Startups Share your startup - July 2018 |
- Share your startup - July 2018
- Networking for people with mediocre personalities
- Online shop/ Website - Do you guys set pop ups? Like cross/up-selling, etc.
- How to find a good startup idea
- How do you approach pivoting? And Lessons Learned?
- What successful people know about GOOD WORK
| Share your startup - July 2018 Posted: 01 Jul 2018 04:07 AM PDT Tell us about your startup! /r/startups wants to hear what you're working on! Contest mode is on, so remember to select 'Show All' to see all the replies. If you don't see your post, you probably need to load more comments at the bottom. Also, all posts are sorted randomly, so the sort function doesn't seem to work.
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| Networking for people with mediocre personalities Posted: 01 Jul 2018 04:46 PM PDT Hi, I've seen over the years how important it is to network in the bay area to be able to a) get into startups in stealth mode b) get to startups for that highly coveted position For someone who doesn't have a great personality (quiet, meek), how can I network more effectively ? Is there a way to network with people and have them think of you as a contact without your personality getting in the way ? I always thought that the internet was a great leveller, where you can get anything done without your personality/race/gender stopping you in any way. [link] [comments]  |
| Online shop/ Website - Do you guys set pop ups? Like cross/up-selling, etc. Posted: 02 Jul 2018 01:48 AM PDT I personally really hate pop-ups when I am shopping online. So when I started building my online shop kingpurr.com I have decided to keep my website clean and minimal, and have done without most pop-ups. At the moment I am only having sales pop (real time recent sales notification) on my website. And even that, I am contemplating to do without. But, it really isn't easy getting a conversion without these marketing tools? I'm in a dilemma. From what I read and learn everywhere, these pop-ups are necessary and do seem to help with conversions. But if I am the consumer, I personally hate these pop-ups. So, I find it ironic for me if I start using pop-ups to save a sale, cross-sell, up-sell, and whatnot, as a seller. Can an online shop/ website actually be successful without all these? What do you think? [link] [comments]  |
| How to find a good startup idea Posted: 01 Jul 2018 05:43 AM PDT I see people asking this question quite a lot. First off if you really can't see how anything around you can be improved or done 10x better, then you're either not the ideas guy or you haven't got enough exposure to people's problems to have the ideas yet and that's fine. Why not join someone else's startup who has a really good idea? There's a hell of a lot to starting a business that's about execution and lots of different skill sets, marketing, sales, business development, strategy and development. The idea takes by far the least amount of time, so you only need one ideas guy and hopefully he's got other talents too. If you are an ideas person and you're trying to figure out what's worth pursuing and putting time into and what's not, here are a few bits I picked up on along the way. From my own experience the main problem was that I could see a huge gap in the market but by the time I'd manage to build something to fill it in my spare time, someone else would launch a more complete offering with a bunch of marketing money to make a big splash. If you've spotted a big gap in the mainstream market, with 7 billion people someone else probably has too and some of those people probably have VCs on speed dial. I then started looking for more niche gaps as my thinking was that they wouldn't be as obvious or have as many people chasing after them. I had a friend tell me about a problem that they had in his company where the market leading software was too slow. I thought great I can write fast code, I'll just build one of those. The company I was planning on doing a better job than had just sold for 11.5 million which is too small to attract VC money. I made a solution 200x faster but didn't know the industry well enough to realise that my system would have to integrate with a million different tools and I had no desire to build all of that. The lesson for me was if you go niche make sure you have someone in the startup that knows the niche inside out, things often seem simpler from the outside. The next project, I joined a team with sales guys from the industry we were targeting and datascientists. This again was niche but this time we had industry expertise in call centre sales and cool tech. Call centres were perfect for AI to come along and improve things 4 years ago and it was niche enough we wouldn't be butting heads with Google and the big boys. Thing is call centres had never heard of of AI 4 years ago and despite great proof points getting them to hand over customer data to prove it was close to impossible. Lesson if they don't know its broke they won't let you fix it. When looking for a niche, look for people actually complaining about the problem and actively looking for a solution. If they're not shouting about it, even if it can be done better they probably won't invest the time to look at better ways to do it. We actually pivoted into consulting and got talking to lots of businesses helping them solve their problems. This proved to be amazing instead of having an idea and trying to foist it onto companies we were simply asking them to tell us their problems. Month on month we learned lots about the real problems businesses were facing and the product that worked was one that came out of hearing that so many people were struggling with the same issue. I think too many people think it has to be idea first, then build and finally once its ready talk to investors / business. Get the team, talk to businesses, find the idea it doesn't have to be revolutionary it just has to be better to pay you than do themselves and start talking to investors early. Anyway hope that's useful! [link] [comments]  |
