[author: Michelle Sidle]
Some interesting links we found across the web this week:
A Startup Guide to Remote Work
Throughout COVID-19, many have become accustomed to remote work. With return-to-office timelines remaining uncertain, it is now vital to ensure that remote working systems are streamlined for efficient and productive work. This Startup.Info article provides practical tips to help startups efficiently switch to a 100% remote work model. With these tips, startup founders can create seamless plans to move physical processes and operations into digital ones, and keep vital workflows and team communication intact.
How Your Personal Brand Will Impact the Growth of Your Company
In today’s business world, customers value both outstanding products and the story behind the brand. This article from Forbes describes how personal branding, and building the story of a brand, is not vain; rather it can change the trajectory of the company’s growth. One key benefit of personal branding is that it allows companies to find and connect with customers who share the same core values. This is particularly important as converting a new customer to sale only has a 5-20% probability, but with an existing one, the rate skyrockets to 60-70%. Further, by developing these relationship with customers, and clearly differentiating from competitors, personal branding allows companies to powerfully communicate with their customers and expand exponentially.
3 Covid Pivots? How This Startup Found Success by Reinventing Itself
This Inc.com article describes the growth of HELM Life. During the past two years, HELM Life evolved multiple times, starting with offering child care services, to where it is now: providing diversity, equity, and inclusion training. This transition has already brought, and is expected to bring, massive expansion, as the business is expecting to grow its client base from 300 at the beginning of 2022 to 1,000 by the end of the year. HELM Life's evolution serves as an example of how, in order to survive and thrive, startups need to listen to their customers and be willing to evolve, even if it means fundamentally changing their business model multiple times.
Why Mentorship and Access to Capital are ‘Critical’ Keys to Closing the VC Gap for Entrepreneurs of Color
According to a recent study by Crunchbase, as of July 2021, Black female startup founders had only received 0.34% of the total venture capital spent in the U.S. Moreover, of the $147 billion raised by startups collectively in the past year, only $2 billion was raised by Black founders. This CNBC article cites lack of accessibility to capital and mentorship as critical hinderances to closing the minority VC gap. Further, it explains how mentors “understand market opportunities, and more importantly, the viability of [the] product or platform” which are key to growth. In addition, an added benefit of mentorship is that the “[m]entor relationships also allow the founder to connect with other professionals that are necessary for raising capital.” As such, these relationships has proven to be beneficial in both growth and fundraising efforts.
Four Ways the Cloud Can Help Data Startups Scale
When growing a business, founders can’t just keep their heads in the clouds, they should also keep their data. Predictions say that half of the world’s data- 100 zettabytes- will be stored in the cloud by 2025. This prediction has already shown signs in companies, as the share of corporate data stored worldwide in the cloud jumped from 30% in 2015 to 50% in 2021. These companies have found that cloud technologies can help harness data to effectively solve unique business challenges. This article by Sifted shares four ways the cloud can be of particular use to startups as they scale and grow.
