Startups What form of financing did your startup raise capital? |
- What form of financing did your startup raise capital?
- Candid chat & coffee with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor ☕
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| What form of financing did your startup raise capital? Posted: 29 May 2018 08:45 PM PDT Hello everybody. Hope all is well. I am trying to learn more about the startup world and have a few questions for everybody on this forum... 1)When you went out to raise money for your startup, what form of financing was it and why? 2)What are the pros/cons to your choice and looking back, would you have done anything different? 3)I'm interested to know the most typical ways investors and VC's structure their investment in companies. I am familiar with all the different options such as convertible debt/equity and SAFEs yet curious why founders chose one versus the other. 4)Also, how common is it for startups to receive debt funding? 5)If anyone can share their experiences raising money for each round and give us insight to the thought process of investors when drafting a term sheet and what clauses they like to see in the contract. Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Candid chat & coffee with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor ☕ Posted: 29 May 2018 09:39 AM PDT Want to pick the brains of the guy behind Intercom's marketing and product? Or just join in for some straight founder talk? I had a chat over coffee with Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, the unicorn messaging company. Join us 👇 --- Prefer listening over reading? Link to the podcast is in the original post. Just scroll to the bottom. --- Jeroen: Hi Des, it's great to have you on Founder Coffee. Des: Hey! It's so cool to be here, thank you. Jeroen: Firstly, congratulations on your recent round of 125 million again. Des: Thank you very much. It's always weird to take congratulations specifically for raising money. At the end of the day, it's actually a financial event. But I think it's always indicative of some progress the company's making. So I guess I'll take the congratulations. Jeroen: Well, you're officially like a unicorn now. So you must celebrate this milestone or is this something that you don't do at Intercom? Des: I think we get much more excited to celebrate things like any sort of significant progress the product might make. Like for instance, a certain customer engagement or growth metric. The evaluation of the company is a proxy for a lot of other things. The thing that we really get excited about, is the product. You'll see a lot more enthusiasm this year when we release some great features or when a product release hits some sort of usage that we're really happy about. I think that's the stuff that we've always focused on. We know that the evaluations and all that, it all is the trailing indicator of like greater work that's happening. Jeroen: That makes sense. How long has Intercom been out there? Des: We incorporated in August 2011. So we'll be 7 years old in August. Jeroen: Seven years. For those who missed all your work in the last 7 years, what do you guys exactly do? Des: We help businesses talk to customers and customers talk to businesses. We're like a customer messaging platform. If you're an internet business with a lot of customers that you'd like to speak with or want to make it easier for them to contact you, Intercom is the tool. You've probably already used it somewhere. Jeroen: Actually, we use Intercom at Salesflare to manage everything from the onboarding of our customers with automated emails to follow-ups with automated chat messages. The whole inbox has conversations assigned to the team. In fact, we're also using the help pages. We're using the whole product, from the beginning to the end. Des: That's awesome. So you literally use everything we make. Jeroen: All the products, yes. Maybe not all to their fullest extent though. I'm sure I am missing some things. Des: We need to do better there. We want to make it easier for people to get as much value as possible — as quickly as possible. Jeroen: Your product is super simple when you first start using it, but it still has a lot of depth. How do you deal with that? Des: It's a real tricky one for us because as you grow your product, it becomes more powerful. But I've come to the conclusion that another word for powerful is, complex. We can't hit you with all the power upfront. If the first step in your Intercom onboarding is, create a messaging campaign for longitudinal communications with your entire user base, it will genuinely confuse you. You'll never get past that step. So we try to keep some sort of a flow here. The first few steps should be simple and they should demonstrate the product value early. We know that to realize the full potential, you have to actually embrace the product and get more from it. You have to commit more time to it. When you're generally designing an onboarding program, you should try to find things that are basically quick. By quick, I really mean in software there's two things that take time. There's what I call the 'task time'. Let's say if it's an email client. Then the task time is when you're actually writing the email. You're thinking about what you want to say and who needs to hear it. Then, there's 'tool time'. Tool time is when you're clicking 'compose' and you're entering your recipients and stuff like that. There are two different ways to think about it. I think something can be easy to do, but can still take a long, long time to complete. Lets say for example, writing an article on Medium. It's a very easy thing to do, but if Medium's first step is to write an article right away, you might spend the next six hours stuck on that step. Right? Jeroen: Yep. Des: And it's nothing to do with the UI (user interface). I think when you're trying to design the onboarding, you have to look for things that are both quick to do, but also don't have a significant amount of task time either. It kind of rules out things like designing an onboarding campaign. It