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Startups

Top States to Start a Business In

While we have resources to help you start a company in any of the 50 states or D.C., we have some favorites–places that make it cost-effective and low-maintenance to establish a business. Check out our top five. 
Jordan Meyer
December 11, 2024
Startups

Business Entity Searches: East Coast States

A business entity search is a tool for finding information about registered businesses within a specific state. Review part three of our series, how to conduct business entity searches in popular East Coast states.
Jordan Meyer
December 23, 2024
Startups

Business Entity Searches: Popular States

A business entity search is a tool for finding information about registered businesses within a specific state. Review part two of our series, how to conduct business entity searches in some of the most popular states to start a business.
Jordan Meyer
December 18, 2024
Startups

How To Conduct a Business Entity Search

A business entity search is a tool for finding information about registered businesses within a specific state. It's usually an online service where users can look up details like the business's official name, legal status, the owners, and the formation date. Review typical and challenging examples when conducting these searches.
Jordan Meyer
December 9, 2024
Startups

Support for VC Funding

Fundraising requires a lot of moving parts and roles. As someone who has supported founders during fundraising from behind the scenes, I'm sharing what I've learned through the process to ensure your business maximizes its capital potential.
Kim Le
December 1, 2024
Startups

How to set up Leads Tracking on Google Ads

This guide focuses on optimizing ads for quality leads and walks through setting up lead conversion tracking for Google Ads, ensuring that you have the tools in place to track user actions and improve your campaign performances.
Jennifer Chu
December 1, 2024
Startups

Google Ads Competitor Analysis and Tools

Do you know your competitors paid ad strategies? Here are a few tools to research ad formats, taglines, keywords, and ad spend by by competitors.
Jennifer Chu
November 14, 2024
Startups

Basic Link Building Tactics

Backlinks to websites are like getting celebrity endorsements for your fashion brand. It helps your website be anchored in the world wide web as opposed to floating adrift. Backlinks are your website’s badge of endorsement from others on the internet. Therefore, every website owner needs to employe basic link building tactics to set up their website’s success.
Kim Le
October 15, 2024
Startups

Dealing with Layoffs

Being a founder is hard. Dealing with layoffs as a founder is even harder. Layoffs are sometimes inevitable for startups and small businesses. Layoffs are a correction for a past mistake from leadership. Because of the unpredictable nature of starting a business, it's almost a given some mistakes will be made and sometimes those mistakes are in how the organization has hired.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

How a Website Redesign Can Kill Site Traffic

A website facelift is a common project in budding businesses. It’s an opportunity to show off new products or services that are launching or to update the messaging and content to be reach the target audience. Although website redesigns can help give a website a new facelift, if not well executed, a website redesign can kill a website’s organic traffic.
Kim Le
September 16, 2024
Startups

Blog vs Newsletter

Where should one invest their written content? Substack is all the rage now, but blogs have historically been the go-to for a long-term search play. Doing both can spread you thin, so which do you choose?
Jennifer Chu
August 22, 2024
Startups

Best Local Advertising for Small Business

A good local advertising strategy should consider local SEO, community building, referral marketing, paid ads, and offline channels. Here are 6 local advertising tactics for small businesses.
Jennifer Chu
September 10, 2024
Startups

Is an LLC a Business License?

Starting a business involves navigating various legal structures and requirements. For many small business owners and startups, the question arises, "Is an LLC a business license?" This blog will break down the differences, benefits, and steps to forming an LLC, and clarify whether you need a business license along with it.
Kim Le
September 10, 2024
Startups

Local SEO for Dentists: How to Get More Patients

Dentistry is highly competitive, and dentists tend to be savvy marketers. If you have your own dental practice, you must implement local SEO best practices to be found by your local audience.
Jennifer Chu
September 27, 2024
Startups

Generate Organic Visits for Google Business Profile

Google Business Profiles are easy, effective and free for generating organic visits. All small businesses who meet their in-person must absolutley have one. To maximize organic visits to your GBP, pay attention to these fields.
Jennifer Chu
September 27, 2024
Startups

Local SEO Audits for Small Businesses

If your business has a physical location, local SEO audits are critical in getting discovered by people in your geographic region. Here, we go over the ranking factors to improve your visibility in Google Maps and Google Search.
Jennifer Chu
September 10, 2024
Startups

SEO Rich Text - Beyond Just Keywords

SEO rich text goes beyond just keyword targeting. It involves enriching your content to improve quality and readability, and enhancing the SERP listing to increase CTR.
Jennifer Chu
September 10, 2024
Startups

How to Change Domain Name and Preserve SEO

Changing a domain name is a type of site migration. Poor site migrations can hurt your SEO performance. But if well prepared for, they can improve your organic visibility and traffic.
Jennifer Chu
September 10, 2024
Startups

