Advice to Entrepreneurs from Entrepreneurs

Southeast VC:

• There are a lot of good new ideas out there. What differentiates companies and makes them great is the execution.
• Entrepreneurs shouldn’t debate whether or not this is the right time to start a business. That is almost like trying to time the stock market. The advice was to ignore market conditions.
• Also, entrepreneurs shouldn’t read about a hot space and try to start a company trying to copy the model. Usually, when it is in print, it’s probably too late. At that point, there could be tons of competition.
• Too much time is spent building and carefully refining a business plan for VCs.
• For the market research for start-ups, it was recommended that instead of studying tons of research reports, more entrepreneurs should pick up the phone and talk to potential customers. Call up twenty potential customers, share your idea and see if they would they be willing to be a beta customer. And if the first twenty say no, be peristant and call another twenty.
• VCs are attracted to entrepreneurs with a “spark” and a winning, take no prisioners attitute.
• Some entrepreneurs think they need to raise a ton of capital to sufficiently build their business, but when you look at many of the most successful companies on NASDAQ, many of them have either raised a small amount of capital (under $10 million) or in other cases, they didn’t raise money at all.

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