup or small business ensure that their product or service will still be marketable in the future? What steps can they take to ensure that they stay relevant and in-demand among their target market? While there’s...
How to Grow Your Business with Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing, as the name suggests, is a marketing approach that seeks to leverage one-to-one conversations with prospects and customers in order to maximize conversions and improve the customer experience. It includes the use of chatbots, live chat and social monitoring to offer guidance and support throughout the entire customer journey. But it’s much more...
Start and Grow a Business Abroad: Advice From 2 Entrepreneurs Who’ve Done it Successfully
It’s one thing to start a business, but taking that business and starting an iteration of it abroad? That’s an entirely different beast. Here, James Kinsella and Adam Carnell share their journey from a dorm room in the U.K. to a bustling transatlantic printing business. Spot the difference Back in 2009, we were ignoring our...
Launching and Iterating a Product in Tiny Steps as a Lean and Agile Startup
The following is excerpted from "Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business" by Paul Jarvis. Copyright © 2019 by Paul Jarvis. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Introducing a company of one A company of one is a collective mindset and model that can...
7 Signs You’re Ready to Expand Your E-Commerce Business
An e-commerce business can be a passive form of income, a full-fledged business or a barebones offshoot of your brick-and-mortar business that you built because you were told you had to start selling online. It can be unclear what the tipping point is for an e-commerce business. When do you start investing even more of...
Important Tasks for Entrepreneurs to Complete Before the End of the Year
As 2019 lurks around the corner, entrepreneurs everywhere are scrambling to address tasks that have been on the back burner for longer than we’d like to admit. From website updates and filing restructures to customer outreach and expense tracking, many tasks are often sidelined in the hustle of the daily grind. To step into the...
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Efforts While You’re in the First Year of Business
You’ve got a great idea, enough funding to hire an expert team and a developed product ready for customers. You also have some marketing strategies in mind, and now it’s time to validate them, grow your business and scale up to the next phase. But, before all of that… there’s a lot of work to...
Top 5 Reasons Why Startups Fail (and How You Can Avoid the Same Mistakes)
It goes without saying that every entrepreneur wants their startup to succeed. While starting a business, your passion and drive is often the easy part, while trying to keep your business afloat and heading in the right direction is often more difficult. With high hopes, long term plans and money going into new businesses, it’s...