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When Your Startup Idea Has No Game

This week, Everett Harper guest blogs from Founder Labs - "When your idea has no game". Our team of foodie travelers share a common problem - travel and review sites generally stink at making recommendations with our tastes in mind. We’ve been hungry in London without vegetarian options, driven around wine country trying to avoid tour bus parties, and sought a decent playground for two cranky kids. So, we figured there was a travel product we could design with these travelers in mind. In the first few weeks of Founder Labs we proposed: Custom itineraries! Crowdsourced targeted recommendations! Photo album collaboration!

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Diana Chen on Finding the Right Co-Founders

This guest post is by Diana Chen, a Women 2.0 Startup Weekend attendee from last November. Diana is currently in the Founder Labs program in Menlo Park, CA. She blogs about her early-start mobile startup experience: Startups aren't easy. Nor are they particularly comfortable. In all E's it's been exciting, exhilarating, exhausting. Some days, someone tells you your product is amazing and you feel terrific. You're getting somewhere, you're creating the product of your dreams, you sing and cartoon birds will help you get dressed in the morning.

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Step-by-step guide: starting your web company

By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit) Every aspiring entrepreneur has to start somewhere. Yet when you decide to start a company, there's no guidebook to tell you what to do next. People might argue that "real" entrepreneurs need no such book, but a few years ago, I had wasted two years floundering and $20k of my savings on my failed startup -- I could have benefited from such a guidebook. So my best friend Jennifer Chin and I compiled the LaunchBit Startup Guide, which I wish I had had several years ago.

This guide is for new aspiring web entrepreneurs to learn to validate your business idea and build early versions of your first web prototype without coding. After my failed startup was over, I teamed up with Jennifer to try my hand at a different startup.

Today we build comparison shopping sites and use the Lean Startup Method to vet our business ideas before coding our sites. This process ensured that we either cut our losses quickly or achieve profitability. Over time, our process became formulaic. We share our learning and process in the LaunchBit Startup Guide.

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Women 2.0 FoundersCard Membership Offer

Women 2.0 is excited to launch the Women 2.0 FoundersCard!If you are a founder of a tech startup, this one is for you. FoundersCard welcomes Women 2.0 founders.

The Women 2.0 FoundersCard is an exclusive offering to founders from Women 2.0 programs and initiatives: Founder Labs alumni, Founder Friday participants, PITCH applicants, attendees from past Women 2.0 events, and all founders recognized on the Female Founders' to Watch Lists. Apply for a Women 2.0 FoundersCard here.

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Partner event: i/o ventures application deadline (Feb. 21)

The i/o startup accelerator is a 3 month program that helps you launch your product and build a company. We invest 25k into your company to get you up and running. We invite you work side by side with us in San Francisco for an intense 3 months where you will learn from the best. We roll up our sleeves as well as put on weekly events to inform you about what it takes to build a great company. The next program starts March 15 -- submission deadline of Feb 21. To apply simply go to http://www.ventures.io/apply and fill out the form with as much detail as you can.

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TetherPad Lessons Learned (and Pivots)

This guest post is from Sally Grisedale. "Pivoting" describes what entrepreneurs do when they get stuck. It involves recognizing your business idea is failing and making a radical change. In week three, our team objective was to interview 20 concierge at four star hotels in the Bay Area and get four to test our prototype on a free trial basis. Through customer development interviews, we hoped to validate our business idea for “GuidePad”.

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Learning to Go Big on Day One at Founder Labs

This guest post is from Sally Grisedale about Customer Development for the Lean Startup - Notes from Alexander Osterwalder, Steve Blank, Cindy Alvarez and Hiten Shah speaking to Women 2.0 Founder Labs participants on January 23, 2011 In week two of Women 2.0 Founder Labs, the stars of the startup business world kept appearing to shine on us. This week we heard from Alexander Osterwalder the author of “Business Model Creation”; Cindy Alvarez and Hiten Shah from KISS Metrics on marketing strategies for startups and Steve Blank author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, discussing what makes Silicon Valley scalable startups so different from traditional business models.

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Partner event: Vator Splash 2011

Vator Splash on February 3, 2011 in San Francisco will showcase 10 promising startups onstage. The founders of Pandora (possible IPO this year?) and ngmoco (sold to DeNA for $400M last fall) will be onstage giving keynotes on their lessons learned as entrepreneurs and how to build sustaining startups. Women 2.0 members save 25% off tickets with discount code "Women25" when you register here.

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Partner event: BlogHer BET 2011

Whether you're considering launching a startup or innovating from inside a company, we invite you to join BlogHer's 2011 Business, Entrepreneurism and Technology conference (March 24-25 in Silicon Valley). Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania joins 49 other amazing women role models and mentors to work with 100 entrepreneurial women. Women 2.0 members save 20% on BlogHer BET tickets with discount code "Women2" when you register here.

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