The deal is a real team-up, not just a check. News UK will train ClearDraft’s AI for its own news team lawyers. It will help them manage a growing flow of stories across print and digital desks. The pitch to journalists is simple. Publish important stories faster and with more confidence. Lawyers can then spend their hours on the hard cases instead of daily checks.

What the News UK ClearDraft deal actually covers

ClearDraft describes its model as rule-based. It does not write anything. It reads drafts and flags legal risks. Journalists get feedback before anything goes live. That frees in-house lawyers to focus on hard cases. That means investigations and fighting Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) cases.

Media lawyers Alex Wade and David Burgess founded the company in late 2025. They worked with tech experts in San Francisco. Wade has spent many years on both sides of the legal desk. He filed as a journalist for The Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times. He was also the media lawyer deciding what could run. Burgess spent 25 years in media law, including a stint as Head of Production Clearance for EMEA at Netflix. (ClearDraft)

“Investing in ClearDraft is a natural step for News UK as we continue to lead the way in responsible, fearless journalism and in harnessing new technology,” said Angus McBride, General Counsel of News UK. He called the deal “a win for journalism and a win for our readers.”

Burgess offered the kind of number that makes a top lawyer listen. He said he watched ClearDraft review a 100,000-word book in minutes. It flagged the same risks that would take a lawyer at least 15 hours to spot.

Why rule-based AI is the part news teams will accept

Here is the telling detail. News UK is not asking AI to write its journalism. It is asking AI to check it. That difference matters. It draws the line the whole media industry is currently working out. News teams treat AI that creates content as a legal and copyright risk. They treat AI that reviews content as a basic tool.

Publishers have spent two years fighting over training data and suing over copied content. At the same time, volume swamps their legal desks as every story ships in five formats. An AI that reads like a cautious lawyer is an easy yes. An AI that writes like a journalist is still a board debate.

ClearDraft’s plans show where this goes next. The company plans to adjust its product for US, German, Spanish and Dutch law during 2027. It will also roll out a video and audio checking service in the first quarter of 2027. That covers the video and audio that now make up so much of a publisher’s work.

The founder lesson: sell the bottleneck, not the hype

For founders, the deal is a case study in strategy. ClearDraft did not pitch “AI for media” as a vague idea. It sold relief for a specific, costly problem: the legal desk at deadline. And it landed a key investor that is also its customer, which is the oldest business move there is. When your investor trains your product on their own daily work, your plans write themselves.

There is also a quieter signal for anyone building in legal tech. The winners may not be the tools that replace lawyers. They may be the ones that sort the daily work for them. They handle the daily flags, so humans spend their judgment where it counts. That is a much easier sale than replacing people. It avoids the trust problem that slows most AI use in work with strict rules.

The News UK ClearDraft bet says the news team of the near future still has lawyers. They will just spend less of their day reading daily copy. They will spend more of it on the stories that actually need them. For more on how leaders are using AI inside their companies, see our Xiaomi MiMo vs DeepSeek comparison. We also have a press release guide.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

The post News UK Is Betting on AI to Catch Legal Risk Before It Publishes appeared first on CEO Medium.

Then there is Trustpilot, where the customers talk. Polsia AI sits at 2.9 out of 5 stars, and 45 percent of the reviews are one star. Both things are true at the same time. The gap between them is the most useful thing a founder can read this week.

What Polsia AI Actually Does

Polsia is not a chatbot that helps you write emails. It is a network of specialized agents, each assigned a business role. A CEO agent sets goals and plans, and an engineering agent writes and ships code through your GitHub. A marketing agent runs ads and cold outreach, while a comms agent manages the inbox and investor replies. An ops agent watches the metrics.

Every night the agents run a cycle. They check the state of the company and decide what matters most. Then they do the work and send the founder a morning briefing.

The platform is built on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK. It plugs into the tools a real company uses: GitHub, email, Meta Ads, X, Stripe, and payment processors. Pricing starts with a free tier. The Pro plan costs $49 a month. It includes one autonomous task every night plus five on-demand credits. Polsia also takes a 20 percent share of the economic activity the agents generate.

The founder is Ben Sera, who also goes by Ben Broca. He runs the whole thing solo with zero employees. He is not new to startups: he previously co-founded Future Foods at CloudKitchens alongside Travis Kalanick.

