Startups Best strategy for startup apparel brands |
- Best strategy for startup apparel brands
- How can I choose a name for my new webapp?
- We see $3 from every $15/mo subscription, before business costs. Is this too small?
- What to Do About Co-founder
- When to incorporate
- Giving equity to users. Legal implications?
- How to Hire the Right Salesman?
- Do I need a lawyer to figure out these formation issues?
- User Onboarding quick guide!
- Early-stage: when to nail down contractual matters?
- A true way to define business metrics for startups
| Best strategy for startup apparel brands Posted: 07 Jun 2018 06:54 PM PDT Hi guys, My niche is athleisure which is athletic/casual wear. I tried facebook ads with multiple ad sets, but averaging only a few clicks and out of those clicks way less than 1% purchase conversions. I tried reddit ads.. even worse results. The best result was when a friend posted my link on a subreddit and my landing page % went up 3000% with an online sale conversion rate of 2%. It got taken off due to "shilling" apparently. I want to mimic similar results, but at the same time respect rules of sub reddits. I'm curious on some clever methods and strategies how to promote an apparel business from basically nothing to something. Thanks again in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| How can I choose a name for my new webapp? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 08:11 AM PDT Hello, After my last failure (a webapp for managing associations of hunters), I'm working on a new project: a web application to help magazine & comic collectors (like me! :) ) to organize his collection. I've already built a MVP, and I'm testing (locally) with my magazines, finding bugs and, mainly, UX issues. So, I've already choosed a technology stack, infrastructure, etc, but I'm still missing something: a name. I'm thinking about names since I started developing this idea, without luck. All the names I imagine are already taken, and I'm worried because I want to start evaluating/promoting the app (there is still a lot of work to do to have a beta MVP), but without a name I can't do anything… :( How can I choose a name for this app? How do you choose a name for your business? Thank you for your help! [link] [comments]  |
| We see $3 from every $15/mo subscription, before business costs. Is this too small? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 10:45 AM PDT Hi, So we want to sell subscriptions for $15, of which we only see $3 (before business expenses). Is this viable at scale, or should I rethink the business model? We're aiming for many users (like a smaller Spotify / Netflix). I know this is a pretty tight margin, but is it okay for when we scale? I can't imagine Spotify/Netflix makes much revenue from $11 a month, and so it must only make sense at scale. Cheers! With 100k users, that's still 300k a month, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at. TL;DR: It costs $12/mo to serve our core product, which is a $15/mo subscription service. It's aimed at a large number of users, hopefully in the millions. Will this margin work OK at scale, or is it too small? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jun 2018 05:19 PM PDT Hi Everyone, Those of you that spend a lot of time here have probably heard this story many, many times now, but here is the situation I am in. Almost two years ago, me and a close friend started a business at a 50 / 50 split. I was to build the app, and he was to sell it. I built the app - very MVP, tons of technical debt, likely has to be re-built in order to accommodate more than one customer - and we have one happy, paying customer who is now spreading the word. The problem is that my co-founder has not done much selling of the product, other than holding one or two meetings with other potential customers. I've been loathe to further improve the product (last commit was June 25, 2017) because I expected him to do much more selling since we started the copilot, even if that selling was unsuccessful. The teeny bit of success we've had (one happy, paying customer) has been in spite of our lack of effort and selling / marketing. Full cards on the table, the problem was something that my co-founder spotted at his job, and the pilot is with the company that he works for. But he seems to think - at least from his actions, he hasn't verbalized this to me - that his part is over. I'm not willing to continue to work on the project - both build it and sell it - for only 50%. I'd be willing, in fact, to hand the entire equity ownership over to him, wipe my hands clean of the work we've done so far, and simply start from scratch on my own. A fair split, if he really wants to sit back and relax, to me would be 10%, which I am, frankly, scared to suggest because of the magnitude of the difference. He's a great friend, just not a great co-founder. This has certainly served as a lesson to me. While I understand that at a startup (and I use that term loosely, it's just us two) everyone has to wear many hats, next endevour I will make sure that everyone has specific responsibilities (not that those will be their only ones), understands them from the beginning, and that there is an impartial mediator that can be brought in when if someone is accused of not pulling their weight. Anyway, any advice? Would turning over the company and staring from scratch, including not communicating with our current customer or any leads that they may bring our way put me in a legal hot-water? Thanks for any help! P.S. The irony is not lost on me I have not touched the code-base recently either. From an outside perspective it might look like we both are not pulling our weight currently, but if we look at it as "i build, you sell, I build, you sell, I build you sell", I built, but no one sold. [EDIT] For clarification: the plan was to one-board each new customer onto their own completely separate instance of the app until we could build something to make that unnecessary. This is an important point as it is not the reason why we didn't move forward. [/EDIT] [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jun 2018 08:52 PM PDT Im currently employed full time, but in the next few weeks Im beginning a project with a few (3) ex classmates of mine. This will be a project selling to the government primarily and a few private sector businesses. When should we incorporate? Due to the nature of the project we might not have a viable product for up to a year. Should we incorporate now? Is a basic agreement written and signed by all of us enough to show agreement of spliting? Is it worth it to eat the year of business taxes and fees to incorporate now, even though we don't have something yet? Also, has anyone here use Stripe Atlas or a similar service? