Startups Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital

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• Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital
• Reading between the lines: What Slack didn’t disclose in its IPO filing
• I want to sell my startup for $3 million. What does this require?
• How to be a founder, not an employee?
• Business partner not pulling his weight, advice on what to do?
• Is getting acquired by a big a company a death sentence for employees?
• How do you log your findings from customer discovery interviews?
• How to contribute money to my C-corporation
• How do you all feel about hiring SEO firms?
• If you have clear evidence of fraud, where should you start to report it?
• Options for software development: Finding a co-founder, Hiring an employee/freelancer, Or using an agency?
• SaaS - When do you track a customer as “active”?
• Make Something! (2 / 19, Competition and Lookalike Apps)
• Theory: Ecosystem Versus Value Chain?
• Product Website Sales to SaaS App User Creation
• Early adopters finding process.
• Where do I even start?
• Affiliate Marketing Inside a App
• Setting up company policies and don't know where to start - need advice about policy creation and wiki usage!
• App has some traction, but where to go from here? (Numbers & Questions)
• Business plan help for a medical diagnostic test

Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:06 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Fundraising Thursdays Thread. Ask about anything related to fundraising, investors, accelerators, grants, and other sources of capital. That includes how to find these sources, how to work with them, and how to negotiate with them. Don't be shy. The purpose of this is to learn and share ideas and methodologies with one another. Any question is a good question! If you are answering questions, remember to be kind and supportive. Many are just starting out and have no idea what they are doing. That's okay! We all knew nothing before we knew something. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