might be as simple as, 'let's configure the first message you say to people on your website'. It's a single message, it should be two sentences or less. That's something that people can do quick enough and it'll probably start showing value within the same day or within the same hour if you have a busy website. That's kind of what we try to force people to do. As a result, it creates this impression of us being really simple to use. Simple is good, but we don't want to be just that. Simple is good at one end of the market. But at some point, people don't want simplicity. They want power; in fact, they need it. It's rare that you can see simplicity and power in the same product. Usually when that is the case, something else is being hidden somewhere else. Jeroen: Exactly, that's what I was aiming at. It seems like you not only make the time to help a user complete a task, but also focus on unbundling the power of Intercom product by product. It's like focusing on one thing first and then moving ahead. Is that something you consciously put in your strategy? Des: It was a conscious thing. I guess when we first launched Intercom, it was just one thing. I think it made sense when our customers were typically very small start-ups. The trace, that's interesting is that in various small startups, everyone is doing everything. If you're selling a project management tool, your developer might also be your product manager and might also be your graphic designer or even the CEO. They could all be the same person. On the customer facing side of Intercom, we found out from our initial customers that the same person who does marketing at a company could also be handling support. They might also be the CEO and the product manager at the same time. As a result, selling this one simple solution that does everything actually made a lot of sense. Now, however, as companies grow up, what happens is that the initial founding team grows into a set of teams. You might have a marketing team, a support team, a sales team and a product team. It's now that they all start looking for their own tools. When we realized this was happening, we decided to break the product into pieces where we could tailor every solution to match the exact target recipient. What was interesting about that was that it worked in both ways. It increased our conversion rate because now if you're the head of customer support for a start-up and you discover our support tool, we're not trying to sell you our marketing software. We're just talking to you about support. When you go to sign up, we just ask you to sign up for customer support. We're not going to tell you, "For your first step, let's create a visitor auto message on your marketing side." We're not saying that, because that's not relevant to support. Breaking the product up a bit, lets us tailor what it is that we need to do for each of our target buyers. Right from their onboarding to all the engagement and retention emails they'll receive, we stick to the specific use case only. Which means that we can sell support to support people and sell marketing to marketers, without confusing either person. You know what I mean? Jeroen: Yeah, I know what you mean. I guess it must be good on all fronts. It must be good on the ads you run and must definitely be good on the onboarding side. It's also kind of a land and expand strategy. You land in one department and expand to the whole company. Is that what this strategy is doing for you? Des: I guess it has done a lot of things. Giving us clarity in marketing and the product positioning, have been the biggest of course. It is also true that sometimes users sign up for the 'onboard and engage' part of Intercom, then go on to explore the other things they might see. Their 'well, this looks cool', gives us an opportunity to offer them an upgrade and purchase another solution if they need it. It does make the 'land and expand' easier, because we have a specific offering for each person. Obviously, it means that they start adopting more of the software and then move on to making rational purchase considerations. Des: The old world had this problem. People felt that if they were from customer support, they couldn't adopt Intercom without talking to the marketers, because there's bits of marketing in there. Whereas when we isolated those concerns, apparently it made those conversations, I think, a lot easier. Jeroen: When you started off with Intercom, which product did you actually start off with? Because I suppose you didn't start off with the whole thing in mind. Des: We kind of did, but I guess we have to take a step back and say, "We built Intercom to solve a problem that we had with our previous internet business." That problem was, that we had thousands of users and thousands of paying customers as well. They were geographically all over the world, paying us all sorts of different amounts. Some of them were on trial, some of them were paying, some of them had quit. We had no good way to understand what our user base was at any given point of time. Now, you have to bear in mind, when we started in 2011, Stripe wasn't a thing. So everyone used PayPal for recurring subscriptions, as a way to manage their customer accounts. There obviously was no tool like Intercom. It wasn't possible to do things like, show me all the users who haven't created a lead or who haven't opened a project yet. The idea that you could, sort of, interrogate your user base based on what activities they have or haven't taken was just not popular. Mixed File didn't have it, Kissmetrics didn't have it. None of the tools of that era had it at all. So we started building a tool that would let us see and talk to specific customers with our user base. One day, that might be something like, let's talk to all our paying customers. Another day, it might be, let's talk to people who haven't yet used a certain feature. We started building this tool, with a simple goal to see, talk and listen to customers. That was all they really cared about. That was what Intercom became and it got really popular then. The initial idea, you could