#Startup Quotes for Starters is an interesting compilation of the innumerable quotes strewn over the internet especially for the starters. It is always better to follow the foot steps of successful people because they would be the “Enlightened Masters” of the challenges and hurdles on the road to success. #Startups has become a “Buzz Word” in the business environment and the very word “startup” can get your tweets more favorited. The very purpose of a startup is to bring an innovative idea into reality- be it a tech or a service based startup. I hope to inspire the fresh set of startup #entrepreneurs with the following quotes right from Thomas Alva Edison to #Larry Page. Get Inspired and Keep Going… 1. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – #Mark Twain 2. “When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.” – Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder 3. “If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.” –Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder 4. “There’s lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.” –Phil Libin, Evernote CEO 5. “User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.”–Evan Williams, Co-Founder, Twitter 6. “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  –Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 7. “What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.”  –Dave Thomas, Founder, Wendy’s 8. “Don’t take too much advice. Most people who have a lot of advice to give — with a few exceptions — generalize whatever they did. Don’t over-analyze everything.  I myself have been guilty of over-thinking problems. Just build things and find out if they work.” – Ben Silbermann, Pinterest founder 9. “We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.” – Pete Cashmore, Mashable founder and CEO 10. “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”  –Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO 11. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”  –Steve Jobs, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple 12. “No matter how brilliant your mind or #strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” –Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder 13. “If you take a good idea and great execution, you will get much farther than taking a great idea with poor execution.” – Rohini Chakravarthy, Inksedge 14. “Invest in startups. Your college network can be very effective in finding them.” – Ankit Gupta, Pulse 15. “As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.” – Ben Horowitz,Co founder, Opsware 16. “Best startups generally come...

Start Your Own Business Questions to ask before starting a business in 2015 While you can’t prepare yourself for every aspect of the entrepreneurial lifestyle, here are six important questions to ask before you quit your day job and dive in: What’s your motivation? How developed is your business savvy? How thick is your skin? Do things need to be perfect? Are you willing to get your hands dirty? What’s your financial situation? The problem is that wanting to be the boss or make lots of money generally aren’t viable reasons for launching a business. A true entrepreneur starts a business in order to improve people’s lives and contribute value to the world. What’s your business idea? Are you solving a common pain point or making someone’s day better? The drive to add value will sustain you when times are tough. A great product idea isn’t always enough to make a great business. Just because you develop something cool doesn’t mean that customers will instantly bang down your door to buy. When you are passionate about what you do, it is hard not to take criticism personally. And yes, it sucks to get a bad press review, rejection from an incubator program or negative feedback from customers. However, bad news and rejection are part of the game, and you can’t afford to dwell on the negative or take anything personally. When you work at a company, you can call someone else when your email isn’t working, you run out of printer ink or you need to set up a customer event. However, in the very early stages of your startup, you will typically need to handle most of these activities yourself, from tech support to sales to IT. Depending on your business type, it can realistically take anywhere from six months to six years to build out your business, gain traction and turn a profit. You need to ask yourself if you have both the patience and financial situation to weather this kind of time frame. NELLIE AKALP Want to be Your Own Boss? If you have always wanted to be your own boss, there has never been a better time to start your own business and make 2015 your most fulfilling year yet. Instead of talking about taking the next step, why not set yourself a timescale and think about some key decisions, spend time developing your idea and see if your business ambitions are truly viable. Before you do anything else, you need to be really honest with yourself and ask: am I truly cut out to start my own venture? You need to be calm, clear-headed and rational. When thinking about starting a business, passion and enthusiasm are essential but you need to think with a business mind at every stage. You have to take a step back and try to be non-emotional when deciding if you’re ready to go it alone. Try and look at it in the same way you would if you were advising someone else. The best advice I can give is to essentially interview yourself. Would you back yourself to lead a company? Make sure you seek as much expert outside advice as possible: it’s no good asking the opinion of a friend or family member if they have no idea about your sector. Seek advice from others in your industry. Businesses that have mentors are far more likely to still be trading after five years than those that don’t. James Caan 18 Ways to Sink Your Startup Successfully building a startup can feel like the sort of thing that requires planets aligning. Screwing up a startup, however, is incredibly simple. Some entrepreneurs...

Top 8 Mistakes That Kill #Startups Let us look at some mistakes that kill startups News: About three-quarters of venture-backed startup firms in the U.S. don’t return investors’ capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. This information made me think and I have tried to summarize the main reasons for flawed-startups below in order to caution the young and growing entrepreneurs. 1. An Unscalable Idea Understand that a Technology-driven idea with more mass appeal is what potential investors are looking for. If your business is not easily scalable across a wide market, higher margins cannot be reaped for the kind of money invested. It is always better that your product or service is appealing to all types of clients in the market. 2. #Lack of Competitive Research Don’t bother if the business idea you are about to launch already exists in the market; let yours be unique and new. Think different is what I would suggest. WhatsApp is one great example for unique contribution to the android market, don’t you think so? Make sure you are clearly differentiated from the others (e.g., better product, better value, different target client) and that your plan is SECURE against future market entrants who may try to imitate you after your initial success.  3. #No Focus ‘One thing at a time’ will be the mantra for startups where entrepreneurs have to concentrate on launching a single product at any given time. This will also help in giving clarity to those who work under you. Don’t try to be a jack-of-all-trades, but end up being a master-of-none without a laser-sharp focus to start. 4. Catch Hold of Investors even at an Early Stage: First try to send feelers to whom you think as potential investors through the right channels. Say, you are a builder and trying to launch your first project. How will you make money rolling in to keep your project going? Either you go for bank loans – no bank will offer you big loans without proper recommendation, fund-flow projection  and collaterals or you need to pitch-in this idea to known circles to popularize your product and raise seed money by way of advance. What I’m trying to highlight is that you need to bring in some initial investment which will help to keep the wheels rolling. 5. No Passion or Persistence Your passion should be infectious enough to attract the right kind of investors. Not all are lucky like Matteo Achilli, the 20 year Italian student, who is about to launch a new social networking site in the lines of LinkedIn, called ‘EGOMNIA”. ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode Tech giants like Microsoft and Google have already geared up themselves to support this lad in areas of marketing and cloud computing. We should appreciate Matteo for his passion to create a networking site where job seeking professionals will be ranked and then directly connected to the employers. His persistence has paid off and he has been termed as “Italy’s Mark Zuckerberg”. 6. Failing to Form a Well-Oiled Team: Let your team be like-minded persons with same objectives and working for a cause. Investors never will want to back-up a single individual, but a well-oiled team. Be courageous to put forward your ideas in an authentic manner. After all it is your own brain-child. If you don’t believe in it, who is going to? 7. Not Going for the Right Mentors: Be surrounded by people who have already tested and tasted success in the market. Experience is like a seasoned teacher having solutions for all your questions....