Startups Micro-budget marketing suggestions to obtain first few sales? (B2C $400-$3000 product) |
- Micro-budget marketing suggestions to obtain first few sales? (B2C $400-$3000 product)
- Advice Needed: How to launch our new startup and e-commerce platform.
- Stock Option and share dilution
- Need help learning to get funding
- Collaboration recourses for non-tech entrepreneur?
- Advice needed. I have a company and want to sell or get investors involved.
- How to launch my ancillary product?
- The best strategy to collect feedback from users
- When people sign up to your mailing list but don't engage?
- Technical Consulting Strategy/Pricing Question
| Micro-budget marketing suggestions to obtain first few sales? (B2C $400-$3000 product) Posted: 06 Apr 2019 01:29 PM PDT I'm at a stage in my startups life where I want to obtain the first few sales, however, I'm not sure how to go about it. I know based on the rules I'm not allowed to describe my startup in detail but essentially its an e-commerce B2C product aimed at people who live in apartments, is $400-$3000 and has to do with interior design/furniture. I'm wanting to spend very little on a marketing budget not only because spending less is great but because I want to be able to obtain feedback so I can pivot/iterate faster if need be. If I spend all this money marketing a product no one wants i'm just going to lose money. So keeping that all in mind my first idea was to go door to door sales. I spent $60 on brochures and went door to door for 6ish days. I knocked on around 3000 doors, talked to around 300 people, only 200 took a brochure. Of those 200 only 15 visited my site the day I dropped off a brochure. No one came close to buying it. Now I understand some people might visit my site/product a week or two after i drop off a brochure but 15 out of 200 is pretty crap I would think. So i've kind of stopped doing door to door because I'm starting to thing it's a waste of time or at least not the best approach. I'm exploring spending ~$80 total on ads on a variety of social networks but I feel like there could be better ways. So I guess my question is what guerrilla marketing techniques do you have? Ways that limit budget but because i'm so small I can utilize? Or perhaps what are micro-budgeting techniques you have heard other companies do? [link] [comments]  |
| Advice Needed: How to launch our new startup and e-commerce platform. Posted: 06 Apr 2019 10:22 PM PDT Thank you for reading this! I'm an African stay at home mom living in Europe with a PhD in what used to be a very lucrative industry. I have been working on an e-commerce platform to connect African owners of some specific commodities related to my industry to trade on the global market. This area of the sector is under-digitised, my co-founder and I are very knowledgeable about these commodities because we both studied the science aspects but not the business or marketing part. A few months ago, a European startup developed a similar platform and raised over €6 million in series B funding within a few weeks! There are several articles, interviews and press releases calling them the disruptors and the future of digitalisation in our industry etc. We've been working on this for several months, way before I read about this startup, plus they are interested in the European market and not Africa. Our platform due to launch in a few weeks would almost do the same, but we are targeting the African market because of the commodity surplus, it will also offer additional services to support the commodity value chain (such as storage, insurance, shipping etc.), help more small- scale commodity owners to trade in the global market at a very fair price. We already have potential users eager to sign up as soon as we launch; our initial plan is to do a LinkedIn and social media posts announcing the launch and hoping it will pick up and gain tractions. We currently don't have any investor or money budgeted for marketing or press releases. Please, I need advice on how best to publicise and make this work for us and hopefully get investors too. I don't know how to go from being a stay at home mom with no penny to breaking the boundaries of entrepreneurship. I will appreciate some advice and suggestions. [link] [comments]  |
| Stock Option and share dilution Posted: 06 Apr 2019 05:41 PM PDT For the first time in my career, I took a job at a startup a year and a few months ago. As part of my contract I was promised 10,000 stock options that vest over the course of 4 years (2,500) available each year. At the time of signing the contract the CFO (not at the company anymore) assured me that 10,000 is equivalent to 0.4% ownership since there are 2,500,000 shares total. I've been pressing to potentially buy my first 2,500 shares since I hit my one year mark and the company keeps saying they need more time. After 3 months, they said that they had been rolling out a new cap table and everyone at the company is going to get a generous amount of equity (even employees that weren't offered options in their contract). I've also heard during this time that they have significantly diluted the total shares and there are now around 7 million shares total. Is this fairly typical for startups (dilution) and should I ask for a % value in my contract next time, rather than a number of shares? If I end up with less than 0.4% I probably won't be upset, since they need to be purchased and they may one day be worth nothing. But, should I try to negotiate if I'm offered much less % than I was made to think I would receive? [link] [comments]  |
| Need help learning to get funding Posted: 06 Apr 2019 09:17 PM PDT I know it's probably been asked a billion times on here but going to ask So I had an idea about an web app/mobile app.. and I really think it might hit so I started building it out but decided ultimately I'd rather build it with other people and not myself because there's ideas that I just know I haven't come up with that they've come up with.. so I brought in two friends who also code and have had some really dope features that I wouldn't in a million years come up with. With that said.. while we build a working prototype.. can someone please teach me how everything regarding funding works? I'm sure we just don't call up a VC and say we're at the door and looking to be buzzed in... how do we go about actually funding this? Do we need to have customers first? Can we get funding on just a working prototype? I saw another thread where a book "lean startup" was mentioned and I just purchased it but until it arrives can someone help? [link] [comments]  |
| Collaboration recourses for non-tech entrepreneur? Posted: 06 Apr 2019 04:25 PM PDT Hi all! Curious if there are any idea sharing/collaboration resources for a non-tech entrepreneur (me) to work with people more technical in startups? I'm fairly strong in bizdev, brand development, and operations and have worked in a few different startups. Something I love doing. Strong tech knowledge, not strong tech skill. Looking to just help others drive ideas and add equity with some of my experience (for free, just looking to develop relationships and personal experience). Are there any chatrooms, websites, ect for collaboration like this? Thanks all! [link] [comments]  |