argue maybe was all of it. It was this reliable dated CRM that included messaging tools and a shared inbox. What happened as we grew up, was that we got more focused. We realized, "Oh, shit. If there's going to be 25 people on a support team, managing thousands of customer conversations, we better design a UI that makes that possible." Similarly, we realized that people are going to be trying to sell through Intercom, schedule meetings through it or ask customers specific questions. So we just had to make that easy to do. So we launched things like our Google caller integration, the Operator Bot and others. Des: We started off with this big idea. Then we just had to add specificity to specific work flows along the way to make it more powerful and faster to adopt. Jeroen: What is your background exactly? What is the story before Intercom and how did you get there? Des: Well, I studied computer science originally. Then I started a PhD to learn why are we so bad at teaching people how to program. I dropped out of that PhD to become a user experience designer. I did two years of user experience design before I met Owen, who is the CEO of Intercom. Then we ended up starting a consultancy together, where we would design and build web apps for clients. As part of doing that, we had a side project called Exceptional, which was a error-tracking tool for Ruby on Rails developers. That was the tool, if you recall a couple of minutes ago, when I was saying, "We had this product that had thousands of users, we had no easy way to communicate with them." It was within Exceptional that we first felt this pain of managing a user base and speaking to a specific customer segment. That was what ultimately led to the birth of intercom. Jeroen: You have quite a broad background. Going back from computer science to usability, looking at education in a certain way to becoming a consultant and launching products, and then dropping everything to focus on one. Des: Yeah, that's about right. Jeroen: You are based in Dublin, right? Des: That's right, yeah. Jeroen: How much of Intercom is still in Dublin today? Des: I think that we're maybe 220 people or something in Dublin today. We're 470 worldwide, so there is still a very substantial part of the team here. We have five offices basically and our intention is to grow all of them. I don't anticipate anything changing in terms of Dublin's presence for the next few years. Jeroen: It's about half your entire team right now. Is it going to stay that way or are you growing the team? Des: We'll see. It depends on a lot of things actually. What I would say, is almost all of our R&D, for the last four or five years, has been based in Dublin. Over the last year, we opened an R&D office in San Francisco and then one in London. We'll see what are the needs of the businesses there and decide what teams really need to grow and which ones will remain the same. That will actually dictate how the future headcount gets distributed. Jeroen: What is it exactly that you do at Intercom? I remember the last time we spoke, you were on marketing and moving back a bit to the product side. Is that still the plan? Des: Yes, exactly. Jeroen: Starting to finish up in marketing and moving fully back to product. What are the reasons for that? Des: I think it's because we have brought on more senior talent to the marketing team. Two years ago, we welcomed LB, who is our VP of sales for instance. She has transformed a lot of how we think about going to the market. Then recently, about an year ago, we brought on Karen Peacock, who's the COO. She again, I say, comes with a wealth of experience that we just never had. As we've gotten more senior talent on how we sell and market Intercom, my role there had reduced to giving people contacts, letting people know why things are the way they are and what stuff should change. It was more about being able to provide them with valuable information. Ultimately, I think I started off on the product side of Intercom. I think that's probably still where most of my best abilities lie. I think it makes sense for me to rejoin the product team, given the amount of software we intend to ship in the coming years. Jeroen: The product side is more of your passion. Right? Des: Yeah, for sure. Jeroen: What are the high-level plans you have in the next few years? What can you share there? Des: I'd say we want Intercom to power conversations between every internet business and customer. Every type of internet business means that we have to think about the different verticals that we need to trade in. Everything from iPhone apps to games, e-commerce — you name it. B2B subscriptions, software subscription businesses, etcetera. Every conversation means, today we do sales, marketing and support conversations, but they're obviously not the only conversations that people have. We're looking at different people from across the world. It means things like localization. We need to make sure that we work in all languages for all the people, in all possible ways. The best way to predict how Intercom will behave is if something can help make business — people conversations easier in some way, we'll need to do that at some point. We obviously have a specific order, a defined ethos and philosophy as to why we do things the way we do them. But I think that our plan is pretty simple beyond that. So basically with the money you raise, you can expand geographies, expand product use cases and the sectors that it can cater to. We touched on a few bits and pieces about what else we're planning to do, in our funding blog post. Jeroen: If I remember it right, those are more technical things. Like building walls around AI, etcetera? Des: Yep, there's a lot on that side for sure. Jeroen: So you are going to lead these things now, for the next few years? Des: Yeah, that is the plan. As I said, we raised a lot of money to build a lot of product and obviously it won't be just me leading it. There's a whole heap of people in Intercom. Paul Adams, Ann Montgomery, Lewis Bennett, Darragh Curran, there's a lot of us who are responsible for significant