Startups Weekly Feedback and Support Thread |
- Weekly Feedback and Support Thread
- I just hit some success and feel absolutely terrible and scared
- Before you take an offer, know the real financial position
- Team workation - a productivity boost for small companies
- Hit a stuck road building a B2B marketplace - please help :(
- Prototyping costs - China?
- Converting a school project to business, getting partners out.
- Your thoughts on an MBA?
- Client Organization Rewrites My Proposal From Product Development to Trailblazing. What do?
- Marketing an API-based Product
| Weekly Feedback and Support Thread Posted: 07 May 2018 04:08 AM PDT Create something? Let's see it! Feedback or Support RequesterPlease use the following format:
Post your site along with your stack and technologies used and receive feedback from the community. Please refrain from just posting a link and instead give us a bit of a background about your creation. Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, or code review. Feel free to request support with hiring talent, finding a job/clients, recruiting a co-founder, getting your pitch deck made, or anything objective based that is specific to your startup. You can also receive advice and feedback in instant chat using the /r/startups discord. Feedback Providers
Support Providers
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| I just hit some success and feel absolutely terrible and scared Posted: 07 May 2018 09:02 PM PDT Need to get this off my chest. I've been running a startup by myself for the past 6 months. A few days ago I hit an inflection point where I got featured in a major news station and now I suddenly find myself talking to reporters across major news stations. My user base tripled in the past few days, revenue is up to $5k/month and growing super fast. I went from not knowing what I'm doing to basically achieving PMF & discovering a golden fucking distribution channel. It's all so much to take in. It's a mix of extremely happiness, fear of success, and general anxiety. For some reason I feel the fear that someone is going to take everything away from me. I locked my doors, turned off all lights in my room and just covered myself in my sheets for half an hour. I didn't expect to feel like this. What I'm currently experiencing right now feels worse than the day-to-day grind. I feel like I'm going to lose everything. That somehow everything is going to come crashing down. Also there are people hating on my startup now. I'm guessing they are hating out of jealousy, but it still feels terrible. I feel a bit scared working on the product because I'm scared that whatever feature I build next will be criticized. Ben Horowitz said you have to manage your own psychology. I'm just doing a terrible job at this. I'm so excited/nervous that I'm literally shaking as I type this. Phew that felt good. Back to writing code. [link] [comments]  |
| Before you take an offer, know the real financial position Posted: 07 May 2018 10:28 AM PDT I wanted to share a bit of cautionary advice with the r/startups community - before you accept an offer with any new company/firm/startup, make sure that you know their REAL financial position... I know this is hard to gauge, but an open conversation about runway is important. It's also important to know your legal rights. My rant/backstory to this advice: I started exactly one year ago today at a new firm that was a Private Equity startup looking to use some new technology/methods to give it a competitive advantage. When I was recruited by a well-respected headhunter I was at first a bit surprised, but jumped in and did an initial interview. I was told the fundraising campaign was underway and going well (fee structure is based on assets under management model), and that there was already enough to make the firm sustainable and growing demand. They had a long deal log they were ready to execute on, they had already set up all the legal entities, had EY lined up as accountants, had a big world-class legal firm working for them, and had an endless stream of meetings with investment banks set up. I joined... and then after doing all the paper work started putting in my hours. Fast forward 6 weeks, and I was like, so, notice I haven't gotten paid yet... the response was a "sorry, we've been moving so fast on other things it must have been overlooked. 3 weeks later a partial month hits my account. I think that must have been since I started late in onboarding month. Then waited until next month... and nothing. I got another, "oops, we'll check on that..." followed by another missed month. And then I get told that they had investors pull out, and there wasn't any money at the moment. I was going to quit, but wife said stick with it, will keep something on your CV while you finish your MBA... besides they were out there trying to raise money and promised us back salary. Fast forward til now. Now owed $200k+ in back salary, the co-founders are saying that it will be at least another 6-9 months before anyone gets paid. And that is being optimistic. Looking at the accounts now, the company is so far in arrears that it would take years to recoup all the back salary owed to employees. And now I find myself a freshly minted MBA that is "working" for a zombie fund, desperate to find a job, with a giant hole in my ego as I can't get out of the endless spiral of depression from being an essentially unemployed sack of shit. So, Never, ever take their word for it. [link] [comments]  |
| Team workation - a productivity boost for small companies Posted: 08 May 2018 01:18 AM PDT Last month I was on workation with my team, and now I really think that every startup should try it at some point. We spent 5 days in Italy (in a winery!) and we actually managed to get some serious amount of work done, even though we worked only 5 hours a day. We're writers and this trip was also great for boosting our creativity and team unity. Before the trip, I was a bit skeptical if this would work. Because when you talk about travel, everyone thinks - vacation. Shockingly, during the 5 days we wrote 7 blog posts on 7 different topics, each 2000 words long (in comparison, each of us usually writes 1-2 articles per week, working 8 hours a day!) Organizing a workation is very easy with a smaller company like our team of four. We simply found cheap tickets a few months ahead and booked 5 days on our busy agendas. However, I believe that bigger teams could do it too. Here's why we succeeded:
I wrote an article about our experience, if you're interested in reading more - here it is: https://medium.com/@Truesix/how-we-wrote-49-pages-in-5-days-tips-and-tricks-from-our-workation-in-tuscany-2628361d0e0c [link] [comments]  |
