Startups What keeps your first dev from taking your idea an running with it? |
- What keeps your first dev from taking your idea an running with it?
- How are early employees compensated when there's no cash? Straight -up equity or shares from dilution?
- How to pick an industry to focus on for the inexperienced?
- How to develop the skills and expertise to spot opportunities in various business industries, w/o experience?
- How would you best spend $100,000 to market your p2p startup.
- Should we make Amazon sign an NDA?
- Looking for some feedback on something I'm currently working on
- Having second thoughts about co founder
- How did you get your first 100 customers?
- Have you worked with an affiliate partner?
- Need advice for first meeting with a potential investor.
- Thoughts on “non-technical” engineers?
- Starting a business in 40 days, until then; what do I do?
- Best manufacturing type for small plastic product
- Seeking Methods for Finding a Reliable Contract Manufacturer (Health Product)
- Co-founder red-flag: He doesn't read books
| What keeps your first dev from taking your idea an running with it? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 05:12 PM PST After thinking about hiring my first developer for a perspective idea, this thought crossed my mind. How do you keep the developer from just writing the code, and launching your project idea it without you? Once you get so large I can see having legal contracts in place to keep this from happening, but realistically how does someone just starting out keep this from happening? Is this something I should even be thinking about or am I over thinking all of this? I would love to hear how others worked around this problem or if someone actually had this happen to them. Appreciate all the help and guidance ! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2019 06:23 PM PST I'm a programmer almost 4 months in, in a pre-seed startup. I've been offered a small percentage plus salary. I'm wondering what usually happens when capital is not raised and salaries can't be paid. I'd be willing to stay for stock options until things get better, but I'd like to ask you: When there's no cash, should the founder compensate you from his equity or, everyone's shares (maybe including mine) get diluted to generate more shares and compensate with that? If the case is dilution, I'd like to know if those new shares would be worth something or if it's lost to something like inflation. [link] [comments]  |
| How to pick an industry to focus on for the inexperienced? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 02:08 PM PST How do you guys find an industry that interests you? There is a lot of discussion on whether you should look for passion vs opportunity. However, if you are looking for an opportunity in every possible industry that you know of, wouldn't you be spreading yourself thin? How did you guys stick to an industry or find an industry that you like? What made you decide on a particular industry? For a person who has doesn't have that much knowledge of the business world, but is interested in entrepreneurship, how do you find something interests you or that you would be suited for?A lot of people tend to have experience working in a particular industry because they like it, and eventually make something that gravitates towards. However, I find that there are also other people who didn't do that and were successful in their chosen industry. For example, Kevin O'Leary when he working on the learning company after undergrad. Also there are a lot of industries that I found would have high barriers of entry for a just fresh out of university undergrad with no experience, such as biotech and other industries that require lots of upfront capital. So everyone seems to just go into ecommerce or something tech related.Edit: sorry for big font idk how that happend [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2019 02:29 PM PST I always see people finding these nifty opportunities and making start-ups that solve a solution, but I am wondering is how did those people come up with that solution in the first place? Where were they looking? Because as a college student, I'm studying subjects unrelated business and I don't have tangible skills that would be of value to a start-up. If I have time, I will read business books (currently reading the lean start-up) and look at business news. But thats as far my exploration goes. How does a college student learn about different industries and find opportunities within them. I know this sounds naïve, but for example, to write a lab report, you might look up publications and journal articles to find evidence for your hypothesis. How can I do this same process, but in a business sense? Does coming up with a solution solely come from being in the field, or can you develop this while just researching the field as a young student? I would like to know essentially, how can I, while in university, research an industry to the point where I can spot gaps and opportunities? Hopefully I could act on them after undergrad when the time comes. [link] [comments]  |
| How would you best spend $100,000 to market your p2p startup. Posted: 07 Feb 2019 10:54 AM PST I am asking because I may come into some funds and was looking for unique ways to promote my p2p (think Craigslist) e-commerce applications. How much or should I even spend money on SEO, Digital Advertising, FB, Snap, Reddit, Insta, Viral Media, PR etc? Looking for ideas that are both safe and/or high risk high reward. *There is other money that is allocated to the product. Over the past 2 years we have spent 90% of our funds on development. This 100k is strictly to get people aware of and using our product. [link] [comments]  |
