Welcome to Startup Grind’s Medium
Finding more mediums to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs.
Who we are?
Startup Grind is a global startup community powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. We host monthly events in 210 cities and +100 countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons.
While Startup Grind was founded in Palo Alto, California, our extended network of Startup Grind chapters are located around the world.
You can find all our chapters here.
Our 3 values
We believe in making friends, not contacts.
We believe in giving, not taking.
We believe in helping others before helping yourself.
Why Medium?
New platforms are built every day to satisfy audiences. A lot of you are part of our community and we want to make sure that we move around with you.
Medium gives us the flexibility to share our stories in a simple way while connecting with entrepreneurs. We intend to make their startup journey less lonely, more connected and more memorable.
So what’s our focus here?
In aiming to educate and inspire entrepreneurs by writing to them, make every piece…
Useful
Every piece must offer a valuable answer to this question: “How will this piece make the reader a better entrepreneur?” Struggling to answer this? Write about something else.
Understandable
Your reader is a 20 to 30-something aspiring or current founder in between his/her pre-seed to post-A round. He or she might be in NYC, Shanghai, or Lagos — it’s a global audience — but regardless, he or she has a life outside of work, too. Write to them how you would talk to your cofounder — maybe over a beer.
Original
Your work should offer value from your own head, experience, or research — rather than a scattering of thoughts pulled from across the web distilled into a list. Furthermore, unapproved republishing of preexisting posts to Startup Grind (“syndication”) is a huge no-go — and a great way to lose writer privileges.
Compelling
The best performing pieces are transferrable strategies wrapped in personal stories. Even the most intellectually stimulating pieces need an emotionally engaged reader to absorb and apply the learnings. Do that at least in your opening and closing.
Key Topics
We have 7 key topic areas on the Startup Grind blog, all which speak to the challenges faced by entrepreneurs all over the world. Pitches for things outside of this realm are always welcome.
In all cases, headlines are key. Make them specific (what will I learn here?), urgent (why should I read this now?), and pique a reader’s curiosity.
Founder Life: Stories from and for entrepreneurs, talking about the personal and professional grind of building a company. Includes topics around productivity, balance, and continued learning. Style leans towards narrative pieces with concrete takeaways.
Team & Culture: On how to get and keep the best people, build a unifying company culture, and deal with specific questions like equity distribution. Includes discussion on diversity. Style leans towards conversational data-backed or case-study backed persuasive essays.
Your Next Idea: Strategies for product validation and idea generation, as well as industry overviews for fields that need cool new startups. Style leans towards analysis, with research and quotes to credential predictions, or individual case studies.
On Product: Stories and strategies of building, outsourcing, pivoting — and anything else — of a company’s key product, whether software, hardware, or service. Conversational thought pieces, image-heavy design content, or strategic product management advice all welcome.
Grow & Scale: You’ve got a product — now how do you promote & sell it? We answer these questions and more here, with case studies and tactical guides. Style heavily favors actionable advice offered with reproducible steps. We want readers to be able to use your tactics, not just think about them.
Fundraising: Our portal for everything venture capital, written for founders by founders & active investors. Analysis, thought pieces, narrative stories, and research/case studies all welcome.
Startup Community: Reports from founders and investors on the ground, discussing the opportunities, challenges, and wins of their entrepreneurial hubs. Though pieces, analysis, and unique/fresh personal stories all welcome.
What’s next?
We started publishing one article daily focusing on personal founder/investor stories, helping founders to understand both perspectives from a humble point. Here are some of our stories:
- Chamath Palihapitiya: We Need To Get Rid of Homophily in VC
- Basecamp Jason Fried: Don’t Sell Your Soul
- Nir Eyal: The Psychology of Addictive Products
- Slack Stewart Butterfield: “It Sucks To Be the CEO of a Startup That’s Doing Super Well”
- Udacity’s Sebastian Thurn: We Can Double the World’s GDP
Editors
Michael Gasiorek & Deanna Rampton
Medium Editors
Ready to publish? Submit drafts for consideration here!
