Knowing Your Competition and Establishing Your Market Niche to Set Your Startup Apart

This is an article of mine published on July 7, 2020, by CEO Refresher magazine. My article is currently featured on the first page of the magazine website — http://www.refresher.com/

This article of mine is directed toward entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs of small and early stage companies, seeking angel or VC investment or trying to recruit co-founders and first employees or contractors. In such circumstances, the interested parties would be looking to the founder’s or CEO’s competitive analysis and demonstrated knowledge and mastery of his or her target marketplace to set his or her startup apart, including the following:

• What market niche you intend to enter and can dominate
• Your plan for how your company will penetrate the target
• Identity of your chief competitors, both direct competitors and indirect competitors that could be substitutes for your product or service
• The value proposition that you offer that will enable you to overcome the normal tendency for no change
• Strengths of the competition and your plan to overcome those
• Weakness of your competitors and your plan to avoid those same weaknesses
• Barriers to entry you would seek to create to surmount new competition once you gain market traction

To read more, go to https://www.executiveemploymentattorney.com/knowing-your-competition-and-establishing-your-market-niche-to-set-your-startup-apart/

It is my hope that this article will be helpful to founders, entrepreneurs, C-level and other senior executives in companies I represent, particularly those in startup and early stage companies seeking to gain traction in their market to attract angel or VC investment or other partners for growth.

How to Fund your Company

This is an article of mine published on June 15, 2018, by CEO Refresher magazine.  It is on the funding of early stage companies by venture capital groups or angel investor groups.  Among the questions discussed in the article, are the following:

• Why do angels and VC’s invest?
• What are the differences between angels and VC’s? – In the composition of their groups?  – In their types of investments each makes?
• What does your company need to do to get investment?
• What are VC’s and angels looking for? What kinds of companies are they investing in?  What kinds of companies are hot now?
• How does an investment proceed – what are the stages or timeline you go through to get angel investment?
• How will your relationship with the investor change after an investment is made? Your board will need to change at some point. The CEO often shifts to the CTO, but many CEOs are wedded to their title. Realistically, as the company gets funding, the title changes, the founder will be miserable in the role that should be filled by CEO: the problem isn’t a lack of commitment but a failure to shift to the next phase.

To read more, go to this LINK:  http://www.refresher.com/how-to-fund-your-company/
or on my website at https://www.executiveemploymentattorney.com/how-to-fund-your-company/

If your company is seeking investment or needs to negotiate the terms of investment and needs advice or legal representation, please do give me a call or shoot me an email at radelson@engelschultz.com.