| Should we make Amazon sign an NDA? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 11:56 PM PST My company (myself and my cofounders) have a meeting with Amazon VC next week to present our business and work out a way that we can move forward together. Our Saas solution would fit in well with what Amazon is trying to do with physical retail. We're at a stage where we have a MVP and we're pushing out our beta within the next few weeks. However, we cannot deny that the fact that, although we could still be successful if Amazon took and integrated our idea, it would definitely make life much harder for us. So, as the title states, should we take along an NDA to try and cover ourselves? Or will this be viewed as bad etiquette? Any advice would be much appreciated. :-) [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for some feedback on something I'm currently working on Posted: 08 Feb 2019 01:53 AM PST So im about half way through working on this side project of mine and want to get some (more) feedback on the feasibility of the idea/business. A little bit about me first, I'm a software engineer from Australia, and am currently doing all the development my self (which saves some money but costs a fair chunk of my time). I've built some stuff in the past (subscription tracker, conference talks website etc.) but have a tendancy of running into a business before fully scoping out the idea and whether or not there is actually a product-market fit. This time I have tried to do more on the planning side and market research, before diving in but want to get some feedback now I have it more refined and started working on it. A lot of people get a bit funky about sharing their idea's publicly on the internet, especially on reddit in a startup community, but as everyone says, ideas aren't as important as execution. Also if someone did steal this idea and do it better then me I wouldn't really be angry, because as I'm about to go into, this solves a problem for me, so I would just be stoked that there's a tool out there that does this! Also this might just plain and simple be a bad idea and something I should discard, so really I have nothing to lose. I feel like a lot of the time i focus on features of products i build, rather then the problems they solve. So with this (longish post) I'm first going to go through what the problem is, then how I will attempt to solve it followed by the problems/issues I think I will face and feedback i'm looking for IDEA: So the idea comes from something I strongly believe in - that everyone should always be trying to continuously work on improving some part of their life. For me this is typically improving my development skills, but also extends to working on my soft/interpersonal skills. For others it might be improving their sales skills or even working on their technique at the gym. You see this sentiment reflected a lot in the startup/entrpereneur community with people always posting about the latest books they've read, podcasts they've listened to and ted talks they've watched, so clearly I'm not alone. However, there are three problems I have run into with how I approach my self learning:
So the solution I came up with to solve my problem is this. A platform where you are easily able to track all the resources you've consumed (still trying to come up with better terminology - any ideas?) as well as not only know what you should be consuming next, but also what industry leaders, friends and family are consuming to help keep you stay motivated. So basically, it's like a platform based around skills and learning with learning resources being shared between people trying to achieve similar goals. To give you an example of how it works, let's say you just finished reading a book on leadership, (If you are looking for a book on leadership, i just finished Extreme Ownership and can't recommend it enough). You would login to the platform and add this as a book you've read. Once you've added it, you will be asked 3 questions:
This would then get stored away in your learning history, where you can view all the resources you've used to help you achieve your skills. For me, and other's i've talked to, seeing all the resources they've read/watched etc. really helps with the motivation to continue to do more learning. Sort of like when you are trying to lose weight and actually start to notice a difference - you're resolve becomes focused and you become more motivated. It also helps with the consolidation of knowledge as over time you are able to go back over the notes. This would also be posted to your timeline where everyone who follows you/visits your profile will be able to see all the resources you've consumed to help you achieve your goals and what you rated the resources. Obviously, you would be able to hold discussions around this with people commenting etc. on these posts. If you follow someone with similar interests as you and see something they have read, you will also be able to add this to an 'up next' list of resources you want to read next. So the general idea here is that overtime, this would build up the network of learning resources on the platform allowing someone to easily come on and see what the best resources are for the skill's they want to work on. E.g. let's say you are entrepreneurial and want to work on your marketing skills. You might search the platform for all the best resources related to marketing based on what other users have added and how they ranked them. For me personnaly, I see this as a way to avoid all the endless hours trawling through amazon reviews, goodreads, reddit and youtube trying to find something new to read or watch.Everything will aggregated into a single platform (bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea) making it super simple to know what to read next. EDIT: Even on the front page of /r/entrepreneur i just saw a post asking what the best marketing books are Other features include:
Revenue Now in order to actually turn this in to a business, I am thinking about a few different strategies along with an enterprise version.