portions of the company's future, as it relates to R&D. That's basically what we've been working on. For the longest time. Jeroen: How does a typical day look for you? Apart from this, of course. Des: In practice, I guess I start slightly late because I'm in Dublin and I want to overlap with San Francisco. I start at around 10:30–11:00 in the morning so that I can finish by 7:30–8:00 in the evening. First half of the day is usually one-to-ones with anyone who I report to or anyone that I'm working with. Then, it's email. Just dealing with anything that came up overnight or any sort of long-standing projects. From there, I usually take two to three hours each day, if possible, to work on any personal tasks that I have. As in personal for Intercom. If there's something I'm working on — be it a new angle for a product or a new idea for a feature, a new talk or a new narrative around why we're building something the way we're building it. I try and get that in before San Francisco wakes up, which is usually around 3:00- 3:30 pm our time. From that point onwards, it's usually syncing with my counterparts on the go-to market side of the business. Whether that's our VP of Sales, our COO, Head of Marketing, etc. It's connecting with all them, to make sure that we're all on the same page. Once a week, I'd have a pretty in-depth chat with our CEO Owen, where I go through everything that's at the top of my mind and vice versa. We see if there's any way we can help each other or any contacts that we need to share. Jeroen: A lot of your time is spent on communication and management, and then part of your time is still spent on actually doing operational things. Or building things? Des: Well, let's just call it individual contribution? I think that's necessary. I think if your entire day is just about forwarding emails from one group to another, it's the sign of a messy organization. It also means that you will inevitably end up not using the skills that you probably, more uniquely have. We need to carve out time to do specific things. I would say it's not always working on new Intercom activities. It could be something more typical like analysing performance. Talking of performance, now it's just gathering peer feedback on certain people, working out the future or the organizational design for R&D or the product itself. It could be any of those sort of things. That's also a part of growing Intecom. It may be less exciting to a lot of listeners, but this too needs to be done. Jeroen: You keep a bit of, let's say, passion in the job, by still doing actual things. Des: I'd say passion and relevance, if you know what I mean. Jeroen: Yeah. Des: One fear I have for people who turn into long-term advisors, consultants or just bloggers, is that, I think if you're not actually practicing the material, it's very easy to come up with really interesting ideas that have no bearing on reality because you never tested them. All you ever do is write pieces or give talks about them. Again, I'm very wary of not becoming that sort of person. So I think it's actually good to be frequently involved in doing things. Jeroen: You mentioned blogging. I know in the beginning you spent a lot of time on blogging? Do you still do that? Des: No. I wish I could and I do need to get back to it. But right now, I'm averaging maybe three pieces a year. I still do a bit of conference speaking because it's easier to do in some senses. The nice thing about a conference is that it gives you a sense of a ticking clock. You have to go on stage on April 23rd and give this talk, and then you're done. Whereas blog posts don't usually have that. I still make time for it and often what happens is that whatever I present at a conference, turns into a blog post. That's usually the way it happens. Jeroen: So every time you are at a conference, you tell a different story? Des: Yeah, it depends. Sometimes I'll tell the same story if the crowd's totally different. Jeroen: But if you turn it into a blog post each time, I guess you cannot do the exact same thing a few times? Des: Yes, that's true and I try not being repetitive at all. It has to be about adding value. Jeroen: You mentioned getting to work at 10:30. Correct? Des: Yep. Jeroen: What do you do before that? Des: I usually exercise if possible. I'll go to the gym or I'll have breakfast and go for a jog or something like that. Something to wake myself up. Jeroen: What about evenings? Des: It's basically dinner and family time. Jeroen: Are there any other things you do to stay productive? You've been at Intercom for seven years and it must be sort of draining. So how do you keep up with it all? Des: The first few years were definitely a drain. They were probably the ones where you don't realize it at the time, but I think you sacrifice yourself more physically than you would have first realized. The reality is, hard work is necessary to run a startup. I think a lot of people have created a movement against this idea, but I think it is important. It's not necessary to follow the same routine once you're past a certain stage, where you have traction, and you're up and running. At that point you just need to start thinking about the longer term. As in, how can I design an organization and a role where I'd be happy to spend the next 10 years of my life. I think there's a weird thing that has gotten into the tech industry — a bad rapport for hard work. I will readily admit I worked 8, 10 and then 12 hours a day all the time in 2011, 2012 and 2013. I think all of the founders did. That was what it took. I can't imagine a world where we weren't doing it. If I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to do a seminar for two customers in India, I would do it. They would sign up and they would pay. The same people who say, "Surely you don't have to work so hard", are also the ones wanting me to appear on a podcast to share how we got our first 100 customers. I'm like, "You have to fucking work." There was genuinely a period, I don't want to sound like I regret it, but there was a period where we had to work really hard. As a result