Reading between the lines: What Slack didn’t disclose in its IPO filing Posted: 13 Jun 2019 10:54 AM PDT Originally found on https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/ Reading between the lines: What Slack didn't disclose in its IPO filing Slack Technologies, the developer of the popular namesake team collaboration messaging app, recently applied for a public offering on the stock market. This is not a classic IPO, but a "direct listing," also known a "direct public offering." This means Slack is not raising money by directly selling shares and instead allows early investors and employees to sell their shares in the public offering. Music streaming service Spotify held a successful direct listing last year. This story caught my attention for a simple reason. In August 2016, I joined the team developing a still-undercover product called Workplace by Facebook—a direct competitor to Slack. I worked on the product for 2.5 years. Back then, I dreamed of having an opportunity to look inside Slack's business metrics. It may seem that Slack has revealed a lot of data about the business in their S-1 filing, a document that is almost 200 pages in length. The reality is, they haven't. The company had already disclosed in various ways much of the information compiled in their report. But if we combine the data disclosed in S-1 filing and the experience I gained while working on Slack's competitor, we'll be able to uncover interesting details that will paint a more holistic picture. I must say that this article contains my personal thoughts on the matter, jotted down while going through their S-1 filing, and should not be considered as investment advice. ​ Slack's top-level business metrics Slack doubles its revenue every year: $105.1M, $220.5M, $400.5M (respectively from 2016, 2017, 2019). Gross margin remains at the level of 87-88%. This doesn't sound bad at all, although it isn't unexpected from a fully digital product that costs several times more than its direct competitors. There is a lot of talk in the press about Slack's unprofitability; the company shows a net loss of about $140M per year. But if we take a look at the cost structure and growth drivers (we'll get to this later), then the losses won't look like a problem. You can read more about this here. Slack estimates the market opportunity of workplace business technology software communication platforms at $28B per year. My own evaluation of the market stands at about the same number. Slack's S-1 reminds us of the true costs of venture capital. The founders are left with 8.6% and 3.4% of the company. Meanwhile, the biggest shareholders are VC firms Accel Partners (24%), Andreessen Horowitz (13.3%), and Softbank (7.3%). Number of free and paid Slack customers Approximately 588,000 organizations use Slack. However, the concept of "organization" is rather vague in the report: "We define an organization on Slack as a separate entity, such as a company, educational or government institution, or distinct business unit of a company, that is on a subscription plan, whether free or paid. Once an organization has three or more users on a paid subscription plan, we count them as a Paid Customer." So, if there are 15 IBM teams using Slack, does it count as one organization or 15? It's not clear. 88,000 of these organizations are paid customers, and over 500,000 organizations use Slack's free subscription plan. Therefore, 15% of the active organizations are paying for the service. But this doesn't give us a lot of information. Imagine 100 new companies register with Slack, but 99 of them stop using it after a while, and one remaining company purchases one of Slack's paid plans. In this case we can say 100% of active companies are paid customers. But looking at it from a different perspective, only 1% of new companies become paid customers. My assessment of a long-term retention rate from a new organization into an active one for Slack is 5–10%. This is a very rough estimate. Moreover, long-term retention rates differ greatly depending on industry and acquisition channel. This estimation is based on my personal experience and the following quote from an old interview with Slack's founder: "Most people who fill out the form and hit submit — more than 90% — never invite anyone or start using the software." If this estimation is correct, then 588,000 active organizations indicate that 5.5–11 million new organizations joined Slack over the service's entire lifetime. This means that Slack gets about 115-230k new leads per month. If the estimate of the total number of organizations is correct, then the conversion rate from a new organization into a long-term paying customer stands at around 0.8-1.6%. If we factor in the average churn for SaaS (approx. 50%), then the conversion rate from a new organization signing up with Slack into the one that pays at least once will stand at around 1.5-3.5%. In many ways, Slack's cleverness is hidden behind its strong brand and a huge flow of new organic leads. We will talk about it further on. Slack's user engagement Slack's DAU stays at around 10 million users (these are the users who either created or consumed content in the service at least once in 24 hours). The dynamics of DAU looks impressive. Slack had previously revealed its overall DAU and DAU of its paying users. But in the S-1 filing, it only mentions the overall DAU. This might signal that the growth of paying users has slowed down. Overall revenue growth is being pulled out by raising prices through the introduction of new tariffs and Slack for Enterprise taking a greater share of the revenue of the service. More than 1 billion messages are sent via Slack every week. This means that the average active user sends 14 messages per day. This is a good level of user engagement, but it's not extraordinary or impressive. An average active user spends 42 minutes per day in the service. In comparison, active paid users spend an average 90 minutes in Slack per working day. These numbers don't look bad. But when compared to the average 14 messages sent per user, they look dubious. The big question is, how does Slack calculate time spent in the product? A few years ago, they simply looked at the time the service was active on users' devices. That has changed, but the company mentions no specific methodology in their filing, which makes it difficult to interpret the numbers. Slack's business model Even without a report, Slack's business model seems obvious, but the company laid it out eloquently in the filing: "We offer a self-service approach, for both free and paid subscriptions to Slack, which capitalizes on strong word-of-mouth adoption and customer love for our brand. Since 2016, we have augmented our approach with a direct sales force and customer success professionals who are focused on driving successful adoption and expansion within organizations, whether on a free or paid subscription plan." Here are the key points: Slack gets most new customers organically through word-of-mouth(self-serve model). Some of the new organizations convert into paying customers. The sales team works with leads that qualify as large organizations. The goal of the sales team is to increase Slack's penetration within large organizations. Let us now reflect on some of these points in more detail. The top of Slack's funnel is driven by organic signups from word-of-mouth "We offer a self-service approach, for both free and paid subscriptions to Slack, which capitalizes on strong word-of-mouth adoption and customer love for our brand." The first question that occurs after reading this sentence is, why doesn't Slack accelerate growth by investing in acquisition through paid ad channels? It isn't hard to verify that Slack almost doesn't invest in Google Ads or Facebook Ads (there are some paid ads, but they're mostly focused on branded search). Here's the short answer: The SMB (small and medium-sized business) segment's economics doesn't justify paying for ads because the return on investment is negative (ROI < 0). Meanwhile, direct advertising channels don't work for the enterprise segment. Now here's a more detailed answer: The average cheque for Slack's paying customers is $380 per month. If we ignore companies that Slack considers as enterprise customers (with more than $100k ARR), then the average cheque per month will be $230, and the average organization's size will be 40 people. Thus, a self-serve client brings ~$2,760 in revenue in the first year and ~$2,400 in gross profit in the first year. If the goal is to get a positive return on investment (ROI) within 12 months, then, then a long-term paying client should cost $2,400 in the self-serve segment. With a 0.8-1.6% conversion rate into a long-term paying customer, a new organization should cost $20-40. But in B2B, leads from organic channels usually demonstrate 2-4 times better metrics than the leads from paid advertising channels. Let's assume that in the case of Slack, the difference is 2x. This means in order to get ROI > 0, Slack needs to acquire new organizations at a cost of $10-20. This looks unrealistic if we consider the economics of paid advertising channels in developed markets, where the average cost of a new organization from Google Ads or Facebook Ads will be around $100-200. That's why Slack invests nearly nothing in paid acquisition. It grows mainly through strong brand, word-of-mouth, integrations with other services and the subsequent cross-promos, the professional communities in Slack and tools for communication between companies. On the one hand, Slack is shielded from competitors because it has a huge number of organic leads and due to the fact that paid acquisition doesn't work in the market, it is nearly impossible to get close to Slack in the self-serve segment. On the other hand, as you will soon see, the self-serve segment acts as a gateway to reach enterprise customers. But Slack's competitors have other ways to reach these companies. Net Dollar Retention Rate is the most interesting piece of data Slack revealed The following chart shows the growth