Startups "What's your budget?"... |
- "What's your budget?"...
- Leadership Position At A New Startup
- Product's in production, its had no formal testing and has lots of problems
- Advice on equity and compensation for a CTO role in a funded startup with $7MM valuation?
- Wondering about "Business Cards" with Promo Codes
- Does anybody know how to reduce large amount of failed payments through Stripe?
- Is working with volunteers early on a good idea?
- Securing Early Users for a Niche App
- Advice on a school project?
- Pointers on pitching my product.
| Posted: 05 Dec 2018 07:10 PM PST I am kind of annoyed when I get this question (in the title) from freelancers... It is always replied to with "How much will you do it for?" They sometimes reply with "Depends on your budget?" Obviously I want to tell them what I want and then get a price from them so I can compare. (it is really a buyers market out there). I feel like if I tell them that my budget is $100. Even if they had $50 in mind they will tell me ... "I'll give you a deal I'll do it for $70". So that is why I feel uncomfortable with telling them my budget. Any word from freelancers out there about this? [link] [comments]  |
| Leadership Position At A New Startup Posted: 05 Dec 2018 03:29 PM PST I've been with my current startup for a long time and worked my way up from individual contributer to leadership role. I've grow with the company as we went from series A to profitable, but its time to move on. Traditionally I've relied on a network of friends to find the next startup. This has worked great in the past, but I'd like to find another leadership position preferably something in the CTO or Director of Engineering title. I've got almost a decade of experience at various companies, but i'm not sure how to find a strong startup looking for those positions. Is it better to find an early stage startup pre funding with an opening for those titles, or should I be looking for a great recruiter with connections to early stage startups? [link] [comments]  |
| Product's in production, its had no formal testing and has lots of problems Posted: 05 Dec 2018 10:36 AM PST Am I crazy? I run a team responsible for the client facing interaction with our clients, there's a couple of us now and we're both from established companies with years of experience in talking to and helping clients. But there's a problem, the platform has lots of bugs and errors, and we're in a market where clients expect things to be bang on and correct. It's so bad that one of the core reasons for clients to buy our product is not being fully satisfied. Today I organised a meeting between the developers and product, with both heads of respective teams. They explained the reason for this is that testing is seen as a burden, something that would have prevented them for moving as fast as they needed to get the product to market. They don't want to write test cases because sometimes they'll replace whole parts of the system and the test cases will be irrelevant (that doesn't sound right at all...) All in all, I'm wondering if the ship is doomed? or am I just melodramatic. [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on equity and compensation for a CTO role in a funded startup with $7MM valuation? Posted: 05 Dec 2018 11:25 AM PST Looking for some advice on my situation. I have an existing relationship as a consultant with a privately funded company. They now want me to join them full-time as a CTO. Company valuation is about $7MM. I've been billing them my standard hourly rate so far and don't have any equity at the moment. They've asked me to come back to them with what compensation I'd ask for in order to go full time as their CTO. My question is, what should I ask for? My natural response here would be to apply my hourly rate to full time 40 hours a week and ask for that. However, I would want to have equity, or more likely stock options, in the company. How much equity would be reasonable to ask for? And does asking for equity impact my salary? I'd think for a CTO role that there would be some sort of market standard of $X + Y% equity vested over Z time. Does anyone know what this might be in the LA area? Another concern that's on my mind is risk. If the company's product doesn't do well in the market, and it's very technology heavy, it might hurt my employability in the future. As a consultant, this is not much of an issue. But as a CTO, a failure of the company could be perceived as a failure of the CTO. Is this a genuine concern and do you think it warrants additional compensation in some form for the extra risk? [link] [comments]  |
| Wondering about "Business Cards" with Promo Codes Posted: 05 Dec 2018 06:06 PM PST Background: I have a startup apparel company I've been working on for ~14 months. Will be releasing 1/11/19. We wear a lot of the test items in public, and we always have people ask where we got it (a really good thing) Also, our target audience is easy to identify when out in public, and I kind of "plug"/"tease" the company when appropriate. Idea: We want to have business-card-sized-cards that practically only has the logo, the website, with a Promo Code --- to encourage these people we find in public to give us a serious glance. We simply want to give an incentive for them to act now - and to feel like they're getting the hook up - something exclusive. Questions and Concerns: I'm hoping others have tried this, or have some insight. My main concern, is how could I order 1,000-5,000+ Cards, but have the Promo Code be somewhat temporary? That way people don't have a permanent discount card for a year+. Would I design the card to be printed with "10% OFF, use code SAVE____" and then hand write the current code-suffix on the line? i.e. SAVE123 ...and then a month later write SAVE425. Just don't want to be ordering cards every month, or allow buyers a lifetime discount (or them sharing code among others for a great amount of time) --- I also don't want it to look half-assed with handwriting on it. Would you feel turned-off if it were handwriting on card? or is that a sign of it being more personalized and unique to them? How would it be decided when to close out the code - and rotate to a new one? Should I just have an ever-running 10% off code for these cards? I wouldn't think so. Has anybody done this before? Any feedback/insight or off-the-wall-ideas will be greatly appreciated. Is there anything that generates single-use codes for Shopify? if so, how would I translate that to Business Cards? Thanks a million! [link] [comments]  |