The $30 Million Bet

The May funding round valued Polsia at $250 million. Sound Ventures, True Ventures, Offline Ventures, Adjacent, Tekton Ventures, Drysdale Ventures, and Vaynerfund participated, plus angel investors. Sera says the company is approaching $10 million in annual revenue with one human on payroll.

An independent review puts harder numbers to the scale. It reports $18.7 million in annual recurring revenue, with $11 million of it recurring subscriptions. Out of 484,592 companies created, 29,132 are active. Month-one churn is roughly 50 percent, a figure the founder himself has stated. Those numbers describe a product people try fast and quit fast, which matters more than the valuation.

The best story from the fundraise is that the AI allegedly ran it. According to the company, Polsia’s agents handled the data room, the investor briefings, and the diligence process. Sera only showed up for the final signatures. Whether that is mostly true or mostly marketing, it is a remarkable claim to make while raising money from humans.

What Users Say About Polsia AI

The one-star reviews cluster around the same complaint: the AI builds before it validates. One reviewer signed up and clicked a “surprise me” button. Within ten minutes he had a company name, a mission statement, and a live site. Then came an inbox and a public post on X, marketing a business nobody had checked whether anyone wanted. Then it asked for a credit card.

Other themes in the reviews: credits burn on failed tasks with refunds hard to get, and support is slow. One user reported paying $199 a month for weeks of agent work and ending with seven signups and zero customers. (One disclosure worth making: the most detailed critical review comes from the founder of Preuve AI. His validation tool sits upstream of products like Polsia, so he has a commercial bias. His review links its sources, so you can check the claims yourself.)

Strip out the bias and the pattern still holds: Polsia executes fast and validates nothing. Speed was never the scarce resource in startups. Knowing what to build was.

What Founders Should Take Away

Here is the honest read. Polsia is a preview, not a punchline. The execution layer of a company, meaning code, outreach, reporting, and inbox triage, is being commoditized quickly. Founders who still do all of it by hand are choosing to be slow. But judgment about what to build and who wants it is not commoditized at all. That is still the founder’s job. It is the lesson Polsia’s unhappy users are paying $49 to $199 a month to learn.

Two practical rules follow. First, automate the repetitive half of your week. Spend the savings talking to customers, because customer conversations are the one input no agent can fake for you. Second, never hand production credentials, inboxes, and ad spend to an autonomous system. Watch it closely for at least a month first. The agents work for you. The moment you stop supervising them, the roles reverse.

The bigger question, whether AI eventually replaces the CEO instead of the workers, is one we have covered before. Polsia just made it more concrete. A company with no employees can now raise $30 million. The founders who survive that world will not be the ones who outsource their judgment. They will be the ones who aim it.

More founder strategy lives in our Entrepreneurship & Startups section.

The post Polsia AI Raised $30M to Run Companies With Zero Employees. The User Reviews Tell a Harder Story. appeared first on CEO Medium.

I searched the CEO Medium interview archive for founders who talked openly about pricing. I wanted to know what they charged at launch, what they changed, and what revenue did next. Their stories line up with the latest industry data on pricing. Below are the seven pricing mistakes first time founders make most. Each one comes with the numbers behind it and a fix.

The pricing mistakes first time founders make most often

Each mistake below comes from a real founder interview or a published industry study. None of them require a finance degree to fix.

Mistake 1: You charge too little because your confidence is low

Lisa Collum founded Top Score Writing in 2011. Her classroom writing lessons lifted her students’ state test pass rate from 38% to 95%. Over the next two years it reached 100%. She went on to work with more than 1,000 schools across the country. Her results were elite. Her prices, however, were not. As she told CEO Medium: “At first, I often second-guessed myself. I felt nervous meeting schools and selling my products. I hesitated to charge much because I lacked confidence. Over time, the results gave me proof. I now feel ready to take both businesses to the next level.”

Of all the pricing mistakes first time founders make, this is the most common. It has nothing to do with the market. Founders price their own insecurity instead of their value. Still, the fix is blunt. Write down your three strongest customer results, then set a price that matches them. If your work moves a pass rate from 38% to 100%, you are not the budget option. Stop introducing yourself as one. Confidence follows evidence. Collect the evidence first and let the price follow.