| How do you approach pivoting? And Lessons Learned? Posted: 01 Jul 2018 10:58 PM PDT I'm a young 20 year old founder working on an Educational Tech platform, and since we're primarily selling this to colleges, my biggest challenge has been setting up the meetings and getting them set up. I'm trying to think of a different go-to-market strategy and a model that centralizes around students, which may require a pivot. What tips do you have on pivoting and what has your process been when you did pivot? Do you think I'm rushing the pivot? I've been trying to sell for the last 1 year and got 2 colleges, but it has been such a drain to do so, What are the biggest challenges you've had? Would love to hear your advice. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| What successful people know about GOOD WORK Posted: 01 Jul 2018 12:04 PM PDT It was a bitter day for me when I realized good ideas and hard work don't necessarily lead to good outcomes. It called into question for me what "good work" is really all about. This article is about what we can learn about GOOD WORK from the placebo effect and bedside manner. (Also, I don't yet count myself as successful, so I'm not shouting this down from an ivory tower of arrogance and condescension.) We can learn a lot about GOOD WORK from the placebo effect (Fun fact: Placebo is latin for "I will please.") The placebo effect fascinates me. I'm sure most of you have heard about it before, but you might not realize how powerful it is or how it works. How awesome is the placebo effect, and what is it EXACTLY? The placebo effect is what happens when your brain believes that you're getting some kind of treatment for a pain/condition/illness. Even if what you're taking is a sugar pill or some homeopathic remedy, if you believe it'll work, there's a strong chance your brain will make real the outcome you imagine. There's placebo surgery as well, where they put the patient under anesthesia and make incisions but don't actually do anything else (I believe this is reserved for pain-relief surgeries). One study concluded that this was as effective as other surgeries 75% of the time, and another saw no meaningful difference in patient outcomes. It won't work for everything. You aren't Peter Pan, and you can't save Tinkerbell from a broken bone or serious underlying condition with the power of belief. But for many things, the placebo effect seems to work, even when patients know it's a placebo (though that awareness seems to decrease the potency of the effect). The ritual of medicine and surgery, and the implicit trust that's baked into the experience, seems to play a serious role. There's also the "nocebo" effect, where expectation of negative outcomes will make them real. Some researchers hypothesize this is where "gluten sensitivity" comes from. The lost art of "bedside manner" This helps explain why bedside manner, an increasingly rare skill among physicians, is so important. Possibly due to bolstering the placebo effect, bedside manner has a strong relationship with patient outcomes. All else being equal, a patient that received the right care PLUS great bedside manner will almost always turn out better than a patient that received the right care without great bedside manner. Bedside manner can sometimes be more valuable than "the right care." And yet the propagation of technology and specialization within healthcare has commoditized the relationships between doctor and patient. Doctors are no longer as capable of effective bedside manner. What does this mean about GOOD WORK? I rely on partnerships and other people to implement my strategies and ideas. One of the most striking things the most successful consultants I've met have told me is that doing good work isn't really about the work. It's about the ability to build trust between you and the people you're working for. It's being able to understand them, how they think, and how they work. It's bedside manner. Imagine you have an amazing idea that you know could work for your client if they were totally on board. It's the greatest idea mankind has ever known. The sad reality is that it will probably be hard for you to get buy-in for that idea, and if you give everyone the hard sell and push it through, it'll probably fail in the end. It's generally better to give them what you think may be a worse idea if they're better positioned to trust it, buy into it, and devote the proper resources towards making it successful. (As it happens, there's also a pretty decent likelihood that you're wrong about how good your ideas are, but that's a different discussion.) Wrapping it up The way people respond to ideas is like how our body responds to placebo medication. If we believe it will work, it has a significantly higher chance of working—even if there's nothing about the medicine or the idea itself that makes it great. The placebo effect won't work for serious underlying conditions, but there's a lot that it will work for. This is the true raison d'etre of "co-creation," a concept often discussed but rarely seen in the real world. So whether you're a consultant, or someone trying to drive change in their organization, keep in mind that your ideas are often the least potent part of the overall equation. Relying on the strength of your ideas is relying on luck. Relying on luck isn't a good strategy. Focus on people and good things will happen. [link] [comments]  |
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