of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) by cohorts based on the year when organizations first paid for using Slack. ARR from organizations that first paid for Slack in 2015 continues to grow steadily in the following years. For most products, cohorts shrink as they age. But in Slack's case, we're witnessing the opposite (this is also called Negative Revenue Churn). This is one of the main reasons why Slack is worth so much ($7B valuation at the latest funding round, $10B proposed valuation for the public offering). ​ However, it is worth noting that such growth patterns are typical for products in this kind of market. Zoom, which recently went public, has a Net Dollar Retention of 140%. Twilio and Atlassian showed even more impressive figures at the time of their IPO (source). ​ The following are the main growth drivers: Expansion of the user base within companies that are already using the service: Slack is building up their sales team, which reaches out to companies that have already started using Slack, and does everything to get the remaining employees to switch to the service. The organic growth of customers: Companies that have started using Slack are hiring new employees and growing in size. More employees -> more Slack users -> Slack gets more money. Price changes: Slack raises prices directly or by introducing new tariff plans. An interesting consequence here is that Slack's growth depends more on how the team is developing the product and the growth of its current customers than on attracting new users and converting them into paying ones. Acquisition, of course, is just as much important, but it has a rather delayed impact on the overall revenue growth. Another consequence is that such growth mechanism depends greatly on having enough enterprise customers with many employees who have not yet started using Slack (it will be difficult to grow revenue from of old cohorts if all of them are SMBs with 40 employees). If you look at the growth of new paying customers, it doesn't look promising. Slack added 22,000 paying customers in 2017 and 29,000 in 2018. This is a 30% increase in new paying clients, but still not the kind of dynamics Slack would like to see. Therefore, the main driver of Slack's exponential revenue growth is the expansion of cash flow from its old customers. Slack measures this process using the Net Dollar Retention Rate metric: They take all the customers who were already paying 12 months ago. They then divide the current MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) by the MRR for the previous 12 months. Net Dollar Retention Rate for the last three years looks like this: 171%, 152%, 143%. That is, customers who paid a year ago pay much more in the following year. Which is fantastic. Net Dollar Retention Rate is gradually decreasing, but this is expectable due to the slowdown of growth in old cohorts. Here's what Slack's report says about this: "We disclose Net Dollar Retention Rate as a supplemental measure of our organic revenue growth. We believe Net Dollar Retention Rate is an important metric that provides insight into the long-term value of our subscription agreements and our ability to retain, and grow revenue from, our Paid Customers. We calculate Net Dollar Retention Rate as of a period end by starting with the MRR from all Paid Customers as of twelve months prior to such period end, or Prior Period MRR. We then calculate the MRR from these same Paid Customers as of the current period end, or Current Period MRR. Current Period MRR includes expansion within Paid Customers and is net of contraction or attrition over the trailing twelve months, but excludes revenue from new Paid Customers in the current period, including those organizations that were only on Free subscription plans in the prior period and converted to paid subscription plans during the current period. We then divide the total Current Period MRR by the total Prior Period MRR to arrive at our Net Dollar Retention Rate." Enterprise is a problematic segment for Slack If you have enough patience to go through the entire 200-page report, you will notice Slack repeatedly showcasing its success in the enterprise segment. This segment accounts for a significant part of the market ($28 billion spent on communication tools each year), and this is what Slack is striving for. This is the where their long-term growth lies and where they are getting Net dollar retention rate > 100%. Here's what the report says about this segment: Customers should have ARR > 100k to be considered enterprise customers. The number of enterprise clients in the past three years: 135, 298, 575 The revenue share of the Enterprise segment in the past three years: 22%, 32%, 40% Revenue from enterprise customers over the past three years: $23M, $70.5M, $160.2M Average monthly spending by enterprise customers in the past three years: $14,200, $19,700, $23,200 The largest customers have "tens of thousands of employees" or tens of thousands of active users per day—quite an ambiguous wording ("our largest Paid Customers have tens of thousands of employees using Slack on a daily basis"). For the last two years, almost all of the Slack product releases have been aimed at adapting the product to large organizations. Take for example Slack Enterprise Grid, adding Threads, Unread section. At first glance, it does look impressive. But let's take a closer look. Customers should have ARR > 100k to be considered enterprise customers. This means that organizations with over 1,000 employees using Slack fall into the enterprise segment. This is a rather low threshold. I assume it was chosen to get a larger absolute value of enterprise customers. Even with such a low threshold, Slack only has 575 enterprise clients. It is not much. Even Facebook Workplace, which entered the market much later (and doesn't have such a phenomenal influx of organic leads), announced three months ago that it has 150 companies with more than 10,000 employees on the platform (source). And Teams, Microsoft's Slack competitor, which launched even later than Workplace, has also achieved similar figures (source). Another way to look at 575 Enterprise customers is to compare it to the total number of organizations that have created a Slack workspace (5.5 – 11 million). Only 0.01% of them achieve enterprise status. Slack is very skewed towards the SMB segment, which suffers from a high churn rate and has very little potential for expanding revenue from its old customers. Major customers have tens of thousands of employees. It sounds impressive, but those who have worked with products focused on the enterprise segment know that there are many companies in the world with hundreds of thousands—and even millions—of employees (and usually they are outside the technology sector). A few examples of Facebook Workplace's customers are Walmart, with 2.2 million employees, Starbucks with 250,000 employees, and Telenor with 37,000 employees (source). In terms of revenue, onboarding Walmart equates to signing up thousands of companies with 1,000 employees. This is not an attempt to say that Workplace rocks, but rather to mention that Slack finds it difficult to strike big deals. For the last two years, almost all of Slack's product releases have been aimed at adapting the service to large organizations. This is true, but Slack doesn't do it for fun. Slack loses most of its deals to competitors when trying to sign up enterprise clients, because the service works poorly for companies with over 500 employees, and even worse for companies scattered across different time zones. Synchronous communication, which is Slack's forte, starts to falter under such conditions. And now regarding the blind spots that Slack was silent about in the report. The report has no clear breakdown of Slack's customers by industry. This is an important question, since Slack initially grew in the IT and media segments. And it is unclear whether they managed to step beyond these limits, and how the product performs in more classical verticals (e.g. banking, retail, insurance, etc.). If Slack experiences problems there (as it previously has), then the market of $28B will be dramatically narrowed down to the niche of the technology business, which isn't very impressive. And here's where things get really problematic for Slack: Microsoft already has access to a lot of large enterprise clients from all verticals and has been selling them products bundled in a single package for a long time. They recently added Microsoft Teams to the Office Suite, which is just as good as Slack in terms of functionality. Does Slack offer enough incentive to convince enterprise customers to forgo the benefits of their long-term relationship with Microsoft? Workplace by Facebook was originally designed for large organizations and outperforms Slack product-wise in this market segment. Moreover, Workplace works great outside the technology sector too because the product's interface is very familiar to the masses, which means companies save a lot of money and time since they don't need to do any employee training. In the next 5-7 years (indeed, B2B and especially the enterprise sector are slow-paced markets with one of the longest transaction cycles) it will be thrilling to see how Slack responds to these threats and challenges. Summing it up Well done for Slack. They won over the self-serve market segment and no one even comes close to them. Just as much as Slack enjoys its growth in the self-serve segment, they make the best out of it using it as a source of enterprise leads for the sales team, which then spreads Slack inside large corporations. Slack is growing rapidly and will continue to do so in the next few years (mostly due to the expansion of revenue coming from the old cohorts). However, what happens next is still a big question. Slack's long-term growth depends on how much of the enterprise segment they'll be able to conquer, and whether they'll be able (or perhaps they already have – this is not clear from the report) to expand beyond the segment of tech companies. submitted by /u/unab0mber [link] [comments]

