Month: June 2020

June
29, 2020

12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You’ve had a great business idea, you’ve already developed your target customer and determined the size of your market, and now you need to figure out how to reach your clients. You need to get there fast — if you drag your feet, you’ll fail to gain momentum while eating up your capital and may watch your competitors fly right past you.

This is where many founders stumble. It’s hard to strike the right balance between getting your product to market quickly and taking the time to prepare yourself for a successful launch. 

Startups are agile and can rebound from mistakes easier than large corporations, but the competition is fiercer. So if you don’t get a head start going to market, other businesses may end up dominating your niche even with an inferior product, just because they did beat you to the punch.

But you can’t sprint to market for the sake of speed. If you don’t prepare properly, there’s a good chance you won’t achieve product-market fit: the sales won’t come in, no-one will refer you to their friends and neither investors nor

June
24, 2020

8 min read

It doesn’t take long to realize why Lily Brown and Tait Hansen clicked as friends and co-collaborators. The two 13-year-olds don’t finish each other’s thoughts so much as round them out. Neither jumps at talking just to be heard; they both take a beat and bat around a question in their head, searching for the truest and most thoughtful answer. They are, in essence, natural conversationalists, which perhaps demonstrates how they successfully completed a years-long — and, for a chunk of that time, long-distance — start-and-stop process of creating and designing their own board game. 

The result of their efforts, Betcha Can’t! (originally called Bet You Can’t in earlier iterations), did more than merely entertain friends and relatives. The game of wits invites players into a good-natured gauntlet of one-upmanship to see who can call to mind the most trivial information on a subject (e.g. the various types of vegetables or modes of transport) in a finite amount of time. It won a share of the grand prize for “Most Marketable Concept” at 2018’s Young Inventor Challenge, part of the annual Chicago Toy and Game Week. 

Contest sponsor Pressman Toy Corporation quickly picked up