Enterprise So after traction picks up I am looking at building out an enterprise version (which was actually my original idea). This uses a lot of the same features from the free public version but also has a few extra. The general idea is the same (e.g. promoting self improvement to employee's within your company) but also restricting the timeline to only others in the company as well as grouping employees into sections/teams. It also has the ability for employers to designate a learning budget per employee, e.g. you have $500 per year learning budget with employee's being able to submit resources to be bought on their behalf by the company. This would also extend to allowing employers to suggest resources to employees as well as create their own learning tracks for getting up to speed with parts of their business. For example, as a developer at work we use certain technologies and adopt certain patterns, and currently in order to get new employees up to speed it involves slacking them a heap of links and pointing them to different parts of the code base. Have a tool which outlined resources they can use to get up to speed quickly I think would help immensly. Issues/Possible problems
So basically that's it! I would love to hear your feedback on this idea and whether or not i should continue or try my hand at something else. Thanks for reading and any feedback I get, I really appreicate it! [link] [comments]  |
| Having second thoughts about co founder Posted: 07 Feb 2019 05:52 PM PST I'm in a pretty non standard situation and after doing some research I think having some more opinions would help me make a decision. I'm currently in a 2 person startup with a friend that we've been working on for roughly 2 years part time. He puts in around 10-20 hours and I put in around 5-10 hours. He's able to work on this project during his full time job, but since I'm a software engineer I can't work on it at work so I only do it when I have free time. When I first agreed to do this, I thought he would handle the business side and I would handle the engineering side. What ended up happening is he does junior level engineering work while I mentored him and built the bulk of the system from scratch. However, he pays all the bills which has equated to $xx,xxx so far since he makes maybe 3 times my salary. Currently I'm getting a bit unhappy working in this situation and am not sure I want to do it long term. He wants majority of the company since he has paid actual money into it, and since he knows some coding he second guesses me a lot on my decisions so I'm not sure if I'm even needed at that point if I'm just going to be vetoed. When it comes to talking about how much equity to give other people, he seems to want to give stuff like 5% to employees and 0.5% for every lead a certain sales person makes. I'm having trouble convincing him that we can't be that loose with giving away equity but he wants to be generous. I want to be fair and generous too, but those numbers are too high to me. When we were talking about equity splits between us, it started off at 55/45 but after he found out about the slicing pie model it went more towards 70/30. This is due to the more hours, the money he put in, and also he claims that since he works on this, he doesn't have time to earn more money in his current job and as I mentioned before he earns a lot more than I do. The way I saw it, was I was putting in the work of a senior software engineer and he was putting in the work of a junior software engineer so the money he put in and time basically equals my contributions. I have a feeling the split might not come out to be close since we're starting to make the company official, and in that case I would probably leave. I'm just wondering if I'm bitching about nothing, or if this is legit not a good deal for me. I'd like to stay friends with him, but working with him has been pretty difficult as of late. [link] [comments]  |
| How did you get your first 100 customers? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 11:39 PM PST Many people think entrepreneurship is easy and they take a domain, write some content and call themselves the CEO of XYZ company, many such people without an intention and goal in mind are just diluting the word 'Entrepreneurship.' [link] [comments]  |