| Advice needed. I have a company and want to sell or get investors involved. Posted: 06 Apr 2019 06:01 AM PDT Hi all. I'm the owner of a software development company and we specialize in general software development (web, mobile, you name it) , machine learning solutions and ethereum dapps. The company is two years old and have 15 employees. Made 200k the first year and 600k last year. Our current problem is that we have no sales background and sales are coming slow. Also, two of our clients had financial issues and had to cancel our contracts. This leaves us in a fragile position, so me and my two co-founders are considering different strategies. What do you recommend to do, reddit? [link] [comments]  |
| How to launch my ancillary product? Posted: 06 Apr 2019 02:11 PM PDT I want to start an ancillary business providing a management solution for cannabis collectives. This is not a napkin idea; the first version is over 90% complete and provides a solid foundation for product growth. I do have a few other competitors on the market now. From what I can tell, almost all of them work in the cloud. My product does not, it is a physical piece of hardware with special software installed that is designed to be plugged into your collective's network and be up and going in 10-ish minutes. It is digitally licensed, and contacts my servers to obtain that license and to obtain software updates; otherwise the unit never talks to the Internet (and those two functions can be done offline). The software (or special sauce) is powerful and unique, but the underlying embedded Linux engineering is also powerful and unique, and can put many IoT vendors like Samsung, Vizio, Linksys, etc to shame. The goal is to lease the hardware and software together as one unit supported as one thing on a subscription basis. I have a price point in mind that most of my potential customers will be more than happy to pay for the workloads this product can reduce and overall ease of use, let alone the unrivaled security. I have a handful of prospective clients in SoCal and a draft contract in the works. Beyond the product being over 90% complete I also have the accompanying infrastructure either in place or ready to be put in; it's not the greatest and can use some improvements and redundancy but budgets are budgets. This includes a billing/invoicing tool, a ticket system, a phone switch and phone number, email and the like. So where do I go from here and how do I get this off the ground? Right now this is just me, myself and I. I am a control freak and that is a personal trait I need to work on, but I take some pride in the quality and engineering that has went into this. While I am willing to let some people into this I am not willing to give up a controlling share. In the grand scheme of things, what I need to get this off the ground would be considered "small potatoes" to most. If this sells at the rate I am setting for it, and I can tackle even a modest amount of customers (let's say, 20?) annual revenue will be in the millions. My starting market will be Southern California but would like to eventually expand out to new markets. I am specifically looking for finding potential investors and lawyers, as well as any advise or 'got-ya's on starting such a business. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| The best strategy to collect feedback from users Posted: 06 Apr 2019 04:11 AM PDT Hi Reddit! I am a founder of a little saas platform for portfolio managers. We have just released our 1st public version but I don't understand if our users like the software or not. So my strategy is to collect as much feedback from users as possible. BUT I don't understand how to do that. So we have a lending page on Tilda which referees to our saas platform. And when they go inside the platform we simply loose them because we don't have analytics inside. So my question is: how to collect as much feedback about the product as possible? How do you do it? What is the best strategy? [link] [comments]  |
| When people sign up to your mailing list but don't engage? Posted: 06 Apr 2019 11:13 AM PDT Context: We're a social networking startup that's testing the core assumptions of our product using a mailing list first. We ask users if they'd like to opt in at the beginning of the week, and if so, what times they're free this weekend and what they're interested in. We then match them into groups of people nearby to go hang out together. We're testing this with a mailing list first. Instead of an app pinging you to opt in, we email you, and you respond via email. The issue we're running into right now is we've got a growing mailing list of signups to our site, but when we send them an introductory questionnaire, many don't end up filling it out. My email tracker tells me that they open the email, click through the link to the Google form, but don't fill it out. I'm trying to figure out why this might be the case and what it means. On the form, we ask for their name, age, gender, if they have a car, how long they've lived in the area, and what they generally enjoy doing. Does any of that feel too invasive? We can't really do matchmaking without that info... Some members of the team has suggested it may be because of the Google form, which doesn't feel very "legit". Thoughts on this? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Technical Consulting Strategy/Pricing Question Posted: 06 Apr 2019 05:15 AM PDT I have an idea of implementing a statistics model (not of my invention) for a local small business that would add a cool feature to their business. The problem is I have no idea where to begin on assigning a dollar value for my opening sales pitch/start of negotiations. There'd be initial configuration and programming work to implement the model (which I have a working demo of)- I have a better understanding of that, as I'd be charging an hourly rate somewhat based on how I value the opportunity cost of my own time ($100 /hour?). After that is where I don't know what to do. It'd be great to try and license the model to them so I earn a recurring revenue stream without much additional work post-implementation and also be able to license the same model to other potential customers. However, I don't know what price tag to place there, nor do I know if that's something they'd go for. Maybe a one time lump sum payment...? Or just charge for the hourly implementation work? How do you think I should approach something like this? [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Startups - Finding problems and solving them!. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment