Useful Website Links for Startups
There are a myriad of websites that can help you with your business startup.
You have found many, including Startup Owl.
Here are ones that I have found useful.
The list will grow and probably the categories as well.
There are some really golden links here–some may surprise you.
So browse to your heart’s content:
Entrepreneurship
The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) is the largest independent, professional, academic organization in the world dedicated to advancing the discipline of entrepreneurship. With over 1000 members from universities and colleges, for-profit businesses, nonprofit organizations, and the public sector, USASBE is a diverse mix of professionals that share a common commitment to fostering entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors.
International Entrepreneurship is a huge resource for entrepreneurs, run by Chris Hanks and Jim Beach who used to teach entrepreneurship at Georgia State University, Chris specializing in Family Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship, Valuation, and Start-ups and with Jim specializing in Importing/ Exporting, Google skills, and International Entrepreneurship. They now run the Entrepreneurship School.
Finance
Venture Funding Network: serves as a connection engine, a learning environment and a meeting place where our members can post listings to find the right “door openers”. They connect entrepreneurs with investors, lenders and the service providers they need, all in one convenient place.
Profunder: an online crowdfunding platform that helps small businesses and start-ups raise investment capital from their friends, family and community. They make the process of raising $$ to fund your business super low cost, easy and hassle free. Profunder was started by Jessica Jackley, one of the co-founders of Kiva.
Chubby Brain: Their first publicly released algorithm is the Funding Recommendation Engine (FRE). The FRE takes about 5 minutes to complete and uses inputs you provide about your business and its funding needs to identify angel investors, venture capital and private equity firms, grant programs and banks that match your business based on their actual funding and investment history (not what they say they invest in).
BusinessFinance.com – Search the funding criteria of over 4,000 sources for business loans, venture capital, equipment leasing and commercial real estate financing.
Marketing
Dabbleboard: the mission at Dabbleboard is to help people think and communicate. By making it easier to visualize ideas, they help unlock the mind’s true potential. And by harnessing the power of the Internet, they enable the fusion of ideas from any number of people.
Planning
Business Model Generation: and the core of its system, the Business Model Canvas is introduced on this site. I have been using it with my MBA students to help them build business strategies for themselves and their clients. The canvas has been developed by a large number of people working together. It is deceptively simple and gains growing impact as groups work with it in many different creative ways.