Mistake 2: You set a price once and never revisit it

Jeremy Finlay, creator of the Salesumentary video method, learned this firsthand. His CEO Medium interview puts it plainly: “Pricing was a big obstacle for the team early on. Many small businesses have the tendency to underprice their work and undervalue their time. It took Jeremy a few clients to realize he was charging far too little for his services.” An old mentor insisted that he raise his prices. So he did, and then he raised them again. Still, demand held firm. His rule for clients today: “We don’t work with folks who are brand-new anymore. We work with those who are the best at what they do.”

Finlay’s instinct matches the data. Businesses that update pricing at least every six months see nearly double the ARPU gain of slower peers. That is the finding of Paddle’s ProfitWell Report, which studied roughly 5,000 subscription companies. Pricing is not a one-time decision. Treat it as a habit instead. Put a pricing review on the calendar twice a year.

Mistake 3: Nobody on the team owns pricing

Here is an uncomfortable number. An OpenView survey of more than 1,000 SaaS executives found a blind spot. 55% of expansion-stage SaaS companies ($1M to $20M ARR) had nobody whose job included pricing. More than half let pricing drift with no owner. It is also one of the quietest pricing mistakes first time founders make. The damage, however, stays invisible until you look for it.

In early startups, pricing goes to whoever argues loudest. Sales wants it lower, marketing wants it simpler, and the founder just wants the argument to end. The fix costs nothing. Name one owner for pricing. Give them a simple scoreboard: conversion rate, average revenue per user, churn, and expansion revenue. Review it every month. When one person is accountable, pricing becomes a system you can improve.

Mistake 4: You charge per seat when your value lives somewhere else

Per-seat pricing feels safe because everyone else uses it. That is exactly the problem. Research from Price Intelligently (now part of Paddle) reached a blunt conclusion. 8 out of 10 companies using per-user pricing should use a different value metric. Your price should scale with the value the customer receives. When the metric matches the value, their growth becomes your revenue growth.

Founders copy per-seat pricing because it is familiar, not because it fits. A 2026 Breadcrumbs analysis of 998 startup pricing pages found that 27.2% still default to per-seat pricing. Ask a harder question. What number goes up in your customer’s world when your product works? For example, if your product saves a team hours each week, price against the hours, not the headcount.

Mistake 5: You copy a competitor’s pricing page instead of testing your own

Three tiers, a highlighted middle plan, a long feature checklist. The same Breadcrumbs analysis found that 41.4% of startups offer exactly three pricing plans. Three plans are a fine starting point. When you copy a competitor’s structure, you copy their assumptions too. You inherit their idea of the customer. Copying a competitor is one of the laziest pricing mistakes first time founders make.

Instead, run your own tests. Interview lost deals and ask what almost convinced them to buy. Survey paying customers about which plan they would choose today. Then change one variable at a time: the number of tiers, the anchor price, or where the feature gates sit. Your pricing page should reflect your customers’ logic, not your competitor’s template.

Mistake 6: You give away so much free that nobody needs to pay

Free plans feel like growth. Often they are just delayed churn. ChartMogul’s B2B SaaS benchmarks put freemium conversion at 2% to 8% of free users becoming paid customers. However, that means 92% to 98% of free users never pay a dollar. If your free tier solves the whole problem, you built a charity with server costs.

Alessya Baggetta, the Toronto founder behind Alessya Baggetta Designs, made the opposite move. She went from freelance gigs to her first five-figure month by taking pricing seriously. Pricing, she told CEO Medium, “can be one of the most daunting recurring issues in a business.” Her rule is direct: “Do not sell yourself short, know your worth and confidently show up with your prices.” Audit your free tier this week. Gate the features that create real outcomes.

Mistake 7: You apologize for your price instead of disqualifying bad fits

Baggetta’s next line is the one founders should print and keep: “If a client refuses to pay then they are not your ideal client.” Low prices do more than cut margin. They attract buyers who haggle and drain your support time. Instead, a confident price filters for customers who respect the work.

Collum’s story proves the second half. Once her results gave her proof, the hesitation ended and she moved both businesses to the next level. Finlay says the same thing from the other side. He now works only with clients who are the best at what they do. Still, the pattern holds. Price for the customer you want, and let the price repel the customer you do not.