| Hit a stuck road building a B2B marketplace - please help :( Posted: 07 May 2018 08:02 PM PDT Hello guys, We spent 4 months building a b2b marketplace with in-app chat (works like slack with addons and all that) - and specific tools to negotiate (like custom specs form, spreadsheet-like quotes comparison etc). From our own experience managing a store on alibaba (gold supplier), we think that alibaba is too complicated/expensive to use and very biased towards chinese suppliers so we want to build a modern site for underserved manufacturers overseas (like south east asia, eastern europe, americas, africa). However we hit a stuck road since our launch a month ago because it seems like being compared to alibaba makes nobody want to try out, let alone paying. Sum up:
Do you guys think there is a need for a better B2B marketplace (esp. those buying and selling to businesses, either within )? Please help us have some insights on your experience with alibaba and how can we fix it? Thanks!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2018 04:10 PM PDT Hey all! Working on an idea of mine, and I'm spending some time researching where to get it mocked up and get the first few units made. It's a very simple part once the mold is made, it's basically just two pieces of silicone that connect with holes in it. This is pretty much what it is. How should I go about finding a factory? What kind of minimum order am I looking at, and about what would they charge me for the initial tooling and mold making? All the info I'm finding has been for much more complicated products or electronics. Thanks guys! [link] [comments]  |
| Converting a school project to business, getting partners out. Posted: 07 May 2018 03:37 PM PDT Hi, using a throwaway because I have identifying information on my main account. I started a group project with 3 other people as part of an entrepreneurship class at my university. We had to build an MVP, write a business plan, and participate in a business plan competition. We got to the finals but didn't win any money. Right now, the only value we have is our business plan, MVP (about 120 hours of work, cumulatively), and some presentation materials. 2 of us have put 99% of the work towards this project, as with many other group projects, but I know technically right now we're in a general partnership. Both of the contributing team members want to continue with the project. One of the minimally contributing team members does want to continue with it and the other does not. We have a chance at getting a non-dilutive grant ~$1,000 in the next 24 hours that the two minimally participating team members do not know about. How do we get the fourth team member out and how do we manage the third team member who still wants to be a part of the project? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2018 05:13 PM PDT I'm sure there been a few of these posts. I'm 28 years old and have been working in a recruitment agency environment for 5 years now. I plan on running my own agency but want to act more of a consultancy than just a pure recruitment agency. I want to guide clients on proper HR processes while helping them hire internally and training them on how to use software, best practices for recruitment, and onboard training. I want to properly learn how to create roadmaps, slick presentations, brand management, etc etc. In my mind an MBA is to show and earn credibility/respect from future clients. I absolutely hate feeling like a resume slinger. My concern is that my GPA in university wasn't the best and not fond of investing in 50k worth of tuition to risk mediocrity. Do you guys have suggestions or recommendations on better avenues for having the basic fundamentals of having this type of start up? I'd love personal experiences as well. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Client Organization Rewrites My Proposal From Product Development to Trailblazing. What do? Posted: 07 May 2018 08:27 AM PDT To keep from being bogged down in the details, I'll give the abridged version of my problem The non-profit that I've worked with for the past one and a half year asked me half a year ago to make me a business proposal for €4.500. We discussed this proposal back and forth for about 5 months, with the understanding that it'd be signed into a contract last month. However, the new department wants to make a few changes. The problem is that she's asked that she gets to rewrite the proposal rather than me and while the business activities are supposed to stay identical, the description will shift from product development to me trailblazing their implementation process. The idea is that, by adopting my innovation, they get a good look at how innovations get implemented from the top down and they know exactly what to do next they want to implement another innovation. That is the ultimate value of my business activities with them. While I am happy that they are giving the product such high hopes that it is supposed to reinvent the character of their organization as being an innovator in the field, I am worried that this new description would set the expectation that the proposal accounts for all of the costs of the entire project. The proposal was simply to get me operational and having the stock of physical components ready for them to implement in their company. I am worried that their proposal is going to suggest that I've been paid ahead for hours worked for the implementation. Not intentionally, but unintentionally setting their own expectations that this is just a one-time payment where it was previously clear that there'd be multiple payments. TL;DR
Is this normal? This is my first client. [link] [comments]  |
| Marketing an API-based Product Posted: 07 May 2018 02:06 PM PDT The core product of my start up is a RESTful API, which can be integrated into websites and offer add-ons to existing purchases. There is no app, and no consumer-facing website. We are having trouble with the sales pitch, both to potential customers (the websites which would integrate with us) and investors. Because we can only show the service running in other websites, the product seems abstract to the audience, and they have trouble grasping what exactly "it" is. This is compounded by the fact that the non-technical members of the companies often don't understand what a REST API is, how their site can integrate with third parties, etc. I should say that once they see the product in action, they are interested and we are closing deals - communicating the "how" is much more difficult than the "why". Has anyone dealt with marketing a product like this before? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
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