Blog

NetWork Kansas, which connects startups and existing businesses with a statewide network of resources, celebrated its 12th anniversary this month by introducing the “KSeship” mobile application. The app, developed by Clutch Studio in Wichita, was designed to simplify access to three types of resources that entrepreneurs and businesses may need at some point in their business lifecycle.

By: Valyn Reinig | December 2, 2014 --- If you’re not a photographer, or don’t have that extra cash laying around to purchase high quality stock images, you might have some difficulty finding the perfect image to use for your website, social media post, or that flyer you’re getting ready to send out to your clients. But here’s the good news; there are tons of ways to find great royalty free photos online, and I’ve compiled a list for you here:

By Maria Brown | October 30 --- GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving recently shared insights in his commentary in Fortune.comthat entrepreneurs in the tech space may find useful: “Women purchase, and make purchasing decisions, for more than 50% of technology items in the marketplace. Understanding how

By Anne Dewvall | October 15, 2014 Cottage industries have existed for thousands of years. Ordinary people sell goods and services on a small scale to supplement their income. Once this may have looked like selling eggs, mending fences, or sewing quilts. It doesn’t look all that different today.

By Sarah Mote | May 1, 2014 --- I’ve invested in a lot of Kansas City-based early-stage ventures. One of the first companies I invested in raised a quarter of a million dollars to take advantage of a purchase order that would ultimately make them millionaires over the course of five years. Without getting into intricacies of the business, the product they were selling was marketed to youth soccer players. We spent months coming up with ideas, whiteboarding strategies and building a roadmap.

By Aaron Harris | Apr 03, 2014 --- Microsoft Excel is a tool that’s used quite frequently in business. Often times as a business person or entrepreneur you have to use Excel to support a point you’re trying to make. Whether it be getting investors to buy into your idea or getting your manager to release more funds to a project you think will be successful, Excel can help support your points with visual aids. Most people think Excel charts are boring; they usually are pretty bland visual presentations of data. In a blog post for Hubspot, Ginny Soskey gives her 7 tips to spruce up ugly Excel graphs.

The SBA offers a really nifty tool to benchmark your business against others in your area, identify competitors and plan your advertising. SizeUp can also help you map customers and suppliers.

Coding is a term that is tossed around a lot these days. What exactly is coding? For most of us, it is somewhat intimidating, probably because we aren’t exactly sure what all the word entails. We know it is important, has something to do with computers and that we can’t do it. Coding is defined as the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging / troubleshooting, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. Which sounds hard and it very well can be, but thanks to the internet and all the awesome, available resources out there, non-coders can now teach themselves at least the basics of this increasingly critical skill.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article describing various social media tools, and their success rates as described by poll respondents. Many times small business owners feel pressured into diving into the web world, and particularly, into social media marketing. The question is, where to begin when your time is already stretched so thin?