I want to sell my startup for $3 million. What does this require? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 08:58 PM PDT My business did $500K revenue last year. Tracking toward $700K this year. I promised myself I'd do this until I could sell for $3 million. How do I know when I'm at that point? What would potential buyers need to see to value my business at $3 million? submitted by /u/1cognoscere [link] [comments]

How to be a founder, not an employee? Posted: 14 Jun 2019 01:46 AM PDT So my observation is, the game of start up is designed in much favor of, Investor > Founder >> employee ​ As I do not have connection / capital to be an investor, my best bet in terms of financial compensation is to be a founder. In fact, my calculation is that being an employee at start up is at best at the par to working at Big 4, though riding the corporate ladder is not very pleasant experience in general. ​ On the other hand, working as a software engineer in Big4 in the bay area, I often feel like the art of founding a successful enterprise has some secret element that they do not openly talk about in the media. The sexy success story like AirBnB is actually very exceptional and the majority of the successful company were founded by the industry veterans. ​ The problem is, when I imaging myself working in the same corporate environment for many other years, I do not think I would obtain the skill, experience, and most importantly the right connection that will help me to be the experienced founder. I made this conclusion by observing my seniors, who are also very hard working and smart people, but are also more of less confined by the "scope" defined by the level in the corporate ladder. ​ I want to hear the opinion of people here. submitted by /u/sculd [link] [comments]

