Startup Lessons From The Sprouter Community

Sprouter enables collaboration and networking between entrepreneurs. Startup experts have consistently shared resources, tips and lessons on starting up,development, raising funds, marketing and management. The Sprouter team on the other hand have also been sharing resources on new startups, small business resources, and successful entrepreneurs. These are a few startup lessons I have gathered from the Sprouter blog. Some of these startup tips are pieces of advice from other startup founders shared in an interview and shared on the Sprouter blog.

# “The hardest part is starting, so get that out of the way as soon as possible.”-Matt Mullenweg(founder of WordPress, Automattic and Audrey Capital)

# The elements of management aren’t intuitive and must be learned by everybody. “Like anything, the best way to start is to read and consume all the resources available, practice, seek feedback, and iterate.-Matt

# Becoming an entrepreneur means taking a giant leap of faith, no matter how old you or how varied your past experiences.

# What’s the best way to get introduced to a potential investor? Don’t contact them cold. You need to get intros. Get out and talk to friends, mentors, etc about your idea and ask for intros to investors.

# “Communicate with them openly and regularly about the inner happenings of your business – both the positives and negatives.”-WooThemes founder Mark Forrester

# Criticism should be looked at as an inspiration rather than a detriment. You have to be insanely stubborn. Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud)

# You need to be extremely ambitious and passionate for what you want to accomplish. This is crucial as building a startup is extremely hard, requires enormous amounts of energy and effort — it won’t happen overnight. Your passion will be the fuel that keeps you going.” Alexander.

# “While it’s possible to be very successful in services, I think the challenge and biggest potential lies in creating products that can scale and produce income that’s not tied directly to man hours.-Lee LeFever

# focus on solving real problems, and see them through to the end. “It’s really easy to build a solution in search of a problem, or build stuff because you wanted to use the latest and greatest data store. – Kyle Bragger (Forrst)