Fixing the pricing mistakes first time founders make this quarter

You do not need a pricing consultant to avoid the pricing mistakes first time founders make. You need a calendar and a backbone. First, assign one owner for pricing. Second, write down your three best customer results and check whether your price reflects them. Third, identify your true value metric and test it against per-seat pricing. Fourth, run one pricing experiment per quarter. Try a plan restructure, a 10% to 20% increase for new customers, or a tighter free tier. Judge the result on conversion and ARPU.

Pricing decides what comes into the business. What stays is a separate skill. If you are sorting out the money side of your company, start with two guides. Read how much a founder should pay themselves in year one. Then read this solo founder bookkeeping setup guide for the first year. Get all three right and the math finally works in your favor.

The pricing mistakes first time founders make are all fixable, and the founders who fix them share one trait. They treat price as a decision they revisit, not a confession they avoid. Collum matched her confidence to her results. Finlay raised his prices twice. Baggetta stopped discounting her worth. So pick one mistake from this list and fix it this month. For more founder playbooks, browse the Entrepreneurship and Startups hub.

Start with the mistake that stings most when you read it. That sting is usually recognition. Fix that one first, then work through the rest one quarter at a time.

The post Pricing Mistakes First Time Founders Make appeared first on CEO Medium.

Xiaomi, best known for smartphones and electric cars, just released MiMo-V2.6-Pro, which debuted as the highest-scoring open-weight AI model in the world on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index with a score of 46. That puts it ahead of DeepSeek’s best open model at 36, ahead of xAI’s Grok 4.6, and within touching distance of closed frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

The model carries an MIT license. As a result, anyone can download it from Hugging Face, fine-tune it, and run it on their own hardware without paying Xiaomi anything.

Xiaomi MiMo vs DeepSeek: the cost story is the real story

Here is the number that should make every founder sit up: Xiaomi says it trained the flagship model for roughly $2.62 million, completing its reinforcement learning run in under six days. In addition, the smaller Flash variant cost about $850,000.

Not long ago, people discussed frontier AI training runs in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars. In contrast, Xiaomi did it for the price of a nice house in San Francisco. Fuli Luo, a former DeepSeek researcher, led the team, which tells you something about where the talent is flowing.

Moreover, API pricing is equally aggressive: $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens. Artificial Analysis measures the cost per task at roughly one-twentieth to one-sixtieth of leading international models.

What this means for your business

First, if you are building a company on top of AI APIs, your cost structure just got a preview of its future. Open-weight models at near-frontier quality, available for free, runnable on rented hardware. Labs releasing their work to the world are competing away the margin that proprietary API providers used to enjoy.

The strategic move for founders: build your product so the model underneath is swappable. The winners of the next phase will not be the companies with the best model. They will be the companies with the best product on top of commodity intelligence.

DeepSeek proved open models could compete. Finally, Xiaomi just proved they can win. Your AI bill is about to get a lot smaller, and your moat needs to be somewhere else.

Read more in our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub.

Sources: https://venturebeat.com/technology/better-than-deepseek-xiaomis-mimo-v2-6-pro-debuts-as-the-top-open-weights-model-in-the-world-alongside-cheaper-v2-6-flash

The post Xiaomi Just Dethroned DeepSeek in Open-Source AI. Your AI Bills Are About to Collapse appeared first on CEO Medium.

Muse, the company’s standalone AI assistant app, racked up an estimated 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days after launching on September 8, according to mobile intelligence firm Apptopia. On a like-for-like basis, iOS downloads in the US and Canada, Muse hit 1.8 million versus 1.3 million for ChatGPT over the same 12-day window after its mobile debut.

Furthermore, engagement looks even stronger. Muse is averaging an estimated 642,000 daily active users on mobile in the US, compared with 231,000 for ChatGPT at the same point. The app climbed from No. 2 to No. 1 on the US App Store’s overall chart, knocking ChatGPT off the top spot. Meta’s stock jumped more than 11 percent on the news, putting it on track for its best month in over two years.

Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang has been posting the comparisons himself. Meanwhile, Shopify is already building a Shop Pay integration for the app. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC that agentic AI might finally be breaking out of developer circles into mainstream consumer software.

Meta Muse vs ChatGPT: why distribution won

Here is the part founders should actually study. Muse did not win on model quality alone. It won on distribution.