| Have you worked with an affiliate partner? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 09:20 PM PST Once a startup gets off the ground, how soon should I expect to look for and work with affiliate partners? For example if I built a small business around a particular mobile application, when (if ever) would it make sense to find affiliate partners like industry relevant bloggers, news publications, large community forums, etc, to advertise my application on their platforms, to their followers/readers? Also, would these offers typically be commission based or should I expect flat rate fees? Curious to hear your experiences, thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Need advice for first meeting with a potential investor. Posted: 07 Feb 2019 06:03 PM PST I am meeting with a wealthy individual this Saturday and to be honest I have no idea what to expect and what to ask for. Our startup has only 3 people and is barely entering it's development stage. We also really don't have any traction. Currently we dont have any expenses but eventually we will need money for advertising and server costs. Any one who's experience what I'll go through have advice for me? Is there a certain amount that I should ask for. Is there any legal business paperwork that will need to be completed. Any advice will help! [link] [comments]  |
| Thoughts on “non-technical” engineers? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 01:57 PM PST I'd like to hear your thoughts on the different streams of engineering. I am an engineer but consider myself to be a non-technical founder. Upon submitting my application to a pitch competition, someone advised me to remove the "bio" from "bioengineering" next to my name. There are all sorts of engineers: civil, mechanical, chemical, aerospace, etc… On one hand, I felt it was misleading because I feel someone might associate that with a technical role in a start-up…. On the other hand, I am truly an engineer, just one who does not perform advanced coding (we only study basic coding in the earlier years). So where do we engineers fall? How do I market myself/skills (problem solver, effective communicator?)?! Thank you. Edit: my start-up is not related to bioengineering. [link] [comments]  |
| Starting a business in 40 days, until then; what do I do? Posted: 07 Feb 2019 04:08 AM PST I have secured funding and the bank says I cannot withdraw the money until the 40th day. I have an office but no equipments. I want to make use of this free time, the app-based startup I'm launching will do "an on-demand delivery for everything that fits a bike." I have designed the UI and made a video prototype for our MVP (PM me if you wanna check it, I'm dying for feedback haha). However, I don't code; so that's how far I have gone. Now, I don't know what to do, I spend most of my time listening to a16z and reading on Medium. What should I do with this free time? [link] [comments]  |
| Best manufacturing type for small plastic product Posted: 07 Feb 2019 10:24 AM PST Hello I hope that this is the right sub for questions like this We're creating a small plastic product for stopping your headphones from tangling. Before we manufacture a large volume, we want to do a test run of about 500 units. We're fairly new in this area and we're unsure what type of manufacture we should go with. (3D Printing, injection molding etc...) Our problem with 3d printing is that the plastic is generally biodegradable which makes the product break after a while. Is this the case with all 3d printed products? Or is that just some. And also build quality is important to us. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Seeking Methods for Finding a Reliable Contract Manufacturer (Health Product) Posted: 07 Feb 2019 08:41 AM PST Hello r/startups! I am in the early stages of developing a custom nutrition/energy product that serves a very large market, but also does not exist in the form I am aiming for and would create a niche within itself. I have begun looking for contract manufacturers to start the testing/production process. While I have found a few viable options, I can't help but feel that there are lots of competitive manufacturers that I am not finding through simple web search. Is there any online service for locating contract manufacturers within a certain geographical area? If not, do any of you have experience with launching a custom health product line (not private label), and could offer any advice on locating the best manufacturer for getting things started? I am located in Texas and will be starting operations here, if that helps. Thank you and I appreciate any and all insights you could provide! [link] [comments]  |
| Co-founder red-flag: He doesn't read books Posted: 07 Feb 2019 09:34 AM PST I've been pre-launch with a co-founder for a few months and I'm the end of my patience. [link] [comments]  |
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