Avoiding the icebergs that can sink your startup

Husband-and-wife team Kim and Todd Saxton, both professors at the IU Kelley School of Business at IUPUI, have spent a lot of time inside and outside the classroom serving as mentors to startup founders trying to make their way through the choppy waters of entrepreneurship.

So they recently teamed up with Michael Cloran, a local entrepreneur and partner at DeveloperTown, to write a book of advice about what NOT to do when you're starting a company. The book—“The Titanic Effect: Successfully Navigating the Uncertainties that Sink Most Startups”—uses the tragedy of the Titanic as its outline, detailing some of the icebergs (which the authors call "debtbergs") that founders face in their journeys to success or sometimes failure.

Host Mason King talked to the Saxtons about the biggest problems that entrepreneurs face and how to tackle them—and they explain how they faced some of those same problems as they crafted their book.

You can learn more about one of the key problems startups face—finding a match between a product and customers—in this week's IBJ.

This episode of the IBJ Podcast is sponsored by Krieg DeVault.