Startups Weekly Feedback and Support Thread |
- Weekly Feedback and Support Thread
- Hiring mentors for junior developers
- My experiences since I quit my job to become an entrepreneur and why I’m about to give up.
- Not sure what I'm doing wrong?
- Best strategy to monetize a social network?
- What stops (or makes it difficult for) you to collect and post reviews from your customers?
- Austin/Denver/Boulder
- When is it a good time to start charging?
- When is it time to scale up?
- Compensation discussion...convertible equity/cash payable
- Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager wants me to shut down my agency and move in-house as CMO with zero equity....
- Offered to join pre-fund stage company as non-technical co-founder...but they will sponsor me to move to Austalia- stupid risk or not?
- What are peoples' opinions of the UK for beginning a startup over the next couple of months?
| Weekly Feedback and Support Thread Posted: 08 Apr 2019 04:08 AM PDT Create something? Let's see it! Feedback or Support RequesterPlease use the following format:
Post your site along with your stack and technologies used and receive feedback from the community. Please refrain from just posting a link and instead give us a bit of a background about your creation. Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, or code review. Feel free to request support with hiring talent, finding a job/clients, recruiting a co-founder, getting your pitch deck made, or anything objective based that is specific to your startup. You can also receive advice and feedback in instant chat using the /r/startups discord. Feedback Providers
Support Providers
[link] [comments]  |
| Hiring mentors for junior developers Posted: 08 Apr 2019 05:31 PM PDT My team and I, we're working in HR-Tech area. We found out that there's a big problem on the market — hiring developers. Although companies feel a lack of tech-related people, they are not ready to hire junior developers. We see the second problem here - juniors are struggling to land a job. So why companies do not employ junior developers? During several interviews with recruiters, founders and CTO's, we realized that the main problem is that there are no people in companies who are ready to teach juniors. Experienced team members don't have enough time for mentoring as they have to perform their tasks. It made us think that maybe there is an opportunity to create a service that can provide remote mentors to these companies. These distant mentors could teach juniors, review their code, answer some basic questions, help with dev tools and frameworks, etc. Maybe you have experience of hiring a mentor for junior developers at your company? I've heard only from one company that they did that. [link] [comments]  |
| My experiences since I quit my job to become an entrepreneur and why I’m about to give up. Posted: 09 Apr 2019 01:01 AM PDT It is my dream to become a successful entrepreneur. A year ago I finished my master in quantitative finance, which is a mix of statistic and financial math. After my studies I directly signed at a small algorithmic trading company that primary focuses on investing into stocks. My hope was to learn there how to write my own algorithms in the long run. After six month I decided to quit for several reasons: First, the learning rate dropped. The job was nice to deepen some basics, but I knew a lot in advance and the companies algorithms were rather simple. After the first couple of month I had to do some tasks, that consumed quite a fraction of my day, a monkey could have done. I'm not kidding, it included adjusting parameter based on graphical tools with red and green areas. Second, I was annoyed by working for money. Maybe it's idealism but selling my life time for money seems to be a pretty bad deal to me, especially because I don't need much to live. At least for the next couple of years. Money is only a bonus but not a driver. Third, I was bored by my own CV. It was straighter than a ruler... School → Bachelor → Master… Mixed with some experiences abroad and internships. Don't get me wrong, I was definitely not looking for travel experiences or something like that. I want to create something, to be part of a story. At the same time I realized that investment algorithms are not a good area to start a business in. Building algorithms and living from it's return, requires capital, as well as, huge time investments. If investing money of other people you need to go through regulation hell. After quitting Since I was still in probation time, the process of leaving the company took only two weeks. I decided not to waste my time by searching for job opportunities. I told myself that pressure helps being creative and to leave my comfort zone. So I started in January with no job, no idea what to go for, but highly motivated. I put my main focus on output. I was sick of learning without output. I studied my entire life, sometimes harder, most of the time less harder, but I did produce nearly no output. By output I mean a product or a service that creates a surplus. All I did is study and reach certificates. I started to connect regionally with the entrepreneurial scene. A friend of mine who had just started writing his master thesis, could also not make sense out of a classical employer