| Does anybody know how to reduce large amount of failed payments through Stripe? Posted: 05 Dec 2018 10:04 AM PST Hi all, any help or advice on this will be greatly appreciated! I help to run a membership website in the UK. We've been established for 18 months now and a year ago we partnered with a national chain to give their customers a 1 year free trial for our Premium service (usually £39.99). With this trial year now over, we are beginning to get the automatic renewal payments through - great! However, we're getting a very large amount of failed payments. We mentally prepared ourselves for the UK industry average of about 15% but we're hitting more around the mark of 65%! The typical notification we receive is 'insufficient funds or 'do not honour'. We use Stripe as our payment gateway and we've spoken with them but they can't seem to give us a real answer as to why this is happening. My thoughts are that It may be because we are in the process of becoming PCI compliant and/or because our trial lasts a full year, our user's banks believe the £39.99 charge could be fraudulent. These are merely guesses at this time though. Currently the only thing i've been told we can do to rectify this issue, is to ask our users to speak with their banks to allow the charge to go through. Can anyone shed some light on this? Many thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Is working with volunteers early on a good idea? Posted: 05 Dec 2018 04:48 PM PST I just launched the Alpha of my start up's product and it has seen a lot of eager early adopters (100 people signing up within the first week). So eager that some have volunteered to work on the project. I must admit, the extra hands would be safe to say... 'handy'. However I'm torn because I much prefer the idea of having someone properly compensated for their time (With my budget, I cannot afford to hire anyone). Even worse, If the product/company blows up down the line, I'd hate to be in a situation where, people start fighting and clamouring for shares/ownership because "I worked for free, so I deserve equity/I feel cheated" (I can see that being very bad for the brand down the line). Has anyone ever had to make this decision? What do you think I should do? [link] [comments]  |
| Securing Early Users for a Niche App Posted: 05 Dec 2018 12:17 PM PST Quick background: My company recently launched a cryptocurrency investment app for iOS that makes the investment process super easy for everyday people. The challenge: Targeting casual cryptocurrency investors has proven difficult, as they don't spend time on the usual cryptocurrency channels, and they are highly diverse. I feel like I've read every blog post, article and guide to securing early users for my app, and yet none of the suggestions have proven consistently effective. I constantly convert users when I speak to people in person, but that is not scalable, and I feel like I need to spend my time on more efficient activities, such as investor reach out, scalable marketing efforts and product development. How have you found success reaching users that are not obviously targeted? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Dec 2018 11:20 AM PST My friend and I are both in high school taking a "PLTW" Engineering class, where our goal is to design a solution to any problem and work on that solution over the course of the year. We're reaching out to this subreddit in hopes to receive some advice on our startup. After consideration of different projects we could pursue, we came up with the idea of a platform that could provide comp. Sci. students with all the resources they would need to develop their careers. We would take on any willing instructors with backgrounds in coding that would be able to use the students as a means of developing their personal projects, while simultaneously teaching them how to code. Everyone benefits. We hope to expand this past just students, and take on more and more staff. The students would leave the program with experience in their field and proficiency of 1 or more languages. The main goal of our platform is to provide a network for students and teachers to collaborate and work on projects while developing their skills as coders. Where we are at Right now we are in the planning phase. We need to reach out to different communities for not only advice but for reassurance that people would want to take part in this project with us. What we need help with If anyone has had experience with assembling people for a project, or just starting a project in general, we would really appreciate any advice you might have for us. How do we go about finding people that would be willing to invest in our idea? We would need teachers, students, and anyone else who is qualified and willing to work with us. [link] [comments]  |
| Pointers on pitching my product. Posted: 05 Dec 2018 10:38 AM PST I've just started my own fruit and custard pie baking business from home. To start I will be selling to my social circles and coffee shops. I have no experience in selling, so I'm looking for some pointers as well as some short reading material to help me create some sort of structure for when I approach shops. Ideally I would like to have them as a regular purchaser of my products starting with two shops a week and growing from there. Where do I start in my approach? Asking for the manager? Give them some background? Take single sample with me (a single slice for them to try) or a whole pie and say take this on a discount try it out and get back to me? If they initially say no how much should I keep trying? Thanks for all of your advice. Also I will have my Instagram up by Sunday and will share in the sticked post for all of you to look at. [link] [comments]  |
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