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Giving equity to users. Legal implications? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 05:55 PM PDT I got an idea that has terrible legal implications. We could give a tiny bit of equity to our users who give us a share on their social media pages. Right now the plan is to have a simple point system. A user who gives us a share will get 100 points. And if a liquidity event happens (get acquired, or go public), those points will be converted into equity. If the company goes nowhere, the points are worth nothing. E.g. If we get acquired at $2 a share, then the user who has 100 points will get 100 shares, which will be worth $200. There are probably a ton of legal implications with this idea. My current research tells me this is a bad idea. But I think we may be able to get this to work. Your thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| How to Hire the Right Salesman? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 12:52 PM PDT Hey all! I currently solely operate a software company in the industrial/manufacturing data-entry market, though looking to expand to more data-related technologies. I am a senior in college and my experience is in software development. I currently sell my products through partners who handle the customer relationship. I have only one partner, the company I used to work for. We currently do one to two sales per two months, each sale generating about $6000. All sales are yearly recurring. I feel like I have run into a wall here because my one partner isn't really growing our sales. I do not have any connections to possible partners, and my current partner isn't too excited about getting me in contact with his competitors (I don't even know who they are). How should I go about growing my sales? How do I find those other partners? Should I hire someone to do this for me? If I decide to sell direct to consumer, who do I hire? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Do I need a lawyer to figure out these formation issues? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 03:11 PM PDT I'm in the process of forming an LLC for a digital media startup. I'd like to save as much as possible on legal fees so I can spend my money on other facets of the business. I live in Atlanta and want to form my LLC in Delaware (with success, years down the road, I'd convert to a Delaware C-Corp). If I do that, what, if anything, do I need to do in the state of Georgia? Also, I'm forming a sports digital media company. I'm planning to create a rev share agreement where I provide certain services and help to individuals who oversee coverage of specific college teams. (I.e. I'll provide x, y and z, and in return I get 20% of revenue.) Is this kind of agreement something I can write on my own, or do I need a lawyer? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jun 2018 02:05 PM PDT Who of you are SaaS product owners struggling with onboarding? I mean if you own one you certainly are questioning yourself constantly of as to how you should activate and retain more users, aren't you? No matter, if you have a product market fit, no product ever will manage to survive! Not without adopting any onboarding tactic whatsoever. So, where do you begin exactly? 1) First things first, you adopt a powerful onboarding tool like Intercom or Drip- I am certaim that many of you have done this already, but many SaaS limit their actions in just using the tools for live chat purposes (without actually adopting a customer success strategy), while if they add the right message to the right page they can make wonders. 2) Further on create clever walkthroughs to highlight your key functions and features. Here it would be wise to reward the user in a way as they move forward and conclude their first milestones. Eg. You just won a free consultation with our customer success manager who has made his life goal to get to know clients like you and contribute to your personal success. 3) Always have in mind that there are two main types of onboarding. Benefit-Focused and Function-Focused. The 1st you use to explain 2–3 core benefits and how to achieve them via your solution and the 2nd follows the same logic but it applies to your product's key functions. 4) Consider what kind and how many marketing and/or sales personas you have, in order to create the necessary funnels that will suit your onboarding strategy. 5) Before actually start creating any strategy at all make 100% sure that it is aligned with your marketing & sales KPI's 6) Include in it any soon to be released features- or at least consider the effect they will have to your users journey once they do launch- as you don't want to redesign the whole strategy every once in a while 7) In case you already have a respected amount of users consider to conduct a customer satisfaction survey. Ok I'll admit that's a tricky one. Consider to ask questions like: - How long have you been using the service? - Which features do you use mostly? - What's the add value you get from the service? - What do you consider to be the product's greatest weakness/missing element? - From 1 to 10 how satisfied you are with the customer service? - What would you consider missing when it comes to your education regarding the product in question? Before you go ahead and ask why should I ask all these questions since I have a google analytics account, hold your horses and think how many times you have come to the conclusion that you have set the wrong goals or even worse how many feedback and data you have lost if you haven't even set your analytics from the very beginning.