employee relationship, and therefore decided to join. We built our own website to share our work and to present ourself. To produce output we made a YouTube video about the process of setting up a website. Nothing special, but a start. While doing this we were constantly thinking about ideas. We thought about many different topics, close to our field of expertise, such as crypto currencies, but also completely off topic, such as animal food consisting out of insects. At the beginning of February we agreed upon diving deeper into the drone sector. It's a rapidly growing area with a huge open source community. Our idea was to provide a website, where you could offer and book drone flights. Imagine steering a drone at the coastline of New Zealand while sitting on your coach. Consequently, we started to deal with the software and the open source technology. Pretty soon, we discovered many legal barriers of steering a drone remotely and not being physically present. Therefore, we focused on underwater drones instead. However, the tourism idea did not appeal to us that much under water. Nevertheless, we thought about applying drones for solving underwater problems. The technology got more fundable during the last decade, so opportunity to support or even replace expensive divers from our point of view. After a participation at a local startup week at the end of February, where we pitched our idea of using drones to scan ship hulls, we connected to a promising scholarship and a science institute. Because of this, we met an expert out of the deep sea technology who basically advised us not to pursue this idea because of our missing expertise. After this conversation my friend lost some trust into the idea. At the same time he realized that he has not enough time to go for such a big project and he doesn't have the feeling that the field we were about to enter would fit to him. This was disappointing for me, but I understood my friend and I had my own doubts about the project. Nevertheless, I thought about continuing but it stole my thunder. Thereafter, my friend and I built another small website and played with deep learning. I like this field and it's the area I would search a job in, maybe in combination with finance. Right now, I have difficulties with judging ideas. I see how difficult they are and how much time they would take. I'm now three month in and did not achieve anything yet, why should I continue? The more time passes the more difficult it will get for me to get a job at a descent employee. I don't like to be pessimistic because it makes slow, but maybe I'm just honest? As you can see, I tried quite a few things but from my point of view I'm missing some commitment. I do not have the feeling that I really tried to follow a specific idea, even though I invested three month now. I'm very happy that I took these steps so far, even though it seems that I did not succeed yet. I will take two days off and reconsider everything. What do you think? [link] [comments]  |
| Not sure what I'm doing wrong? Posted: 09 Apr 2019 01:31 AM PDT Hello everyone, I've been working on a project for quite some time now which is related to businesses sending receipts to customers through an online portal. It doesn't send it via email and paper is not used. Anyway, I've been spending money on advertisements lately to my target audience for quite some time. At this point, it looks like I'm burning money but not seeing many people registering or even using the free service. I don't know whether the PPC service I'm using doesn't hold enough customers or businesses don't need it. What would you do in this situation? Would you continue and try out new keywords or perhaps try another PPC service? [link] [comments]  |
| Best strategy to monetize a social network? Posted: 08 Apr 2019 02:26 PM PDT I have been building a mobile first social network/social utility for a while now. It is just about ready to market. The only thing that is still fuzzy to me is my monetization plan. At first, I was confident in using a freemium model (ads, with IAP to remove them monthly as well as extra features/no limits). I soon figured out that limiting the amount of content that a user can create and selling extra access is a terrible idea since it directly limits the content available on the platform, but that takes away a large incentive to pay. I then settled on ads only, with the ability of use rewarded ads to remove ads for the rest of the users session or for 30 minutes or something similar. The draw behind this is that I don't have to lock any features for free users, but they will be annoyed with ads. Then i had idea of just not monetizing at all for now until I have a stable user base which would give me time to create premium features and release a comprehensive subscription package all at once. Not monetizing at all and aiming at being acquired seems like a silly option and is not one that I'm considering right now. Does anyone have experience with monetizing a social network of sorts? Expenses will be pretty low since it's just me working on it and hosting fees are pretty small these days. [link] [comments]  |
