Martin Zwilling

Martin Zwilling

Martin is a veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech professional, and angel investor. He is the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides products and services to startup founders and small business owners.

Articles by Martin Zwilling

Invested Interests

7 Reasons for Entrepreneurs to ‘First Know Thyself’

If you are going to be a real entrepreneur, it’s important that you know yourself well. After all, you won’t have a direct manager charged with giving you feedback, and your team probably will be afraid to tell you what they really think. Entrepreneurs need to recognize their own strengths and limitations.

In any case, your skills, talent, knowledge, personality, and strengths are your best assets as an entrepreneur. I’ve extracted many of the following points about knowing yourself from a book aimed at women professionals, called “Career GPS”, by Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell, Ph. D., but I see them applying equally well to every entrepreneur, man or woman. Let’s see what you think: Read more

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Test Your Business Model Against These 10 Elements

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. There are no “overrides” – for example, businesses don’t thrive just because they offer the latest technology, or because everyone wants to be “green, or because their goal is to reduce world hunger.

I expect that should seem intuitive to all entrepreneurs, but every investor I know has many stories about startup funding requests with major business model elements missing. The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, and giving away the product. Read more

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6 Reasons Why Startup Prototypes Attract Investors

It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup.

A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible. For less tangible products, like software, it should simulate the look and feel of the final product on relevant base hardware. Here are some key objectives to keep in mind when designing your prototype to make it attractive to investors: Read more

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Startups Need the ‘Why’ Before the ‘What’ to Build

All too many startups are founded simply on the basis of a new and exciting technology invented by an industrious technologist. This is the origin of the “solution looking for a problem” and “if we build it, they will come” syndromes, which result in surprise and frustration waiting for funding, and waiting for customers that don’t materialize.

The right approach is to start by solving a problem causing real pain to a large number of customers willing to pay real money for a solution. Develop the solution with your technology, and develop a strategy to maximize your impact in the marketplace. I’ve talked about the solution part several times, so this article will focus on the value of a strategy. Read more

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Amount of Startup Equity Depends on Contribution

One of the first tough decisions that startup founders have to make is how to allocate or split the equity among co-founders. The easy answer of splitting it equally among all co-founders, since there is minimal value at that point, is usually the worst possible answer, and often results in a later startup failure due to an obvious inequity.

Another common “failure to start” situation I see is one where the “idea person” insists that the idea is 90% of the value (and 90% of the equity). In the real world, the “idea” is a very small part of the overall equation. A startup is all about “execution” – meaning the equity should be allocated based on the value that each partner brings to the table in each of these dominant variables: Read more

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Pull Investors to Your Business Plan With a Summary

Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. This one had better grab their attention, or they won’t look further.

You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary. They all offer a list of requirements that might take 50 pages to address, but of course they ask you to write concisely. Take a look at my website for the Sample Executive Summary, which shows what can be done in one page (both sides). Read more

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10 Sure Ways to Get Your Plan Trashed by Investors

After struggling to create your business plan for months, every entrepreneur likes to think that their document is inspirational and will reach someone who is smart enough to see the brilliance of the idea, intuitive enough to recognize their business acumen, and enthusiastic enough to offer the money required to make it happen.

Every serious investor, on the other hand, has a stack of these in their in-basket (email or real plastic) awaiting review, and is looking for the flaw or less-capable entrepreneur in each that predicts failure, allowing them to discard it like another piece of junk mail. Many VC firms and investment banks receive as many as ten plans per day, so it’s hard to get them salivating. Read more