At accelerators like Techstars, the “Office Hours” is a standard part of the program.  A mentor comes in and a whole slate of companies are scheduled to meet with them for around 20 minutes or so.  It’s more than an elevator pitch, but not enough time for a full pitch.  So what are you supposed to get accomplished in that time?

First of all, get it out of your head that Office Hours is time to pitch.  In fact, any short meeting–an Office Hours or rushing the speaker after a speaking event, or an actual elevator ride–should never be thought of as a pitch.  Your goal at these short meetings should either be to:

a) Seem interesting/smart/personable enough for me to want to meet you again.

or

b) To get a specific, thoughtful question answered that I might have a unique perspective on.

It should really just be a bridge to another meeting or interaction.  

If you make it the kind of meeting where you rush through everything you’re doing for me to just say “yes” or “no” to, you’re missing out on all the other potential value you get get out of the meeting.  You’d be abbreviating your pitch, missing out on the back and forth of a longer meeting where you can do a deeper dive, and probably not leaving enough time for me to get to know you.  It’s the worst possible time frame for an actual pitch.

Here’s what I’d suggest instead:

1) First off, research beforehand.  Know the types of investments I make, and if you can’t figure that out, ask the leaders of your program.  Don’t waste your time getting me to talk about myself.

2) Spend the first three minutes saying exactly what you do.  We can dive into that later.  Basically, just describe to me what it might say on your landing page.  ”We’re a human powered bookkeeping service… you just upload all your financial docs to us, scanned receipts, and we have an outsourced staff who will make sense of it and track it for a low monthly fee.  We’re aiming for the one billion small businesses out there who are too small to hire a CFO or comptroller.”  Bam, done, I get it.  We can do a deeper dive later to understand the inner workings of that, but now I get what you do and that you’re going after a big market.

3) Why you?  Do you have a killer team of coders, or are you the sales guru?  What is it specifically that makes you the right team for this problem.  This is not for you to describe your resume back from elementary school.  It’s a way to tell me, “I led the team who built eBay Motors–I can sell cars online.”

4) Explain to me what you’re aiming to accomplish over the course of the program–why are you here–that’s another 3-5 minutes.

5) Right around midway, let me know what you think I can be helpful with–besides money.  I don’t invest in anything where I’m just money.  I want to be able to help the company in some way.  Do you need introductions to customers, feedback on the customer messaging, or perhaps insight into who may have tried something like this before?

6) Spend the rest of the time on next steps–is there a specific list of people that I think you should talk to?

7) Follow up!!  Send me a freshly composed note saying, “Hey, thank you for meeting, we’d love to follow up with the people you mentioned today.  As a refresher, here’s three bullets about what it is that we do.”  Then send me another e-mail with a reminder of the 6 people I said I’d send you to.

8) Kill it with those intros.  Your goal is for me to hear back from the people I sent you to thanking me for the intro, because you were so smart/awesome, helpful, or solved a pressing problem they had.

And that’s how you make the most of 20 minutes.

As the talent wars wage on and the likelihood of poaching a C-level executive from Google are close to zero, founders are turning to recent MBA grads for hiring needs.

Fifty-seven percent of business schools claim startups — companies less than a year old — are ramping up their full-time recruiting efforts for MBA grads, according to the MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance’s Spring 2013 Recruiting Trends survey. By contrast, only 41 percent of larger companies — those with 500 or more employees — are doing so, notes the survey that polled administrators from 84 MBA programs (see graph below).

“A growing number of MBA students are focusing on entrepreneurship, either by starting their own business or helping other students start theirs. Reports from large and small MBA programs confirm the increased student interest in a range of entrepreneurial endeavors,” Jack Oakes, assistant dean for career development at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, said in a statement.

Recruiting increased in all industries with more than 40 percent of colleges seeing a spike in technology, petroleum and energy, consulting and consumer products.

For more stories on hiring and college students check out:

How to Hire the Best Recent Graduate for Your Business

America’s Bright Spots: The Top 10 Cities for Hiring

The Rise of Entrepreneurship on College Campuses

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If you’re not raising bookoo venture-capital bucks, it can often feel like you’re the only one who cares about your startup.

At the San Francisco-based startup NerdWallet, a company providing price-comparison tools for financial products, the CEO and I have been plowing our own money and the company’s earnings back into the business for the last four years. Today, we have nearly 40 employees, we’re profitable and growing fast.

Some might hail this as success, but with San Francisco’s startup ecosystem so focused on funded companies, no one seems to care. We might as well be pariahs.

It’s tough to build a company with no outside help, yet self-funding is how a lot of startups launch. While it can be extremely fulfilling to have complete control of your business, we’ve dealt with a myriad of challenges.