| What stops (or makes it difficult for) you to collect and post reviews from your customers? Posted: 09 Apr 2019 12:15 AM PDT No one will dispute the importance of reviews and social proof in a business. But, there is a varying degree of focus towards this among people. So my question is: How do you actively encourage more reviews without seeming needy? Ideally, one would like more control over the reviews, but also want to make sure that prospects trust that the reviews are from real people. It also takes away time from selling and marketing if you are a small team. How do you achieve a balance there? How far you guys manage this successfully? If not, what's really the challenge for you? What stops (or makes it difficult for) you to collect and post reviews from your customers? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Apr 2019 06:11 PM PDT Which of these three places would be a best place to move for a working software developer that wants to network and start a tech start up? I currently live in Dallas and there are very few meetup events happening here related with tech startups. I have a full time remote software developer job but the job is not very motivating and there is just too much corporate politics. It is not my nature and I would like to be around people where the arguments during the meetings are for the best outcome of the product, not for the personal ego. While the money is OK (95K/year), I don't feel like I am gaining too much long term skills. I do spend lot of times on my side projects though but it would be nice to spend all my energy into things that I'm passionate about. So, I have been playing with this idea of moving to a city that has a thriving startup community. I am planning to work out of a co working space until I network with people and in a position where I can leave my current job. I want to network with other like minded people who are passionate about learning and growing on tech skills and create a non-addictive product. After a long research I narrowed down my choice of places to Boulder/Denver/Austin. While I would love to move to San Francisco, I kept it out of my choices because I want to also enjoy my life on the side during my startup grind years. The housing prices and the tax part of CA scares me. I could be totally wrong on this but that's what I got from my research. Still would love your input on SF vs those 3 places. I picked Boulder because it has a good start up scene, proximity to outdoors. Denver for almost similar reason to Boulder but cheaper housing price and more metro feel. Austin because lot of startup events happening but gets really hot. So, please give me your honest opinion about those three places for an aspiring tech founder. Few things I am looking for are as follows:
Side Note 1: If you transitioned from a software developer at a large company to founding a startup, how did you do it? What was your journey like. I would love to hear your experience and would be of great help to me and other readers in a similar situation. Side Note 2: I am also open to a job offer if your company is <50 people and have a good working culture. You can pm me on this. My current skills set are Java/python/Django/flask, little bit of playing with golang. TL;DR : Which of the 3 city mentioned in the title would be best to move for a working software developer to network and start a startup? [link] [comments]  |
| When is it a good time to start charging? Posted: 08 Apr 2019 02:30 PM PDT Here are some backgrounds: I started my company a year an a half ago to let people place buy limit orders on Amazon. You set a maximum price on an item that you would like to buy. The app will monitor and automatically places the order when the price drops below your price limit. The service grew to about $1.5 million of orders in the system. We have placed about $300,000 worth of orders with an average saving of about 30%. Most of our customers are gamers buying graphic cards. Example: a graphic card would cost $1,000 and we would place the order at about $500. The service has been running for free and I was making some affiliate money on the back end. The revenue was not enough to cover the cost of the first release of the application. Now I am launching Version 2 of the app with a total rewrite and was able to cut the cost down by 80%. The big question now is should I continue with the service for free and focus on growth or should I start charging? I have no idea on how much I should charge. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Apr 2019 08:33 AM PDT So right now my agency is pulling in ~$15k/month in revenue. All included, current expenses are ~$5k/month, this includes marketing which can be adjusted at any time, and is about 40% of expenses. Its worth noting that last month revenue was $10k/month, was at that for about 6 months, and before that it was climbing from 1.5-7.5k/month, over the course of 6 months. So growth has been pretty rapid, but it can stagnate. Right now its essentially just me working out of a sublet office of the family business that they are letting me use for free. Here's the problem, I'm begining to cap out on what i can handle. Im massively behind right now and things will only get harder from here. I have potential interns that want to join, but would only do so if i move the office to the city, which would cost an extra $1k/month, potentially more if i actually get them seats. Eventually i would plan to hire one of those interns after 3-6 months and get them a seat. Should i keep grinding away on my own, or start expanding. Is it too soon? [link] [comments]  |