More than 95 percent of Muse users are active Facebook users, and 63 percent are on Instagram, according to Apptopia’s audience data. Meta plugged its new app directly into the largest consumer social graph on earth. In contrast, ChatGPT launched in 2023 as a standalone product from a company with no consumer distribution. Muse launched in 2026 inside a machine built for exactly this.

This is the oldest lesson in business, relearned again: the best product rarely wins. The best-distributed product usually does.

What it means for the AI race

The launch also signals a shift in where AI competition happens. In fact, the model layer is commoditizing fast. The fight is moving to agents that do things for users: fill out forms, organize inboxes, handle shopping. Meta is betting that whoever owns the consumer relationship owns the agent layer, and its early numbers suggest the bet has legs.

For founders building with AI, the takeaway is practical. First, stop obsessing over which model is marginally smarter this month. Instead, start obsessing over distribution. Who already has your users’ attention? What channel can you borrow, partner with, or build on? Muse’s launch is a case study in the answer.

Meta understood something simple: in a crowded market, distribution is the product.

Read more in our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub.

Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/21/metas-muse-is-outpacing-chatgpts-early-mobile-launch/

The post Meta’s Muse Beat ChatGPT’s Launch Numbers. The Lesson Is Distribution. appeared first on CEO Medium.

June 2025 — Silicon Valley, California. The Ventures Award will expand its international program with investor-led pitch events in 12 cities. The global pitch competition already held editions in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Buenos Aires, Bali, and Tel Aviv.

Also, in 2025, the program will reach Tokyo, Miami, Seattle, Singapore, Paris, and Berlin. As a result, the expansion connects early-stage founders with capital, visibility, and strategic partners.

A global network for early-stage startups

Originally founded in Silicon Valley, The Ventures Award works with more than 100 venture capital firms and innovation hubs. Furthermore, Stanford, Plug and Play, and Google.

Meanwhile, the program looks for companies with global ambition. It highlights product readiness, early traction, team strength, and technology. The 2025 sectors include AI, fintech, robotics, medtech, and cybersecurity.

Investor-curated pitch events

Meanwhile, each local event brings selected founders and active investors together. Therefore, the format encourages focused, high-intent conversations instead of generic networking.

“The energy at The Ventures in Chicago was unmatched — sharp founders, bold ideas, and real momentum. It’s rare to see this level of early-stage clarity paired with global ambition.”

Yash Chaturvedi, Jury Member and Principal TPM at Amazon, made that assessment.

Founders and investors build trust

In addition, Matviy Kruglov, former investor and Director of Ecosystem & Partnerships at Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, now at AWS, praised the San Francisco edition.

“The San Francisco edition brought together founders tackling some of the most urgent and complex problems in AI and deep tech. I was impressed by both their technological depth and market traction. The Ventures creates a space where real investor–founder trust can form — and that’s what moves ecosystems forward.”

Next steps for The Ventures Award

Finally, the program aims to reach 50 global innovation capitals. It is more than a pitch stage. It is a network of opportunity for founders and investors.

Next, events will take place during the second and third quarters of 2025. Finally, for partnership inquiries, judging opportunities, or startup applications, visit www.the-ventures.com.

The post The Ventures Award Expands Worldwide, Connecting Founders and Investors appeared first on CEO Medium.

Decide on a Business Structure

Coming up with the perfect company name and writing down a business plan may have gotten you excited about launching your new venture, but you now may be dreading filling out and filing all the legal forms and documents needed to establish yourself as a bona fide business owner. Thankfully, you can find help online to guide you step by step and make the process a lot simpler. 

Forming an LLC is often the most advantageous structure for new small business owners, as it protects your personal assets in case of litigation and also offers significant tax advantages. Keep in mind that the easiest way to form an LLC inexpensively is to work with a formation service. Read reviews first to find an affordable and reliable service.    

Develop a Marketing Strategy

A marketing plan serves as a roadmap, helping to guide the company’s operations and ensure that resources are effectively used. When creating a marketing plan, it is important to analyze and understand the target market, identify effective strategies on how to reach the desired audience, set measurable goals, and consider the financial impact. Furthermore, factors such as competition and current trends should also be assessed in order to give the business a competitive advantage.

New businesses should use content marketing as it provides an effective yet efficient way to reach potential customers and build their brand awareness. It allows them to connect with their audience and create a meaningful, long-term relationship with them while helping to build trust in the business, product or services they are offering. 