of which, a lot of things fell by the wayside to make that happen. I was traveling all the time, either to be in San Francisco or to go to events and let people know what Intercom was and talk about it anywhere they would let me. I think all of that was necessary. But at the same time, my own health probably suffered a bit during that period. I definitely wasn't as fit as I could've been. I definitely wasn't eating as well as I could have been or whatever. I've certainly clawed all of that back and I feel like I'm very happy where I'm at right now. But I think, your point about health or how do you keep up with things, I think it is important to take care of it all. Honestly, I think one can't do it all. You have to obsess about working hard from day one of your startup. Most startups fail because they're trying to optimize a perfect day at work, focusing too much on the work-life balance from day one. It's like you're trying to solve the wrong problem first. It's important to have a company that needs you and then work out what you're willing to give up for it. You need to basically learn what are all the various things that need doing, do them all, understand them all, then get them all up and running. If you talk to folks who have had similar success as that of Intercom, I think they'll say a similar thing. I admit and totally acknowledge that there is also a world out there where you take things a lot slower and still achieve similar outcomes. Or reach these goals over a longer period of time like five to ten years. That's the long, slow ramp. I think you can do that and that's a valid approach too. It's just I think you need to pick one of those two lanes. Are you happy to make a million over the next seven years or do you want to make it in the first two years? These are the sort of trade offs you need to make in terms of what sort of growth trajectory you want for your company. That has implications for whether you should raise money or not too? If so, how much should you raise? What sort of people should you hire? All that sort of stuff. There's a lot to think about in terms of the type of company you want to set up early on. My advice there, is to know that hard work is going to help you in either case. But for sure if you're planning for things to blow-up quickly, you need to really put the arrows in. And I'm yet to see anyone who's avoided that. Jeroen: I think you mentioned spending 10 hours a day at work? For the trajectory you guys took, that's not too bad. I think your trajectory was from zero to one, five, 20 and then 50 million. Right? Des: That's correct, yeah. I'm probably underselling it at times. Like when I say 10 hours a day, I guess what I mean is 'in the office' hours. I'm not counting the hours where I was at shitty airports or hotel rooms, away from my family and friends. I know I could make it sound more dramatic, if I wanted to. Jeroen: You're right. I would say, I think it is all about working hard for that period of time to really grow your business. Jeroen: Just for the listeners, when did you make the switch between putting a lot of time at work and then stepping back a little to focus on your health? Des: I think it's when you realize that the raw momentum of the business is sufficient to maintain at. For instance, if we all don't show up to work tomorrow, people are still signing up on Intercom and they're still getting the support they need. They're still clicking the ads we're running and interacting with our business. . I think that's when you realize that you can afford to take a step back and hire senior people to handle substantial parts of the business. It's the moment when you realize that the company is going to be around next year. When you start off, you don't know if you're going to have a second month. I'm sure it was probably the same for Salesflare too. For us it was no different. In our first year, we damn sure didn't presume that there would be two years of Intercom. We thought that our best might be one year of Intercom. It was never this 'guaranteed win'. Now I think we can afford to think slightly long term. You think, "Well, I was 30 when we started Intercom." If I'm still going to be in Intercom when I'm 45 or 50, what will really support that or will make that hard? Then you realize that if you still have to work just as hard as you did when you were 30, when you're 40, you start thinking, "Well Jesus. Would I really have time to have a life, to have a family?" So you start to sort of realize that if the right thing for the company is to have you, then you need to prioritize both you and the company. It doesn't work if it doesn't work for the both of you. So that means hiring people to help lead functions that you're not sure what you're doing with. It means that you need to start getting the right people around you. Then I think you have a chance at balance. You know? Jeroen: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Slowly wrapping up, what's the latest good book you've read and why did you choose to read it? Des: These days, I'm reading through Blinkist a lot. Jeroen: It's the book summaries, right? Des: Yeah, it's the book summaries because I read a lot of business books. Most people I know, who read business books, usually read the first six chapters to get the main idea. The following eight chapters generally tend to be just case studies or repetition of the same points. I think Blinkist is wonderful, because it skips through all that. It doesn't lose the key ideas contained within a book, it just spares you of a lot of the hundreds of pages of fillers that the book industry feels the need to push for. As a result, I haven't actually read many sharp business books over the last while. But I've read dozens through Blinkist. Probably the most recent one I read is, Sources of Power. Let me think. No, I'm totally getting the name wrong here. Let me try one quick Google search and see if I can get it. It's a business analysis book about the sources of how businesses gain power. Yeah, it's by a guy called Hamilton Helmer and the book is called called the 7 Powers. The