Usual metrics to use here are: - Percentage of activated users - Percentage of returning users - Percentage of trial users converted to paid - Percentage of users that renewed their subscription (yes onboarding do apply on retention)
Ask yourself questions like: - How do they lead their users to their aha moment? - How would my persona/user get something out of their onboarding - How would my persona/user be disappointed by their onboarding? I hope you found my feedback useful. What practices do you use for your onboarding? [link] [comments]  |
| Early-stage: when to nail down contractual matters? Posted: 07 Jun 2018 12:44 PM PDT Two good friends have an idea for a startup. They're currently fund-raising, talking to prospects, and have a wireframe "prototype" site. They approached me to be the tech lead (potentially CTO). We already had a meeting to align high-level, and we're meeting again in a couple of days to spec things out, so that I have something to share with potential developers. So far, everything is on the basis that we know, like, and respect each other. I don't know what the business arrangements are between them, but how long should I let things progress for on a trust / goodwill basis? They're asking me the right questions e.g. how will we build this, how much will it cost, how long will it take etc, but there's nothing to stop them . Despite the fact that I do trust them, this is business. I don't want to be greedy, but if they want me involved from this early stage, and I want to be involved, how should I broach the subject? And how do we determine a fair package? Their idea, but they need me to execute. They already know I'm good (sorry) and trust me, I can't imagine they're relishing braving the R&D waters without me. [link] [comments]  |
| A true way to define business metrics for startups Posted: 07 Jun 2018 09:06 AM PDT I wanted to share the insights from the post which I recently published. It is about how to build analytical process in the startup. Would like to here your experience as well of building this process in your company. The analytical process From a business user standpoint, data analyst work looks like calculating this or that and plugging the result into some dashboard for every question that pops up. The result is a myriad of dashboards overloaded with metrics that don't make much sense and which no one is looking at. To achieve meaningful results, a company needs to adopt a more comprehensive metric definition process that consists of multiple, equally important steps. The steps of a healthy metric definition process are the following: • Getting context • Data health check • Exploratory analysis • Metric selection • Implementation of the definition • Implementation of the visualization • Getting feedback Business users sometimes tend to prescribe the solution, jumping to step number 5. They think steps 5 and 6 are everything the data analyst does. In fact, these steps represent only a small fraction of an analyst's routine, so let's take a closer look at the underestimated steps 1 to 4. Getting context When a business analyst knows the real life context of the business process, the underlying data makes more sense. In this case, the result will be more meaningful for both sides. Users who request data have to provide more information about what they are trying to achieve in terms of business, not in terms of numbers: their goals, their issues, or some hypothesis that has to be tested. A requester shouldn't prescribe the solution. The best solution is created during collaboration between the business user and the analyst. Data health check This step is about checking how well data captures the business process, if at all. Data collection and cleaning may require at least 80% of time. So if you want to check metrics on a regular basis, you need to invest some time in proper updates of the data pipeline. Sometimes data doesn't capture the process at all and requires software engineering and/or data engineering efforts. In the next parts of this series, I'll tell you how to build a good interaction between the data team, business users, and the software engineering. Exploratory analysis This step is just as important as it is underestimated. People like averages because they think averages are good indicators of the overall trend. Meanwhile, the same average value can come out of completely different distributions. Further in this post, I'll show a good use case on how to handle this problem. Only if the analyst understands the business process, looks at the data distribution, and investigates its causality with some business target, does the company get a good metric. Metric selection One can select a good metric based on the results of the exploratory analysis and the checklist below: • Business impact. How critical is this metric in defining the success of the business? If you don't get the answer, how painful would that be? Or if you do, how much benefit would the company get, or you get as a manager? • Actionability. If you see a metric value that doesn't satisfy you is there anything you can do about it? If you are a manager and you have averages on your dashboard you're in a position of an overseer that can only order slaves to work harder. You could do the same thing without the dashboard if you wanted, there's no extra value that the dashboard brings. A data driven company is not calculating averages, it's linking clear and reasonable benchmarks to people and processes and monitors their reach. • Transparency. The metric shouldn't be too obscure and complex and it should give you an idea of what is going on with real numbers behind it. The better the mathematical background of the audience of this metric, the more complex the metric can be, and vise versa. It's not recommended to define complex metrics in the low-qualification employee performance review even if they are very indicative and make a lot of sense for a manager. They should make sense for employees first and foremost. • Sensitivity. Would the metric adequately reflect the changes in the business process in a way that not only the direction, but the magnitude of change, is well understood? Quantiles and % of data points that meet the benchmark work really well, much better than averages. *Example of quantile based metric: the bottom 10% of the worst wait times in your conversion pipeline. Example of the % of data points: the % of tickets with a response time of less than 6 hours.* Metric implementation and visualization Once the metric is well defined it's time to implement and visualize. We won't focus on this part here, as it depends on the selected tech stack and the amount of data, which is out of this article's scope. Getting feedback The process flow for analytics iterations seems quite obvious (can't attach illustration here, but you can look at it in the original post). The feedback step is a very important last step of the process in every scenario. The data team needs a short confirmation from a business user if the job is done well. If they don't receive feedback, they think their work wasn't useful or was ignored. Next time a data analyst might give tasks from the same business owner a lower priority. Sometimes the job is done well from a technical standpoint but the results are counterintuitive. In this case, you need to decide how important the task is and whether it's worth investing more time in further research. This again requires feedback from a business owner. Here are the steps of analytical process which I wanted to share with you. Further in the article we tell about unified metric definition across the entire company, right metrics ownership, and a long read use case on building analytical process in sales team. [link] [comments]  |
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