Funding Fridays: Small Grants & Competitions

Small grants and competitions are a great source of capital for startups.  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.

Sample competitions and small granters

When Things Go Wrong, How To Respond

When something goes wrong, we often mistake symptoms for root causes and think the only solutions we can make are all-or-nothing... which means we often do nothing.

Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, adapted Toyota's 5 Why's technique to help correctly identify the root course of a problem and the find an agile way to respond to root causes that fits into our budgets and ensures we apply the appropriate  level of response to each problem.  It also takes the emphasis away from blame and onto creating solutions.

See a 3-minute video explaining the process here.

Or read it here. 

Learn how to conduct a 5-Why root cause analysis meeting.