If you will have a physical office or storefront, make sure that it also reflects your branding. Use your branded colors and fonts whenever possible, but when you need to go off-brand, go simple and classic. For instance, use high-quality metal letters and numbers for your brick-and-mortar location. This may help people to recognize your business and find your location easily. You can choose from a variety of metals, including brass, bronze, aluminum, copper, and steel. 

Implement IT Solutions

Today’s economy is mostly technology-based, and businesses should expect growth by implementing systems and software such as CRM, ERP, accounting, and payroll, just to name a few. But there are so many options available that it can feel overwhelming for a solopreneur. 

So if you want to avoid spending a fortune on IT solutions that can be overly complex and too extensive for your needs, look for an IT company that will analyze your processes first, then come up with a plan specifically designed for your business. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and headaches if you don’t have to do all the research on your own, and by only buying the services and technology you really need, you’ll also save a lot of money that can be invested elsewhere.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is an incredibly powerful tool that all businesses should consider. It provides an excellent, cost-effective way of accessing the most up-to-date software applications and services without requiring large upfront payments or long setup times.

Finding Funding for Your Startup

Depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to self-fund your new venture, at least partially. You may also have to ask family and friends if they want to pitch in to get you started. 

But if you need to invest in expensive equipment and supplies, you may have to look for investors willing to bet their money on your success. And with the high odds of small businesses failing within the first four years of their existence, convincing banks and investors that yours will make it to year five and beyond is a tall order for a new entrepreneur. But a solid business plan and financial projections showing steady progress can help you attract financiers and partners. 

Additionally, think about applying for grants and having the government help with your funding efforts. Crowdfunding is also becoming increasingly popular, but make sure you research what kinds of fees and regulations are in place before selecting a website or platform to work with. If you’re planning on taking out a loan, one of the main factors in getting approved or rejected is your credit report. Therefore, it’s important to check your credit periodically and stay vigilant about improving it if needed.  

Complete the Essentials

Setting your business up for success sometimes means dealing with less-than-appealing tasks. Asking for funding, setting up hardware and software, and choosing a business structure may not be what you envisioned doing as a business owner, but it’s part of the deal. Thankfully, there are experts who can help you along the way, so save yourself time and money by contacting the right professionals. 

The post Dealing with the Less Glamorous Parts of Starting Your Own Business appeared first on CEO Medium.

Get a New Place

Anyone who has ever bought a house knows that the process can be time-consuming and stressful. But for those who are also running a business from home, the stakes are even higher. Not only do you need to find a property that meets your business needs, but you also need to make sure that it is in a good location and within your budget.

The Economic Development Collaborative suggests writing down some realistic goals and what you need to achieve them; for instance, if your business is based on handmade items, you’ll need a safe, possibly climate-controlled space to store materials and inventory. Working with a realtor who is familiar with businesses can be a huge help in the search for the perfect property. They will know what to look for in terms of zoning. They can also provide helpful advice on financing and negotiating the purchase price. 

Get Legit

Home-based entrepreneurs often face several challenges as they’re trying to get their business up and running, including conveying credibility to their customers. One simple way to add legitimacy to your ideas and give your customers peace of mind is to form a limited liability company (LLC), which is a widely-accepted business structure that provides tax benefits and flexibility. Not only that, it creates less paperwork for you than a corporation would, meaning you can stay organized as you make the move to a new home. The rules for formation are different from state to state, so read up on how to create an LLC for your state and use a formation service to file the forms in order to save money.

Prepare for Your Move

Forming an LLC is a great way to structure your business and get paperwork organized, but when it comes to the move itself, you’ll want to ensure that your home is also in good shape. Once you’ve started the search for the right house–in the right neighborhood–and are pre-approved for a loan, create a plan for moving day preparations that will help you get through the process as smoothly as possible. Then make a list of essential tasks to perform, such as setting up wi-fi and cable service, and gather all your resources to get them in one place. These might include phone numbers, websites, passwords, and addresses that you’ll need to access before, during, and after the move. 

