START-UP TOOL KIT  

Howard Greenstein


5 Tips to Ensure Customers Pay You On Time

Every business runs into deadbeat customers. Here's how to make sure they don't take advantage of you.  Read story

How Can You Boost Local Sales This Season?

How can you capitalize on the good will felt toward small business this holiday season? We've scoured the statistics and tapped experts for their best strate...  Read story

5 Keys to Business Happiness

Ted Leonsis says business can add real value by ensuring customers and employees are happy.  Read story

Tips for Running Daily and Local Deals

Inc. has covered the Daily Deal and Local Deal space quite extensively over the last year or so. In fact my colleague Eric Markowitz has reported on the <...  Read story

Reach Customers and Employees via Mobile Apps

If you’re a small business owner with customers on the go, or employees that work in the field or remotely, you may want to provide them with a mobi...  Read story

Tool to Predict Tech Start-up Success

A few months ago, the team at Blackbox seed accelerator set out to decode the "genetics" behind successful startups (See this short piece at Read story

Do Facebook Ads Bring Customers?

Start-ups and small businesses are always looking for more customers, and there are a lot of potential customers on the Internet, right? But what online s...  Read story

New Discounted Legal Services for Small Businesses

One challenge for many startups is the high cost of legal fees. Rocket Lawyer recently did a Read story

How to Show Market Traction

When pitching your business for funding, a common question that investors will ask is “Have you achieved market traction?” Market traction is ...  Read story

"Wherehouse?" Outsource Your Storage and Shipping

Growth is a challenge for a small business, especially when it comes to warehouse real estate. You don't want to carry costs for more space than you need....  Read story

Fight Credit Card Processing Fees

Start-ups are always looking to increase revenue or save costs. When Sean Harper was running his e-commerce business, he started looking at costs, and zer...  Read story

Pay Attention - Or Pay Cash

When I worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, Alex St. John had a reputation as an infamous DirectX game development evangelist. That meant he had worked ...  Read story

Sponsorship as Participation

More than two years ago Inc . covered the " unconference " trend. ...  Read story

A Sales Social Network

Forget liking and photos—respond and sell something. SalesSpider is all about connecting for sales.  Read story

A Community for Ideas

Bulbstorm is a community for idea sharing. You can gather a team interested in working on your idea and get feedback, all with security, NDAs, and legal trac...  Read story

Evil Genius Finds Case Study in Her Pepsi

Tracy Brown, CEO and founder of Evil Genius Designs , doesn't profile as the standard entrepren...  Read story

A Pop-up App Store in San Francisco

When Podio's Chairman Thomas Madsen-Mygdal told me at South By Southwest la...  Read story

Making Location Awareness Simple

Last year's South By Southwest festival was a tipping point for location-based check-in services. I wrote about companies l...  Read story

Cloud-Based Software for Small Biz, Easy and Integrated

More than 160 companies are ready to provide web-based software that fits together to solve problems like Lego blocks, and it all works through the web. I go...  Read story

A Female Spin on Starting a Business

Normally I don't focus on male- or female-specific entrepreneurial challenges, but having received two books by women entrepreneurs in the last few weeks,...  Read story

Dial 1-800-Get Some Sales

When there are 300 other companies doing the same thing as yours in a market like New York City, how do you stand out? Read story

Don't Put Your Assets on the Line

Starting a business? Protect what you have by thinking through your legal form first.  Read story

Start 2011 By Learning from Failure

The Start-Up Toolkit is above all a resource for start-ups and it is my intent to help them better manage, market, sell, protect their businesses, and pro...  Read story

The Power of Thank You

I wanted to use my last column of the year to discuss the value of "Thank You." Many start-ups and small businesses survive and thrive via referrals and w...  Read story

Start-up End-of-Year Legal To-Dos

The government doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice. They do care, however, if you've done everything required of your business, if you've planned you...  Read story

What Start-ups Can Learn from the Big Brands

Creating a successful start-up includes many factors, from delivering a great product or service to proper financial and legal planning.  But one of ...  Read story

NY Entrepreneur Week Spurs Connections, Businesses

Last week's New York Entrepreneur Week (NYEW) brought together over 1800 entrepreneurs, potential entre...  Read story

A Start-Up Helps You Incorporate

Start-ups always need to figure out a legal structure – it’s one of the most common questions asked early on in the formation of any company. Incorporati...  Read story

Presenting a Different Way of Presenting

One thing entrepreneurs do often is present their ideas to others. Whether they're selling their business services, pitching investors, or explaining thei...  Read story

Demand Management Provides a Business Model

As a start-up it can be tough to know when you'll get customers, how many you'll get, and when they'll show up. These problem plagues larger businesses as...  Read story

Leverage Virtual Workers for Your Start-Up

Independent workers make up 30 percent of the nation’s workforce, according to the Freelancers Union. Could you use one to help launch your start-up?  Read story

Motivation Lessons from Summer Camp

If you can tap into what motivates your team, you can have people doing more work than you've assigned, gladly and without hesitation. In a start-up, th...  Read story

This Start-Up is "Auntie" Establishment

When the entire market focuses on one niche, and you choose another, you're either a bold innovator, or a failure. Henry Ford's quote about building cars ...  Read story

PR Stunts and Start-Ups

Publicity stunts are on my mind this week. This past Sunday night on the premiere of Mad Men, Peggy suggests paying women to fight over a ham, and scores ...  Read story

Connecting Your E-mail and Social Marketing

Your business has accumulated an e-mail list, but you have no idea how to connect those e-mail subscribers to your Facebook page, your Twitter followers a...  Read story

A One-Stop List for Start-Up Help

As a blogger who writes about Start-ups, I often get calls, emails or get stopped at parties because people need something for their company. They may ne...  Read story

Is It Legal To Use Social Network Data When Hiring?

Many start-ups use their Social Network contacts to find additional workers. Why not? Someone's friend of a friend is probably that chef, programmer or ad...  Read story

Simplicity and Freemium Models "Crush It"

"How is 'not giving a crap about your customer' giving you good Return on Investment?" shouts G...  Read story

Start-Up Help at Your Local Library

A tree grows there, so why not a startup? The Brooklyn Public Library has been running...  Read story

The “So-What” Factor

There's a famous quote by Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt that "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a qua...  Read story