Funding and Building your Business

"They’ve started cooperating with the product now because we have a purchase order from a big company,"

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/entrepreneur-s-frustration-turns-to-success/article_0b085346-cf73-11e1-995c-0019bb30f31a.html#ixzz20yhzF7wH

The government’s SBA 504 loan plan allows business owners to pay much less down on commercial real estate while still getting favorable loans. The SBA covers 40% of the loan, banks cover another 50% and most borrowers only have to pay 10% cash up front according to the SBA’s website.

There are several standards a business must meet to qualify for a loan, among them that the company must be headquartered in Montana with more than half its employees working in state, must not have a history of bankruptcy and be selling products or services outside Montana.

I recommend that every early-stage startup find three Advisory Board members.

Next week the TechStars accelerator is sponsoring a Patriot Boot Camp for about 75 veterans who want to start technology companies.

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve.

Entrepreneurship itself doesn’t have anything to do with money. Instead, it’s a style of leadership and finding ways to build something out of nothing.

"If your only goal is to become rich, you’ll never achieve it."

"Buzz-worthy" and "viral" are marketing illusions that cost big money to create. In a business plan these are called marketing campaigns, which continue to rise in cost. Here are three elements of most viral marketing campaigns:

Jetpac’s fundraising represents a striking success for data science as sport–an approach that first drew attention when Netflix offered $1 million to whomever could best improve their movie recommendation algorithm.