| Compensation discussion...convertible equity/cash payable Posted: 08 Apr 2019 11:55 AM PDT I received an offer that I get paid up to a certain amount if the financing is in excess of 1.2M and I convert the rest to equity. I can convert the accrued fee into stock at pre-money valuation of $5M with an option to convert in 2021 and I could convert accrued comp into stock at a pre-money valuation of 10 million with option to convert in 2022. Does this seem reasonable for a startup? Hypothetically, he could raise for $1.1M and I wouldn't get paid cash even. Any other impacts and considerations I should be looking for? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Apr 2019 07:54 AM PDT Long story short, back in October 2018 I took on a client for digital marketing who runs 2 health-related startups. This client is a former Hedge Fund Manager, one of the top in the world. He is extremely well connected and wealthy. As our work progressed over fall and winter, we became pretty close, and he was really impressed with our skill set with digital marketing and how we helped his company. Now, the client is asking us to shut down our small digital marketing agency and join his healthcare-related startup which is unironically going to change the face of American healthcare. Our agency is very new, less than a year old. We are only at about $300k/year in revenue right now ($150k of that is from this client) and I'm maxed out with no employees yet. There is a huge performance-based aspect to my current contract with him. There's a $5,000 monthly retainer for misc. work, and the rest of my pay is all performance-based, which I am very happy with. By May we will be making $20k/mo from the performance-based pay. My issue is that I don't know how to structure a possible in-house deal or buyout where I come in as a CMO. He offered to match our current retainers with all other clients, and keep the performance-based thing in place as well. So it would be $150k in salary, and huge performance-based compensation. But when I brought up a possible equity position in the company, he made up a cop out about how it would increase his accounting by 100's of thousands per month or something dumb like that. What is a traditional compensation for a CMO position in regards to stock, preferred stock, equity, salary, bonuses etc? Company info: This is a startup in some sense of the word, but the company is very profitable already and well into the 8 figures in annual revenue with good margins. But we are very small and private still. Very important note: he stated to me that the company is in a Pre-IPO phase where we are actively working on prepping everything for an IPO. My biggest worries are as follows: 1) I get a stock package in writing but then investors get preferred stock and even if we IPO for like $100,000,000 I still only get like 6 figures or whatever (I feel like this is common right?) 2) I take a CMO position and have to navigate the annoying world of company politics etc without really getting a massive increase in salary/profits 3) I sell myself short somehow. I have generated over $10mm in contracts on $30k in ad spend in last 90 days. So, in short, they are really happy with us. 4) Investors come in and look at our performance-based agreement and try to kick me out I am under 35, so taking a CMO position at my age is pretty dang attractive. But my current contract is not very strong - I need to update it soon either way. Very open to advice or thoughts - navigating these waters can be difficult. Appreciate it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Apr 2019 02:46 AM PDT Hi Folks, I've been offered a role that exactly fits my unique background. The compensation plan includes a mix of salary, cash `bonus` to lower tax burden, as well as 30% of salary going toward equity in the first year. All in all, it would be equal to what I make in my current company which I am actively looking to leave. I see the upside, but I also see many risks -
I have the offer, and the move would not be until Feb 2020 - so I have time to make sure the company is viable as I will be assisting part-time until Jan 2020. It`s risky, but I also strongly believe in the full `idea` - problem, solution, rev model, and founding team has a good mix of experience. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| What are peoples' opinions of the UK for beginning a startup over the next couple of months? Posted: 08 Apr 2019 03:34 AM PDT As a Brit who has an idea for an app and a potential physical product and plans to develop them over the next couple of months, I was wondering whether anyone here has any opinions with regards to the current economic/political climate here and how it could impact my startup? Setting it up the UK, I would obviously be a lot more familar with tax/financial regulations, can make connections with angel investors/financers much more easily, plus have pre-existing knowledge of local geographies, demographics and industries, but should the instability of Brexit be enough cause for concern that looking abroad to set up shop be in the mix? [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