Marty Zwilling
Marty Zwilling is the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides products and services to startup founders and small business owners. Marty has been published on Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Gust, and Young Entrepreneur. He writes a daily blog for entrepreneurs, and dispenses advice on the subject of startups to a large online audience of over 225,000 Twitter followers. He is an Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; and Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management. Follow Marty on Twitter @StartupPro.
Latest
8 Smart Tips to Soliciting Friends and Family Funding
It’s great to start with a big dream as you contemplate a new business, but finding the money you need takes more than dreaming. As an advisor to young entrepreneurs, I find that many are…
8 Strategies for Regularly Reinventing Your Business
Sometimes entrepreneurs are so focused on making change happen for customers that they forget that continually changing themselves and their company is equally important. Some get stuck in a rut and get run over by…
7 Guidelines to Assure 2-Way Customer Communication
Entrepreneurs and business executives seem to be even more focused on their technology than the rest of us, and less inclined to listen to the voice of the customer, even if they remember to ask….
Avoid Competitor Bashing in Your Pitch to Investors
Don’t bash the competition. Every investor knows how vulnerable a new startup is to competitors, so investors always ask about your sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. How an entrepreneur answers this question speaks volumes about their…
6 Strategies to Build Traction and Validate Your Plan
As an advisor to many new venture founders, I often hear their frustration at being told by investors “I love your idea, but come back when you have more traction.” As a member of an…
10 Startup Strategies to Minimize Cash Flow Disasters
The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service…
How to Validate Your Innovative Product as a Business
In my experience with technical entrepreneurs, they work hard on creating an innovative product and elegant solution, and assume that customers will flock to them (“if we build it, they will come”). The reality is…
Businesses with a Higher Purpose Also Increase Profit
Many entrepreneurs still don’t understand that building a business culture today of doing good, like helping people (society) and planet (sustainability), is also a key to maximizing profit. Employees and customers alike are looking for…
7 Groups of Difficult Customers Test Every Business
Have you ever noticed that some of your business owner friends get all the bad customers, and yours all seem fairly reasonable? Or is it the other way around? I’m always amazed that, in my…
9 Beautiful Questions Will Validate Your Innovation
The entrepreneurs I see are always talking about “disruptive innovation” ideas, but the plans I read are more often linear extensions of a current hot offering, like one more social network with the best of…