Check out the following three major bootstrap obstacles we’ve run across and how to overcome them:

1. No one’s going to toot your horn for you.
While all tech-media outlets seem to have an auto-publish button for every press release that comes out of major VC firms, bootstrapped companies seem to go to the auto-delete pile. To get around this press issue, one of the first things we realized is the importance of active marketing and PR.

Related: 5 Quick Tips for Better Bootstrapping From SXSW

Not long ago, we were one of a handful of companies that understood the implications of the new credit-card law that passed into law in 2009. The media soon picked up that we could be a resource. So, while we weren’t promoting our products, we got a lot of attention for being on top of the news and offering a different spin on how the new laws would affect people’s lives. If you are able to offer a unique angle, utilize it with the press and be a go-to source.

Also, aspiring entrepreneurs take heart — most startups that get tons of press still face the same struggles as you. Building a company without financial help forces you to focus on what’s important — developing a sustainable business model from the beginning, building a product people can’t live without and focusing on providing long-term value to your customers.

2. Resumes don’t exactly fly in.
Another major struggle of a self-funded startup is recruiting. At the beginning, when no one has heard of you and you don’t have an investor’s blessing, it’s significantly harder to convince strangers to take a risk on your company.

Related: Entrepreneurship 101: Understanding How to Bootstrap

We managed to work around this by leaning heavily on our personal networks. We hit up everyone we could think of from our college lives, our previous jobs and friends of friends. We were shameless.

And while the Facebooks and Googles of the world were in an escalating arms race for the same limited pool of people in Silicon Valley, we looked beyond its gold-rimmed borders to other parts of the U.S. for hiring.

Thankfully, it worked, as we were able to grow our team by having talent relocate to San Francisco. And better yet, it got easier. Now when we introduce candidates to the team and the culture we’ve built, it’s a much easier sell.

3. Don’t expect any free drinks.
These days, venture-backed startup founders in San Francisco get celebrity treatment. Bootstrapped companies? Not so much.

At the beginning of your startup adventure, you’ll probably go to networking events and startup parties, where you’ll try to rub elbows and integrate into the startup scene. But as soon as people realize you don’t work for Dropbox and you’re not the founder of a photo-sharing app with millions in seed funding, they’ll likely lose interest.

Related: When Friend and Family Become Financiers

My advice? If you don’t get any value out of the events, skip them.  You’re better off back home building a business, than trying to fit in.

If you need to troubleshoot something, reach out to people personally who have taken on similar challenges and ask them for advice.  It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in.  Anyone who’s had to manage people, oversee an organization and build or sell a product will have valuable input that could help you.

While there are certainly challenges to self-funding your company, there are also huge benefits.  We control our company in its entirety, which means we’re never forced to compromise our mission in order to satisfy our investors. And for us, that’s always been worth the struggle.

What are other obstacles bootstrapped companies face? Let us know how entrepreneurs might overcome them in the comments below.

If you plan to launch a product through a crowdfunding campaign, you need to be prepared to fulfill your backers’ expectations in a timely fashion. Fortunately, several new crowdfunding platforms have sprung up to help you bridge the gap between crowdfunding and ecommerce.

These new platforms realize that many crowdfunding campaigns lag in delivering their products to supporters. In fact, more than 75 percent of crowdfunded-project creators deliver their products late, according to a new study by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Just consider the largest Kickstarter campaign to date, the Pebble watch. After raising a whopping $ 10 million (100 times its goal) in May 2012, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pebble was faced with fulfilling more than 85,000 orders within a promised deadline of five months. But one year later, it has shipped only 70,000.

To avoid such situtations, these three platforms aim to keep entrepreneurs on track and backers happy:

1. Crowd Supply – Launched in March 2013, Portland, Ore.-based Crowd Supply supports designers of everything from game controllers to eco-friendly yoga mats through a suite of a la carte services that include product planning, campaign hosting, order fulfillment and online retailing. “We call ourselves ‘Kickstarter for capitalists,’” says Crowd Supply president Lou Doctor.

For entrepreneurs Bryan Kappa, 31, and Rob Story, 28, fulfillment services were a big concern before launching the Portland Press, a French press for Mason jars. “We didn’t want 1,000 of  [our products] sitting in our living rooms,” Story says. “Crowd Supply had the solution.”

Related: Kickstarter’s Rising Competition: Crowdfunding Alternatives to Donation-Based Sites  

Having met their funding goal in June, Kappa and Story are now manufacturing 500 Portland Presses that will be stored with Crowd Supply and delivered by December 2013 — a deadline they might even bump up.

