Funding Fridays: Friends & Family Financing

Remember, you'll see them every thanksgiving for the rest of your life so be sure to Do The Right Thing.

Remember, you'll see them every thanksgiving for the rest of your life so be sure to Do The Right Thing.

Friends and Family is the most commonly used flavor of capital" to fund startups of all kinds. Below are links to a lecture (broken up into 5-minute segments) where you can learn about the pros, cons, and best practices in securing this kind of funding for your startup.

This post is a part of Funding Fridays, an occasional series on best practices in raising funding as well as our collection on the Flavors Of Capital.

 

Click Brings the #1 Entrepreneurship Curriculum to Western Massachusetts

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Click Workspace is proud to announce the creation of Lean Launchpad: Pioneer Valley, the first course in Western Massachusetts based on Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad, the #1 entrepreneurship curriculum in the country,  This curriculum has proven its ability to dramatically reduce startups' odds of failure by accelerating their ability to find a repeatable, scalable business model before they run out of ramen noodles (or spousal patience :)).  

Our version of the course is optimized for entrepreneurs in the Pioneer Valley actively developing a startup.   The course begins on Tuesday, September 17th.  To learn more, please view the course syllabus .

To ensure teams get lots of individualized attention, we are limiting enrollment.  Four slots remain.  

To apply for a slot, contact us.

 

Toolbox Tuesdays: Rapportive Brings LinkedIn Info into Your Inbox

Welcome to another Toolbox Tuesdays post, where we highlight tools that help coworkers Get Things Done with minimum headaches and cost.

This Tuesday we're highlighting...

Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.

Why we love it: 

  • It is seamlessly integrated into GMail.
  • Type in someone's email address on the TO line and BAM, their LinkedIn and other public profile data appears on the right hand side of your GMail.
  • The profile summary has buttons to launch the LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc profiles. 
  • If you right click on those buttons, you can copy those links to the clipboard, making it super simple to then PASTE those URLs into your email to introduce persons A and B.
  • It's free! 

Check them out at: http://rapportive.com/ 

Funding Fridays: How to Write For Investors

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Funders are overwhelmed with applications. So overwhelmed they often allocate only 15-30 seconds to the initial review of each applicant… and based on that brief review they disqualify 50-75% of them! Those of you who have followed my personal blog and twitter feed have see my own examples of this – simple mistakes people make that get them tossed out right away. DON’T BE THAT GUY!

Here is a brief video that shows you some simple rules to dramatically increase your odds of getting through the first level of filtration:

http://screencast.com/t/FsqbvoTDZGIf

This post is a part of Funding Fridays, an occasional series on best practices in raising funding.