Why Should You Bootstrap Your Business

We bootstrap our business, but is it right for yours? From a couple of lean start-up operators, here's what it means to bootstrap.
Kim Le
September 10, 2024
Startups

Banking for Small Business

A good bank setup for your business will help your business thrive. Whether to collect customer payments, prepare taxes, or earn money on idle cash, it can pay dividends (literally).
Kim Le
September 10, 2024
Startups

Digital Marketing for Startups

Here are 6 simple and effective strategies to help startups get started with digital marketing.
Maddie McElhenny
September 10, 2024
Startups

Pitch Deck Library: IPO Investor Presentations (Part 2)

Here are examples of pitch decks (aka investor presentations) released when companies first go public. Pitch decks evolve over time as companies matures. What starts out as a ten-slide pitch may one day become a full fledged hundred page investor presentation.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Pitch Deck Library: Seed Stage Startups (Part 1)

Pitch decks these days are slick and beautifully designed. Yet some of the most illustrious companies of Silicon Valley had pretty janky early stage pitch decks. What they didn’t have in style, they made up in substance.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Professional Communities for Mom Founders

It can feel isolating being a stay-at-home mom and entrepreneur. No one succeeds alone. We all need communities that can serve as sounding boards, additional expertise or a place to vent to individuals in the trenches like you
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Grants For Mom-Owned Businesses

We compiled a list of 80+ grants that mom-owned businesses can potentially look at for funding sources. These grants cater to founders who are moms, women, women of color, small businesses, LGBTQ+ and minority, and more.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Best Reads for Startup Finance

As the late Charlie Munger says, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none." Finance leaders at start-ups have to read on a wide range of topics to stay relevant. From actual finance topics, to new tax changes, and scaling a start-up, the learnings from reading are endless. But where to start?
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

I Made $0 From Equity At 5 Start-Ups

At some point in your life, you’re going do something incredibly stupid and ask yourself: What the f**k were you thinking? For me, it was when I came to the realization that I’ve made $0 from my equity across the 5 start-ups I worked at. As a self-touted “strategic finance leader” for startups, that makes me question my own skills. How did I get it so wrong?
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

AI Tools for Businesses, That Are Not ChatGPT

We’ve been talking a lot about ChatGPT, both its use cases and its shortcomings in our previous series on ChatGPT. Of all of the AI tools, it’s probably the most well-known mainstream application of AI. There are a plethora of other new tools on the market for small businesses ranging from creators to service firms. As of this writing, a number of these tools also offer a free tier.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Decision Tree Analysis for Decision-Making

Decision fatigue is real, particularly for founders and CEOs. One way to simplify the decision making process and add objectivity and discipline is through decision tree analysis -- a visual map with mathematical vales to evaluate your choices.
Jennifer Chu
September 27, 2024
Startups

ChatGPT Prompts for Productivity

How can you leverage AI so you're not falling behind the curve? Start with the three most mundane (but required) areas: Research, Project Planning and Skills Development.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Business Startup Checklist

Most startups fail, but we can mitigate those reasons with proper planning and following a checklist. We've outlined the fundamental steps to take before you start throwing a ton of money at your venture.
Jennifer Chu
September 27, 2024
Startups

ChatGPT: Issues, Pitfalls and Caveats

ChatGPT has a blend of unique problems that have blurred the lines between human error and algorithmic hiccups. In order to complement ChatGPT, it’s important to understand ChatGPT’s inherent flaws and current limitations. The end goal is to learn how to utilize the new technology in a way where the output from “ChatGPT + You” is greater than the sum of its parts.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

How to Use ChatGPT at Work

ChatGPT has been used by roughly 1 in 10 people. For individuals over 65 years old, that usage drops down to 5%. That leads the vast majority of Americans lagging behind on one of the most transformative technological advances of our generation. Generic writing tasks in your day to day job is a great set of problems for ChatGPT to tackle and to get started familiarizing with ChatGPT.
Kim Le
September 27, 2024
Startups

Webflow Custom Domain: Should You Buy?

Webflow is a full suite content management system and website builder bringing together the best of Wordpress' customization with Squarespace's sleek design. Beyond that Webflow's competitive edge is its expansive integrations. But can Webflow also provide competitive domain hosting?
Kim Le
September 19, 2024
Startups

The Anatomy of a SaaS B2B Homepage Design

The homepage of a B2B SaaS company is not just a landing page; it's the digital storefront, the handshake, and the first pitch all wrapped into one. Learn how to bring together the value proposition, headlines, navigation, product demos, and call to action into one seamless experience.
Kim Le
September 19, 2024
Startups

Create or Update Intercom Leads from Webflow Forms

Learn how to easily send Webflow form submissions directly to Intercom as leads.
Jennifer Chu
September 19, 2024