Since you will already be juggling a lot, outsource at least some of your moving process. First, decide if you want to pack up your home and office yourself or if you’d like the movers to handle that task. Then, look online for “best moving companies near me” and read through the reviews. Once you’ve found a few Los Angeles companies that come highly recommended, ask them for an on-site written quote. Phone quotes are never as accurate, plus having a representative from the company will help you to judge their professionalism and customer service, which are both important when trying to reduce your stress around the move.

Get Some Insight

One major aspect of both a move and a startup is figuring out financial details, and gaining some insight into your spending is a crucial element in the early days. Keeping track of how much capital you have and where it’s going can actually make or break your business. Fortunately, there is software available that will give you information on 24 months worth of transactions. It will even allow you to receive real-time updates so you always know where your money is going and when it’ll get there. Whether you need to lay out cash for marketing tools or equipment, you’ll have peace of mind about your financial state at all times.

Get a Marketing Strategy

You’ve found the perfect location for both living and working, and you have your financials sorted out. What’s the next step? Marketing a home-based business can be challenging, even if you already have an online following, so finding different strategies for drawing in customers is a major priority. FreshSparks notes that the right branding methods can go a long way, so think about a logo that will separate you from similar businesses while making it clear what you stand for. Gone are the days when small business owners had to lay out a lot of cash for design services. Simply generate a logo online through a platform that provides a template so you can use your preferred colors, fonts, and images. 

Moving and starting a business at the same time can be a grueling process if you’re unprepared, but a good plan can go a long way toward helping you make both of these major life changes as successful as possible. Hire help for the moving process to reduce your stress, and focus on the logistics of getting your business and home back up and running smoothly. There will likely be a few bumps in the road, but there’s nothing a motivated entrepreneur can’t handle.

Are you looking for inspiration, but don’t know where to look? Visit CEO Medium. We provide resources designed to help inspire entrepreneurs and influencers. Take a look to see how you can be inspired today!

The post Create Your Home-Based Startup With This Guide appeared first on CEO Medium.

What is your entrepreneur’s story? How did you come about building your business?

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and started SelfieMark right after having my second child, I was in a dressing room and had no idea what to wear or what looked good on me after having a baby and it was hard to know what shapes or styles look good because my body completely changed. Then it just clicked and I decided to start an app where shoppers could decide in a comparison what to wear and get feedback from a pro or their friends and family. I always loved empowering women and I feel there is a big disconnect in stores and online where shoppers need a lot more help and salespeople won’t provide unbiased advice.

What is your business model — how were you able to grow so fast?

Our consumer app SelfieMark is FREE for shoppers. Now we just launched 6 months ago our b2b with e-commerce solutions that help retailers sell and engage more and we charge them in a subscription model based on how big they are.

https://www.selfiemarkbiz.com/compare-plans/

Can you give me an overview of who you are, what is your educational or overall background? What are some of your achievements?

Finished college degree in Marketing and Advertising. I also had a store for many years in San Francisco at the Westfield Mall with a high-end line of handbags and accessories designed by me and my sister.

What have you learned through your experiences as an entrepreneur that can be used by aspiring business individuals?

Never stop pushing even small milestones will contribute to a bigger goal. And don’t listen to others, people will try to stop you from reaching your dreams so just stop listening to people and get surrounded with mentors who can help you achieve those goals.

What makes your business so unique and successful?

We help shoppers decide when undecided. Last year 76% of shoppers online and also in stores dropped their shopping carts of left the store because they didn’t know what to buy. With our solutions, we are helping both shoppers and retailers get those missing sales. We have no competitors who do exactly what we do and we have 2 patents pending to protect our concept.

What have you learned through your journey as an entrepreneur?

That is never too late to start. Believing in your dream if you don’t believe in it nobody will.

What skills and attributes make you as successful as you are?

Being independent, stubborn, and not afraid about what others will say or think about you.

Why is online business, marketing, etc important?

Nowadays the way people shop online and in stores have changed. New generations don’t like to be sold out and they need a better approach to make purchase decisions. We can help with that.

SelfieMark

Read more about SelfieMark including Market Opportunity, Business Model, Unique Advantage, Growth Roadmap, Investment…www.fundable.com

Social Media :

Facebook: www.facebook.com/selfiemarkapp/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/selfiemarkapp/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/paulaestewart/

Business Website: http://www.selfiemarkbiz.com/

The post Meet Paula Stewart a Latina Mom that Created a Startup to Help Shoppers Decide appeared first on CEO Medium.