foundations of business strategy. That's probably the last book that I read cover to cover, that was businessy and quite good. I used to read a lot of crime fiction too. But that's mostly just stuff to do on holidays. Jeroen: Why did you choose to read this book about the seven sources of power for businesses? Des: Because two of my friends, whose opinions I value a lot, have both said it was a pretty strong book. They both recommended it to me because it uses a lot of business frameworks for analyzing problems and dynamics in the market landscape. They were right. As I read through it, I was like, "Shit. This is really good." So that's why I read it. Jeroen: Cool. Finally, if you were to start over with Intercom, what would you have done differently? Des: If I was to start over knowing what I know now, I think there's a lot of early mistakes that I had made that we wouldn't have. But a lot of those mistakes tend to be tactical. I guess, the best way I'll explain it is, I think we were very strong on product at the very start and every other function. We made many mistakes. If there was a general point, maybe I certainly, for my own part, I could've learned to understand more about what goes into every other business function. Be it sales, finance, analytics, marketing, customer support — you name it. Everything that's not product basically, is something where I think, I at the very least, made mistakes early on. Maybe through talking to people, through learning more about how other companies succeeded, through working with mentors, or just I don't know, reading more books or whatever, I think I could've learnt a bit more early on, which would have helped us. It could have maybe helped make the right hires early on, maybe choose the right tactics early on. The lesson I learnt is that when you're running a business, you're probably going to be a bit weak in some areas and you don't necessarily need to know what you're doing. Don't use the confidence of your strength in one area to assume you're going to be really good at all the other functions. Be open to the idea that you might need to learn a lot about something before you even try it. If you're a product team looking to set up a marketing team or a sales team and support team, there are people out there who are quite good at this stuff. You should try and meet them, learn from them, understand what makes them tick. Learn how to spot a good person from a bad person. Learn how to spot a good team from a bad team. Only then should you really go deep into trying to make this new initiative work. Rather than going at it from the other side and being opportunistic or assuming that there's not a lot to it and you can work it all out yourself. Jeroen: So you're saying that one should be more open to talking to others and learning from them? Des: Specifically where it relates to areas that you're exploring for the first time. Jeroen: Cool. I hope this podcast can bring a bit of that to people. Des: Hopefully so. Jeroen: Thanks again, Des, for being on Founder Coffee. I'll even send you over a very nice little package of Founder Coffee in the next few weeks. Des: Oh, you're very kind. Thank you very much. Jeroen: Thank you for being on. I'll see you soon. Des: Take care. Good bye. --- This post originally appeared on the Salesflare blog. [link] [comments]  |
| How to attract investing money? Posted: 29 May 2018 01:30 PM PDT Hello all, I have my own brand in an industry I don't want to mention 😊. But it has to do with physical products. I've invested about 12k already but I need more. Way more. I need something like 125k But I don't know where to start. I think going to the bank is my last resort. What is your experience with investors? How did you get extra money? (Crowdfunding is not really possible with my product) And what are the risks? Will I be held accountable with my private money and goods? I can get money from family but that's not enough, that will also be another 10k probably. I'm from Europe so it might be a little different here. But I'd still love to hear your stories and advice! Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Registering non-profit/NGO in the states based of original in Africa Posted: 29 May 2018 10:06 PM PDT Hey guys, so a few months ago I travelled to Madagascar through a volunteering program based on organic farming. The whole site was like a medium for organic farmers to link with volunteers, which providing a kind of exchange, where volunteers can work for food/sleep. So you just pay your ticket, fly off to wherever for however long, and get to work some hours a day and experience the lifestyle. So I did that in Madagascar for 3 months, and lucky me that my hosts actually have their own non-profit going on there centered around farming/healing/and basically a selective attraction site once it's all built up. I guess I was chill enough that they brought me into the family. It was great experiencing life there, really opened my eyes and I got a chance to see how things went down business wise in a 3rd world country (hilarious at times). Anyway, story time over. We got the non-profit there, and there's a whole bunch of spices/herbs (legal)/ and others foods/items we've got that's really exclusive considering only Madagascar has it, and so what I want to do is establish that non-profit here in the states and also set it up in a way that we can import. But..there's so just much info out there that I'm not quite sure how to go about this. What's the best type of non-profit to set up for trade? Any help? Would be a blessing for someone to help me out. I'm completely new to this [link] [comments]  |
