Startups Dilemma of a co-founder |
- Dilemma of a co-founder
- Can't decide if I should quit my job (doctor) and work on startup full time
- Have you ever tried 'silent-start' meeting technique?
- Funding a startup
- First month of my app being live. Finding it difficult to understand active users. Does it look positive?
- Working on the startup makes me happy, but thinking about it makes me unhappy
- How to find a non technical cofounder?
- What is your method of cheap effective start up?
- ADVICE NEEDED: Do I have what it takes to start an online business?
- Convertible Note Question
- Need to make a technical hire but don't have capital to pay a salary?
- Really need help for a business plan.
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 05:11 PM PDT Start with a back story of me and my partner. I was an actuarial student graduated and went of to learn coding as an iOS developer. I took on learning coding for the dream of building a company someday instead of the cozy 9-5 actuarial job. Went off to secure a job in a company that build apps for clients. Here I met my partner, a CS graduate that transition to a project manager. He started a few companies before this. A year goes by, he approached me and persuaded me to start a company based on an idea he got from overseas. He offered me 20% but I countered with 40 as he wan to be the CEO and guide the direction of the company. One of the reason stopping me is I do not have any savings so he propose he will inject 50k of his own money and offer me salary but in turn he will get an extra 10%. I took the leap in May of this year, quit the job and soon he quit right after and commit full time. At first, I do not continue to question about equity since i thought its best to focus on working on the product or we will end up with equity worth nothing. So the equity he insisted to be 70% him 30% me. But I think it should be 64 36 if diluted equally since the 50k is to the company and not to my own pocket. In hindsight I should pressured more on this. To build the MVP I have to learn react native from scratch to build something for both iOS and android. While he has to learn backend and build the server and company website. We build a rough MVP and join accelerators to get pre seed funding. To note in this juncture, it is always him deciding what to build and I just went along with it. At the end we got selected and investors have invested the pre seed fund recently. But what really bothers me at this point is that he invested 10-20k into the company instead of the agreed 50k and wants to withdrew 10k when the investment comes in but the equity still remains the same 70% 30% The second thing is I feel more of an employee than a co founder. When discussing features or company strategy it always end up with let's just do this to end the discussion without justifying a reason. We have a weekly meeting with the accelerator investors to mentor us, and I think the advice is reasonable and he nod in agreement. After the meeting when ask when are we gonna implement the advice? It will be I don't think that is important let's focus on this. In discussing roles, he wants to decide on marketing, operations, company strategy and the product features while I'll be responsible of building the app. This is not the reason I joined, I want to be hands on and have more responsibilities since the end goal is getting the experience of building a company. I'm willing to learn anything that will make the company better but it seems he see me as just a tech guy instead of a co founder At the end of the day, I learnt expectation have to be established early. I would have to voice out my concern but still I don't want to jeopardise our team dynamic making it harder to work together in the future. Open to feedback on what I should do. Thanks EDIT: Spoke with my partner about my concern, at the end he thought of me as just a tech guy that can help him build his app. I guess that is why his first offer was 20%. He say this is just the way he is, the decision he makes some are unexplainable because its just his gut feeling it will somehow work out, that is why when he make up his mind, hardly anyone will change his mind. It seems he is looking for an employee instead of a co-founder, someone that will just listen to his directions and execute it. So with a heavy heart I think it is time to move on. In hindsight, we agree on we should have set out our expectations at the beginning. I guess I am now a free man, hit me up with cool ideas :) [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Can't decide if I should quit my job (doctor) and work on startup full time Posted: 25 Oct 2018 05:17 PM PDT Hey everyone, For the past however many years of my life I've studied to become a doctor, and finally graduated med school in June this year. I'm a junior doctor (UK, equivalent to resident in the US I think?) in my first year. The training left is 2 years of being a junior doctor (3 months of which I've completed) and then 3 further years of speciality training for my desired field - general practice. So in total I've got 4 years and 9 months of training to go until I complete my training. During med school I taught myself to code and built an SaaS platform which now has over 1,000 paying users and a MRR of 10-12k, around 8k in profit. I am the sole owner and have no employees at this point - I kind of just coded it and let it grow, tweaking minor things and upgrading servers as necessary. The startup is not related to the medical field at all. I work 50+ weekly hours (sometimes 80+) including some weekends and nights, and so barely have time to focus on the platform. I believe it has the potential to scale realistically up to 100k MRR, if it received my undivided attention. At this point I'm unsure of what to do. I earn good money as a doctor, but my startup makes more monthly than my medical salary. The problem is that if I leave training now, it's extremely difficult to restart training as taking time out is viewed quite negatively and I'll basically be throwing my medical career down the drain. If I wait until I complete training in 