Startups What’d your beginning stages look like? |
- What’d your beginning stages look like?
- To the SaaS founders who are tech savvy but are having trouble marketing
- To restaurant owners/managers, what's the best way to approach your restaurant?
- My plan to bring on a CTO co-founder.
- Why do engineers keep declining our offer after talking to their wives?
- Everything keeps going wrong, but I don't want to give up. How? :(
- How to find top talent?
- Advice on setbacks to square 0?
- Pivoted my startup. How to change my LinkedIn profile?
- What technical skills should I learn before making a startup?
- A quick question for UK businesses please
| What’d your beginning stages look like? Posted: 31 Jan 2019 04:58 PM PST Everyone has ideas, but what sets regular Joe's apart from entrepreneurs is that they take action on those ideas. How'd you take the leap from idea to product or company? What finally pushed you to give it a try? I have an idea, I'm not even sure where to start, constantly listening to how I built this for inspiration, but I'm constantly feeling like I don't have the right skill set, or support, to take the leap. What were your first steps? How many ideas failed before you had a successful one? How old were you? I find this world so interesting and feel a huge urge to be a part of it. [link] [comments]  |
| To the SaaS founders who are tech savvy but are having trouble marketing Posted: 31 Jan 2019 11:47 PM PST Anybody have a billion dollar idea but still stuck getting very little engagement with people? First off, stop talking about your product and start letting people know how your product will enhance their life. Connect with them on an emotional level to let them know how your product will jumpstart a change in their business or personal life. First rule about tech marketing is to NOT talk about tech. You will scare off the average customer and it is almost impossible to try to bring them back. Sometimes word of mouth just isn't enough but you don't know what else to do. Comment if anyone has had any struggles getting their product name out there. Hopefully we can all help each other. [link] [comments]  |
| To restaurant owners/managers, what's the best way to approach your restaurant? Posted: 01 Feb 2019 12:42 AM PST I've tried many different avenues of marketing strategies to get restaurants on board my platform, but none seem to be effective. My platform is for pickup orders and the tech is fully built. The only thing I've gained from reaching out to restaurants so far is really thick skin. When I cold call, I tell them that I'm a part of a company with a new platform and that there's a lot of opportunity with being one of our first customers. In my emails, I include a business partnership guide that includes detailed pricing, how to sign up instantly, and customer support. I feel like I've put in a lot of effort into preparing the platform and onboarding, but I'm having little luck with sales and actually getting restaurants on board. Unfortunately, I also don't have any friends in the restaurant business. Is there anything that I'm missing? What are competitors like Snackpass doing that my startup isn't? Approaches I've tried:
Number of Customers/Restaurants: 0 [link] [comments]  |
| My plan to bring on a CTO co-founder. Posted: 31 Jan 2019 02:39 PM PST So I posted here and r/smallbusiness about this and got a lot of feedback. I just wanted to relay the final plan here and provide some backstory to see if it's a fair/normal agreement. Company started Jan 2018. Is a digital marketing agency. It is 100% owned by me, and the work is done by either myself or contractors. We did 100k in revenue in 2018, are due to make 150 so far in 2019, but that's likely to increase. Bringing on a CTO so we can start developing apps and software too. Current agreement is as follows: We will operate under my company for the first year, splitting the profits of all software development, and any marketing that comes from a software developer lead. We will both continue working together remotely. At the end of the first year, he must quit his job (he's a dev) and work full time with me, at this point he gets 5% equity. The profit sharing will end, we will incorporate(currently an LLC) and we will both take minimal salaries (I'm thinking $36k, he want $50k, something that concerns me, as I want to reinvest every dollar possible, but besides the point). He will get 5% equity every year following until the end of the 4th year where he will then own 20% of the company and have a seat on the board. So that's the plan. My primary questions are as follows:
Thoughts? Edit: Hope this helps clarify.
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| Why do engineers keep declining our offer after talking to their wives? Posted: 31 Jan 2019 02:57 AM PST Me and my cofounder (both female and single) have been trying to hire engineers for our SaaS startup. We already have had some angel investment. We both have extensive experience in the product we are building and have had a lot of interest from both investors and potential customers. So much interest that we want to hire an engineer or two to help get our beta out faster. We've met with 3 different potential senior engineers/future leaders at different times that all seemed super excited about the opportunity and the product, did their own research and even started to code to show us examples even. They've all said they were in at one point. We've been flexible on the mix between salary and equity. We are flexible with work schedule and most of our company works remote the majority of the time. But as soon as all of them have talked to their wives they told us they had to decline, which has been gut-wrenching for us because we get really excited to have them join the team. So my question is, why do the wives keep telling our potential engineers no? Is it because we are both women? Or are they using the wives as an excuse for something else? Would love some insight on this / what could we be doing better to hire our first senior engineer. [link] [comments]  |
| Everything keeps going wrong, but I don't want to give up. How? :( Posted: 31 Jan 2019 11:48 AM PST I run a startup in Asia, related to property construction. We were doing well for a while, making good sales and getting great contracts, positive cashflow, growing team, happy investors, but my cofounder f'd up big time and lied to a potential big investor about where we are in the progress of the company and our plans to grow, and lied to us about it costing us not just the investor but serious amounts of money from our side. The big investor pulled out, and of course I had to end things with that co-founder and kick him out for betrayal of our trust and behaviour that showed lack of integrity. Ever since then I had to carry the weight of the whole company by myself and things have been going bad, one thing after another. From a turning economy to dropping sales and loss of a major contract to financial problems which led to team morale crashing and investors loss of confidence leading them to practically hounding me at every couple of weeks for solutions and results I can't produce, and worse now that word is getting out and so it's become MUCH harder to get other customers to come on board because it seems we are in trouble and therefore it is questionable we will deliver, producing a chicken and an egg situation. Now I started losing main team members. It feels like everything is screaming "this is a train-wreck. Walk away and don't bother anymore", but I don't want to. I REALLY believe in the core of our value offering which NO ONE in the local industry is even close to being the same (modular construction that is cheaper and significantly higher quality), and I do believe in myself even after losing several key team members, I feel I can still do this... but I am looking at this train-wreck and something inside is screaming "Really?" I don't want to give up but the frustration is killing me. Anybody ever been in such a situation where EVERYTHING is going wrong? Can it be turned around? How do you get out from being in between a rock and a hard place, with loss-of-confidence causing many clients to turn down working with us, and because of the low sales it produces lower confidence? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2019 02:10 PM PST Hey guys, I'm with a startup right now that's in the DFW, TX area so it's a large metroplex which is great for sourcing talent. What are the best places and strategies to find top end developers? We are getting ready to secure a multi-million dollar seed round and will need to start immediately hiring talent. We are going to need rockstar front end and full stack devs along with UI/UX designers. Currently we only have 2 devs and we just lucked out on finding them though referrals. I have done research on salaries for positions, and 120K + stock options seems to be about right for a senior front end & full stack devs. Is this accurate? With that said, is it best to source from StackOverFlow, Github, & LinkedIn or find a recruiter? We won't have months to hire these positions. All advice is appreciated, cheers! [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on setbacks to square 0? Posted: 31 Jan 2019 03:22 PM PST I am a wantrepreneur. I try to write down every idea I have, see if I can flesh it out into a realistic business. While most of my ideas either aren't great, or are too out of scope for me to execute on, every time I come up with a slam dunk I find out it's patented. Take today for example. I saw the DeepFake video of Steve Buscemi's face on Jennifer Lawrence's body, and thought of encoding a digital signature into live recorded video footage as a tamper seal against doctored footage. While researching this idea, I found a patent on this exact technology for this exact purpose. Now I'm back to square 0. Again. Fortunately this time I haven't invested money in it. I don't know, maybe I'm just venting, or maybe someone has some good advice for this situation. I just feel as if the clock is ticking and I haven't started a thing yet. [link] [comments]  |
| Pivoted my startup. How to change my LinkedIn profile? Posted: 31 Jan 2019 11:21 AM PST Hello all, I wanted to ask for your opinions. I started a startup last year. There was no customer. Recently I pivoted to a very different product (plus, the product name is going to be different as well). My LinkedIn profile currently says "Co-founder of XXX" (the company name before the pivot). How should I update my LinkedIn profile? option 1) Delete the previous company name as if it did not exist. Update with the pivoted, new company name. option 2) Delete the previous company name as if it did not exist. Update as "Stealth mode startup". option 3) Update the description of the previous company to "stealth mode". option 4) any other idea? Would it be confusing if I reached out to you for a customer interview for my pivoted, new product, BUT under my previous company name? This is where my concern lies. Any ideas / opinions would be appreciated. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| What technical skills should I learn before making a startup? Posted: 31 Jan 2019 03:18 AM PST Hey. I'm in third year biology and have decided to become an entrepreneur after undergrad. Although I am confident in my skills ability, I don't have any technical skills which makes me feel uneasy. However, I just starting taking a basic coding class (focused on python) and I realized how much I enjoy the experience of coding/programming. I would like to make use of this in the future. Mind you, I'm not a genius. What technical skills should I learn that would be tremendously useful in starting a business? Skills that would potentially reduce mvp costs/hiring costs/outsourcing costs/other costs. I am not a software engineer by any means, but are there certain skills I can still pick up and become good at? I've heard of web development, but aren't there services that can make a website for you? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| A quick question for UK businesses please Posted: 31 Jan 2019 08:40 AM PST Hi all, Hope your businesses are going well! I have just started and plane to ebay/Amazon flip and also open a Shopify store for other items. My question is related to spend as a Limited company, as I want to play by the rules of HMRC. My question is: - If I am going into charity shops, general stores and buying things cheaper to Flip online, I get a receipt so can just put that down as expenses on the business I guess. Then as it sells, thats my revenue. I think I understand this correctly. - However, If I am buying from a guy down the street called John who is selling his xbox and games for £100 and I know I can flip for £200 - can I just send him a bank transfer and collect the item? Or would he need to invoice me? -Also the same applies to if I go to car boot sales to buy, how could I tell HMRC how much I have spent on 'stock' , without them thinking I have just pocketed some cash/money? I expect my turnover to be well under £85k and I am not VAT registered (at least for year 1), however would be great to clearly understand how I can deal with this sort of money changing hands from the outset. Many thanks!! [link] [comments]  |
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