| Secrets behind the most successful app launches Posted: 29 May 2018 08:03 AM PDT Some people think that success comes from hard work. Others think it comes from luck. When it comes to creating a successful app, you need something more than hard work and luck. You need an edge which makes your startup app stand out from all the other ones on the market. The first thing you need to worry about is developing an application which has demand and can be useful to people. This is one of the main success factors app needs to take off. You will know if you have accomplished this after you launch a beta version and allow people to test it out. Based on their feedback from using your app, you will know what works and what doesn't. But even that is not enough for your app to skyrocket most of the time. Read below about most successful app launches to find out what helped the most popular mobile applications get to almost every smartphone on Earth. INSTAGRAM: INVITED INFLUENCERS Kevin Systrom, who is the founder of Instagram, has one of the most successful app launches. He allowed the company's MVP app to be reviewed by technology influencers in the industry. One such influencer included Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey. As soon as Dorsey started using the app, he was already sending pictures to his followers on Twitter. It didn't take long for the word-of-mouth to spread about the app. TechCrunch also featured two articles about the app, one prior to the app's official launch date and another on the same day when the app was launched. Needless to say, his provided even more word-of-mouth traffic for the app. Within 24 hours of the launch, there were 25,000 users on Instagram. By week 3, there were 300,000 Instagram users. This number just kept growing until there were tens of millions of users. Important move that made Instagram release one of the most successful app launches was doing it immediately after the iPhone 4 release date. Since the iPhone 4 featured an enhanced camera and screen, this became the perfect combination for to make Instagram a popular app. Another thing that helped Instagram was how they made their app capable of sending pictures to popular social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This meant the pictures weren't locked into the app. The speed of the app is really important for app users. That's why for the Instagram wanted to speed up uploading of the pictures. So they made the pictures start uploading immediately after they are taken. The size of the pictures was kept small too. SNAPCHAT: CREATED EXCITEMENT IN THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE Snapchat release definitely holds a place at "the most successful app launches" chart. The original founders of Snapchat first drew attention to their app at Stanford University. They told some of their college buddies there about the app which got it some attention. However, it didn't gain national popularity until high schoolers started discovering the app. Very fast this startup app became super popular messaging app amongst teenagers. There was someone who attributed the steady growth of Snapchat to the group messaging feature that it has. Instead of just sending an individual message to someone, a user can send something called a "snap" to several people at once. It is basically like sending messages to a group of people at once. The only difference is that snaps create a personal feeling in the recipients which you cannot achieve through regular mass messaging. This one is a big success factor app has. Most Snapchat users feel comfortable sending snaps because as soon as the recipients open them, they will vanish within a few seconds. This means all their personal messages will not get saved to some history log on the Internet. EVERNOTE: ATTRACTED ATTENTION FROM THE PRESS What makes the release of Evernote one of the most successful app launches? When Phil Libin was interviewed about the growth of Evernote, he credited the original press coverage of its closed beta app as the reason. Evernote went on to having millions of users within a couple of years. The closed beta was what ultimately led to this growth. After just a couple of days from its initial press coverage, thousands of people signed up for Evernote's closed beta. Not only that, the first groups of users told their friends and family about it too. This gave the closed beta a lot of word-of-mouth traffic. Evernote developed a marketing strategy during its first few years which involved having an app available for every platform and device on the market. In other words, if a new tablet or mobile phone came out, Evernote would have an app already available which was compatible with it right from the beginning. This made it easier for Evernote to dominate their competition and get their apps seen by virtually all mobile users. CLEAR: KEPT IT SIMPLE AND UNIQUE The Clear app was designed very uniquely when it was first conceived. This "to-do list" app contains no buttons because it was designed to be simple to use. Compare this with other to-do-list apps which have lots of buttons and other complicated functions that are difficult to figure out. Since the Clear app was easy to figure out and use, people quickly began to love it. That way, people that want to make a simple to-do list on their mobile device can do so without the hassle. The Clear app's founders had a marketing strategy which involved getting coverage from technology blogs. They would release teaser videos and previews of their app prior to it being released. Then, after the app did launch, about 350,000 copies of it were sold in just 9 days. Certain members of the press were invited to try out the beta version of the app and then give their feedback on it. Clear was first introduced in January of 2012 at the MacWorld event. The founders uploaded a video demo of the app onto Vimeo and it was viewed over 814,000 times. This helped create a lot of gossip and interest in the app prior to its February 2012 launch date. CAMERA+: USED SOCIAL MEDIA AGGRESSIVELY The last app in our "the most successful app launches" list. The Camera+ app's founders announced their release through popular social media platforms. These are social media platforms which are compatible with the app. For example, if a user took a picture with Camera+, they could email the picture or share it on Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. At the time, no other app had a sharing feature like this one. On top of that, the founders promoted the launch by offering a