Jack jumps out from his box and shouts out loud ‘I don’t want to live in here anymore, I want to build my own Big Box’. Jack thought he didn’t want to be just another Jack who lived in someone else’s box – he wanted to be different. He had the passion and he thought in his mind, “What more does one need to build his own big box, besides the passion to build one”.

So, when he jumped out of the old box he felt free, he felt excited, he knew he could now build a box of any size he wanted. And to no one’s surprise he chose BIG and set out to make the biggest box that anyone could think about. But there was one problem, Jack had never built a box before – he had only lived in it!

We see many startups making the same mistake as Jack –to start making the biggest box even before understanding how to make a box. There are certain key things that entrepreneurs miss out in the excitement of embarking in their journey. I have come across some such typical problems after interacting with few startups and going through their business plans while running my startup incubation & consultancy firm. I thought would be useful if I shared them, for all the Jacks who are thinking about jumping out of their respective boxes: Read More...

by Stamatis N. Astra, Founder & CEO at PhotOral

We entrepreneurs are wired to get things done. We are constantly chased by the burn rate, the pitch deadline, the release countdown and the launch date. We must say what we are doing and then simply do it. The latest mantra for startups is a lean and mean methodology, where eager angels can throw in a pittance of seed money to test your idea.

Now with the flood of cloud and mobile apps, we should throw our idea to the masses and prove its demand.  Sprinkle in the accelerators, a boot camp that preps founders to be ready for an inflection point, and a demo day in 3-6 months. Young founders are trained to set aggressive deadlines, try their idea, and if it doesn’t work, pivot. The phrase “There is always the enterprise” is so often used, someone should trademark it. Get to market, get the revenue, get more features, get more updates, get more products…and do it faster than your dot-com predecessors. Indeed, “Fail Fast” is not only a badge of honor among founders but an expectation among investors. Read More...