5ish years i'll be able to take a break and start again whenever I want, but I'm worried I'll miss the window for growth and competitors would likely sink my startup. I'm very torn - on the one hand I'm excited to see how high this can go and would love to spend every waking hour working on it, but on the other hand I've spent thousands of hours studying and passed countless exams to be where I am now - am I really ready to throw it all away after 3 short months of practice? Any help/insight at all would be massively appreciated! [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Have you ever tried 'silent-start' meeting technique? Posted: 26 Oct 2018 01:59 AM PDT Did anyone from a startup community ever tried this silent-start meeting technique, as they do in Amazon? Or is this too 'corporate'? I'm looking for ways to get the most out of meetings and came across this: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/jeff-bezos-knows-how-to-run-a-meeting-here-are-his-three-simple-rules.html In a nutshell:
For a startup, 6 page memo might be an overkill, but at ours, we use meeting agenda with more details everytime and there are details to be added in advance for everybody to check before the meeting. As always, not all team members had time to read and prepare for the meeting. So this technique could be a good option to make sure meeting is as effective as possible. This is what Bezos said:
What is your take on this? [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 12:15 PM PDT Two business partners, A and B, decide to incorporate a company. "A" will be the CEO/CTO and brings technology/IP to the company while "B" will act as COO and bring funding/deals to the company. "B" requests the following:
in company. I think "B" is requesting too much and I'm not even sure it's legal. Thoughts? Here's what I might propose: - "B" is granted an initial equity stake of 15% upon closing of the minimum funding of $250K - An additional 0.75% in equity per additional $250K funded is granted to "B" - "B"s max equity stake (at $5 mio funding) will be 29% - Upon securing partners (strategic or distribution), "B" is granted a bonus provided that certain conditions are met (one of which is that it has to be based on something that can be measured, like the value of a deal). Feedback, constructive criticism and proposals for alternative working arrangements will be appreciated. I'm not sure what the "standard" is in situations like this (if there is one), but I'm sure that there are people in this group who might have an opinion as to how this should be done and how it's typically done, so I'm interested in hearing about that. Also the legal aspect is interesting. EDIT: "A" is bringing existing IP to the company. In other words a product which is ready to go to market. The funding is primarily for sales/marketing and continuous development of the existing product. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 08:44 PM PDT About a month ago I "soft launched" my app. I did little marketing, mostly telling people within my niche and seeing if they spread the word themselves. This is the first month's chart: Image, as you can see 100 users, not bad, I think, and generally between 15-25 users per day. It's a social network that focuses on local communities. The thing that is worrying me, is that in the beginning I had about 40-50 users total, and roughly 25 users used it daily, now that I'm at 100 users total, roughly ~17-22 use it daily. It's difficult to understand if people are losing interest, the novelty wears off, or if I found a core userbase. The thing about my app is that it gets better with the more users that are on it, as with most social networks. I'll be officially launching tomorrow making a huge push for a local community in my town, and I'm hoping for around 100-200 new users. So we'll see what that change brings. But I'm curious what y'all think about the numbers/graph. Does it look concerning or does it look consistent despite an increase of users overall? I'd love some advice, I'm finding it hard to judge if this month showed there's interest, or that there's a lack of interest. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Working on the startup makes me happy, but thinking about it makes me unhappy Posted: 25 Oct 2018 08:19 PM PDT I found something quite interesting. When I'm "actively working" on my startup, as in busily writing code or doing sales - basically anything that is addressing an immediate problem in the present - I get a general sense of satisfaction and happiness. But when I sit down with a notebook and start thinking hard about future of the startup, such as analyzing about how durable the business will be in the future, how to maintain growth, etc. - the more I think, the more hopeless things feel, the more sad I become. I'm not sure if this is a normal thing in startups, or it's because the future for my startup really is hopeless, and I'm not willing to admit it. As a side note, I've been running the startup for about a year now and it is basically my life. When the startup feels hopeless, my life feels hopeless and sad. And the only way I have been able to become less sad is by working on the startup. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| How to find a non technical cofounder? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 05:53 PM PDT I'm a coder and usually people have approached me with ideas in exchange for equity. It seems that's what all non technical cofounders want: free code! Now I find myself on the other side of that. I have (what I think is) a great startup concept. I'm building out an MVP and I'm desperately looking for a non technical cofounder. Someone to do PR, marketing, customer service (once we get customers), documentation, QA, etc. It's not that I ONLY want to code. I want to lead the technical and operational aspects. But how do I find someone? Has anyone ever met a cofounder randomly and it... worked? I wouldn't be giving a 50/50 split. I'd want majority. But how much? I'm not sure, so any guidance there would also be appreciated. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| What is your method of cheap effective start up? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 04:40 PM PDT It got me interested on another subreddit r/entrepreneurridealong of a guy that drank a hangover drink, gotten samples made for free and started it fairly cheap. What is the budget of the cheap effective start up of an ecommerce site with you as the sole employee. Who do you hire out and why? Where do you spend more or less on? Bookkeeping/accounting set up: [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| ADVICE NEEDED: Do I have what it takes to start an online business? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 02:16 PM PDT Hello! Short backstory first, I'm a 22 year old recent college graduate working full time as a web developer in Minnesota. I got my degree in Computer Science but have always wanted to go into business, and when I get ideas they tend to take over all of my free time. Well sure enough I recently had one of those ideas. Without getting too specific, it would be a B2C self hosted (not on Amazon or Etsy) online store selling luxury goods to a niche market consisting of mostly married women (facebook Audience Insights puts interest at about 80/20 women to men). The past two weeks I have been researching everything I can to prepare myself for this venture. I've been studying and learning more about my product, my potential competitors, local and broad suppliers, the online community around my potential audience, marketing strategies, branding, permits, taxes, e-commerce platforms, etc. My problem is that as I near the proverbial ledge and decide whether or not to "jump off" (start investing my own money into starting up) I have encountered a number of questions that hold me back.
With all of this to consider, I start to wonder if I should just table the whole thing and focus on working and saving money right now. Maybe I should go back to school for business (Is that important? Maybe that's another thread all on it's own). But I can't shake the feeling that the timing is right for this idea. This particular market is small but google trends show that it is growing year over year. There are very few competitors, and plenty of ways to improve the experience overall. I think it's a great idea and a great time to get in on the ground floor of it, but I'm not sure if I'm in the best place to start. Any advice, any guidance, any recourses, are all appreciated. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 05:36 AM PDT Hey peeps, This is a question for those who have used convertible notes before. It requires some knowledge of finance, thanks in advance for the replies. Does it make sense to give an early friends and family investor a Convertible Note that has a 2 year maturity with an interest of prime plus 2. Has a trigger point of a min capital raise amount and a valuation cap and a 20% discount rate if present value at the time of min cap raise is less than valuation cap. If the trigger point happens pre 2 year maturity, the note would convert the value of the investment into the higher of:
So basically, if no seed investment is raised till 2 year maturity at maturity we do a valuation assessment. If a seed raise does occur, the seed investor sets the valuation. So no matter, what the early investor gets at least interest and 20% increase in their investment if the valuation is less than our cap. If it's more than our cap, meaning the company has grown well, they get the upside from the increase in valuation. Please advise if this makes sense, additional questions can be sent to me and I will answer. Thanks guys [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Need to make a technical hire but don't have capital to pay a salary? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:28 AM PDT So I made an app about a month ago which basically lets you anonymously chat with people in a specific place. For example, if you're at your college's dining hall, you would open the app, it would center on your location on a map, and you tap at the dining hall which would create a circle on the map there. You'll then load any messages sent to that circle (here, the dining hall) and can chat with anyone else who's at the dining hall/chatting there at that time. It's currently only available for Android and I need someone to do the iOS app (I would prefer someone who can do both Android and iOS development for future-proofing). The problem is, I don't have any capital to pay someone yet. With that being said, the current work would be relatively light, just getting a simple iOS app to determine product market fit for right now. I hope to seek investing after that if all goes well, so basically the person I hire would have to be comfortable with investing their time towards this - no immediate return per se but the potential of being an early hire/potential co-founder if it all works out. Any advice for going about this? Thanks! [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||
| Really need help for a business plan. Posted: 25 Oct 2018 03:49 AM PDT Hey, So I've been busting my head over finishing a business plan which is most likely gonna get approved but I need some help with the details specifically about how to proceed regarding employees, I could use a fancy name like "hashers" or whatnot but I could use some help with wording as in what they're supposed to do, because at the end of the day they're supposed maintain the hardware, asses the market and make sound trading decisions, which isn't something you can do full time. My other question, the thing behind this project is that I have to hire 2 people, will hiring myself as an administrator count? Another issue is how it would affect the environment, the business doesn't have any emissions basically, it would just take a massive amount of electricity. Also if there are any additional tips on what's most important to mention in these business plans since I haven't done any before, they're more than welcome. I'd definitely appreciate the help. Thank you very much. [link] [comments]  |
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