contest which was giving away camera equipment valued at over $10,000. They were also able to spread the message about the launch on their mailing list which already had close to 70,000 subscribers on it. Another strategy that the founders used was not focusing on domestic sales only. They understood that numerous other countries around the world did not have an app as good as theirs. So, they released it to international markets and got a fast response in the Apple Store. It even became the App of the Week in the Apple Store at one point. One of the co-founders ran a blog and posted a video there which showed the newest update in version 1.2 of the app. This immediately created more enthusiasm for the app as users anxiously awaited the update, so they could have the newest feature. Original score: ANODA Mobile Development Agency [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 May 2018 04:41 PM PDT Hi All, I have started many businesses, and none have gotten as far as i am now. I have a working prototype, i have a factory in China that will make the product for a very reasonable price (they have sent working samples). I have an IP lawyer, i have a guy creating my branding. What i dont have is Marketing or Investment money. I dont think investment money will be necessary at this point, but i have access to it if needed. My main need is marketing. How can i go about this? I havnt had much luck with adwords or SEO in the past, what i'd really love is to find someone who would want some equity in the company to be our marketing guru. The product is in the Fashion/Shoe industry and has a lot of potential due to the people already involved. Does anyone have any resources they can point me to? It is greatly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Need Extra Hands and Can't Pay Them. Posted: 29 May 2018 02:53 PM PDT Hello - I am seeking advice on a business that I have been building for about 8 months and looking to get to launch. It's a Video on Demand business that requires watching and sorting through TONS of films. The ones then chosen are put on the VOD with permission from the rightful owner of the film. I am the only person working on this and I can only watch so many films a day and am realizing that I need more eyes to be helping me so I can get to a launch date sooner with more films on the catalogue to be realeased on the VOD platform. Just looking for advice on how to get people to help when you are starting from very very low funds. Do I offer a promised stake of the business to those people helping for their work in the beginning until money starts coming in? I am new to this - I have a great idea, but very young in this business world. Looking for experienced advice 😁 Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Start up for newbies- APPS and the like. Share your feedback Posted: 29 May 2018 09:12 AM PDT Okay. So new to the business world here. If you are interested in starting your own app and have done extensive market research and found your niche. Let's say you do not code. What is your advice to said person? 1) do you learn code or hire a coder on a website like odesk 2) do you patent the app idea? How much does this typically cost and is it worth it in the app space? Let's say your idea is completely original (rare I know) how would you best secure the idea from copycats? 3) you want to find a way into this crowded space - what is your best list of advice to this person? [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on marketing hyper-local b2b startup. Posted: 29 May 2018 12:15 PM PDT Hey, we're launching an office catering startup in Toronto, ON. To stick with the rules I won't share its name or URL but rather, I'd like to share a general idea of what we're doing and get some collective wisdom from you. The idea is partnering with local restaurants and catering companies to be the "Uber for Office meals". What does this mean? It means that we can do volume orders, e.g. orders with a minimum required order amount of $150, and a minimum required notice time of 24 hours. With over 15 restaurants / catering companies signed up with accounts (listings) with great offerings. I'd like to gauge the best way to market this and sell it. Given that it's a "hyper-local" marketplace of restaurants and catering companies offering "platters" essentially, what's the best way to get people using it and trying it out? And then to provide more general advice, the take-away here can be applied to almost any hyper-local, b2b focused startup. Thanks! Looking forward to engaging with you. (Edit: more accurate title - pls remove copy tnx) [link] [comments]  |
| Seeking advice on how to sell my product/proceed forward in general Posted: 29 May 2018 08:14 AM PDT So I am a student working over a product with two friends of mine. We are from India and its fairly common here for college students like us to not have any source of income. But somehow we scrounged up enough money for materials of at least a makeshift model of this product. The product is a non-lethal self-defence tool whose main target consumers are women and children above 14. As the sheer number of kidnapping and molestation cases far exceed that of even cases like hit and run, we feel like there is a market for this product in this country and also that this would really help the social lives of these groups. Our problem here is that we as a startup don't really see ourselves producing anything in the future that is even remotely like this or even falls in the same ballpark as this product. We want to sell our idea to the highest bidder. We have plans for another product ready that we want to launch as our first product. We want to earn the production cost for the first working model of this new product and other subsequent costs by striking a deal with someone about the self-defence product. But We have no idea how to approach someone to talk about the deal. Please if someone can help us or give us some advice, it would be really useful. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
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