2. Make That Thing – Easthampton, Mass.-based Make That Thing, which is still in beta, offers the same suite of services as Crowd Supply, but it’s geared to “artists and creators.” Since launching in February 2013, it has helped create a plush toy, party game and comics series. One other difference from Crowd Supply: While Make That Thing helps artists conceptualize their campaigns, it doesn’t host them within its own site.

Of their completed campaigns, one has exceeded its funding goal by 17 times and another by 24 times.  But regardless of how large a project grows, product deliver is the company’s focus. “Our goal is always to have a six-month maximum turnaround on delivery,” says Make That Thing’s co-founder Holly Rowland.

Related: 5 Lessons I Learned From My Failed Kickstarter Campaign  

3. Christie Street – The Santa Monica, Calif., based Christie Street is designed specifically for inventors and welcomes any category of physical product, except pharmaceuticals and firearms. But, unlike Crowd Supply and Make That Thing, Christie Street, which got its start in December 2012, doesn’t offer production and fulfillment services. Instead, it simple vets products to make sure they can be manufactured to scale, which is a huge challenge for inventors, says Christie Street CEO Jamie Siminoff.

“A lot of inventors will put something out there that they think they can make, but they don’t realize it’s not viable,” Siminoff says. “Our process protects the inventors from hurting themselves.”

To keep inventors accountable, Christie Street doles out their funds (less a 5 percent fee) in three stages: The first third gets released after the campaign meets its funding goal, the second third once the inventor produces a fully functional sample and the final third goes out when the product is ready for manufacturing. If a product runs more than six months past the promised delivery date, buyers can expect a partial refund. For example, if the inventor fails to produce the sample, he or she won’t receive the remaining two-thirds of funding, and backers will get two-thirds of their pledge back.

Related: How One Young Trep’s Quest to Encourage Women Engineers Led Her to GoldieBlox  

While still in their early days, each of these platforms has supported at least one campaign that is scheduled to deliver on time. So what could this mean for the established crowdfunding sites?

“Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren’t going anywhere,” says Richard Bliss, co-founder of Social Tech Media, a San Jose, Calif.-based crowdfunding-consulting company, and host of crowdfunding podcast Funding the Dream. “This is the next evolution of crowdfunding,” adds Bliss. “It’s common these days for a campaign to exceed its goal, and I predict these platforms will become more needed as projects become bigger and bigger.”

How do you think crowdfunding could change for the better? Let us know with a comment.

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it’s not a winning-business strategy.

Steve Jobs not only revolutionized the way we listen to music and use a telephone, he also changed our understanding of a computer and even recaptured our ability to fall in love with films through his work with Pixar.

Without a doubt, young entrepreneurs can learn endlessly from Jobs’ example, but they shouldn’t adhere too closely to his image. After all, he may have been a design genius but he did ruffle a few feathers.

He disregarded every “rule” and regarded his mentors and role models loosely. Even he would hardly advise someone to emulate him. I think it’s far more likely he would say: “The best way to be like me is to be more fully yourself.”

Related: Trust, Fairness, Respect: Qualities of a Good Boss and a Great Leader (Infographic)

Still, you can learn an awful lot from the man. Here are a few very specific things that up-and-comers can learn from Jobs’ example:

1. Keep the customer experience in focus. Jobs was a master at getting into customers’ minds. He knew what we wanted — and how we wanted it — often long before we did.

2. Have an eye for beauty. It couldn’t just work well. Steve knew that it also had to feel good to touch, be delightful to use, and be exceptionally beautiful to look at.

3. Foster innovation. Do you remember a time without an iPhone? How about an iPod? Steve created products and product categories no one even had a frame of reference for and made them central to our lives.

Related: How to Find the Right Mentor for Your Startup

4. Insist upon excellence. Jobs had little patience for people who didn’t think things through, and he pushed the people around him to be their best. He accepted no substitutes and inspired great loyalty.

Finally, if there is one powerful absolute to learn from Steve Jobs, it is to focus on your customers and put them before everything else. Think about rabid Apple users — the ones who stand in line outside of a store for hours awaiting the release of the next iPhone. They’ve done more to grow the brand than Apple itself ever has.

You will never replicate that by trying to be Steve Jobs. But, if you ask these questions to apply his laser-focused attention to your own customers, you can definitely inspire that kind of brand advocacy.

• Are we surprising and delighting our customers while also delivering a consistent experience?
• Are our products and services frictionless for our customers to use and enjoy?
• Are we meeting their needs each and every time they interact with our company?
• Are we iterating and innovating with a product pipeline that’s in line with (or ahead of) the market?
• Are we blazing new trails?

Related: 5 Mentors Every Entrepreneur Should Have

How do you inspire brand advocacy? Let us know with a comment.