Business partner not pulling his weight, advice on what to do? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:19 PM PDT So my best friend and I have been running our business as 50/50 partners for about 6 months now. I used to hold more equity however we agreed to being 50/50 partners and splitting profits equally as I thought it would incentivize him to work more and work harder than before as he has more skin in the game. I was brutally wrong. He does almost no work for the business now and I find myself asking him to do things that don't get done in the timeline I give him or when he says they'll be done. Any advice is greatly appreciated. I don't want to ruin our friendship; however, I don't want to be stuck splitting profits with someone who doesn't do anything for the business... submitted by /u/randompineapple223 [link] [comments]

Is getting acquired by a big a company a death sentence for employees? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 12:22 PM PDT So this might not be the right place for this question, but I wasn't sure where to go. I'm working at a very small startup (just me and the co-founders) for the past few months. CEO is talking to some companies right now who want to acquire us. My role is non-technical, and they could definitely train someone else to do my job in a month or two. CEO says I'm not in trouble of losing my job at all, but can they promise that? Should I start looking? submitted by /u/nuggylover [link] [comments]

How do you log your findings from customer discovery interviews? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 08:06 PM PDT Do you have log them on a spreadsheet spreadsheet? What kind of things do you record? Right now I am putting mine in a google sheet that anyone on the team can edit. Recording name, position, date, key takeaways, and if they recommended anyone. Anything else I am missing? submitted by /u/kerrybaumann [link] [comments]

How to contribute money to my C-corporation Posted: 13 Jun 2019 04:20 PM PDT Hi all, Awhile ago, I formed a Delaware C-corp with my business partner. Admittedly that may not have been the best idea, given that we still have no other investors, but now we're faced with the issue of contributing more of our own money to keeping the business running. Everything I've read online has either recommended issuing more shares, or making a loan to the business. I was leaning more toward the latter. From my research, it looks like it's necessary to have some paperwork that sets an interest rate, a payment schedule, and consequences for non-payment. Additionally, the interest rate can't just be "0" otherwise the IRS may impose an interest rate later in the vent of an audit. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Are there other options that I've missed. I'm also considering the option of converting to an LLC, and just converting back in the event that we ever reach a point where we're likely to get investors. submitted by /u/notunlikecheckers [link] [comments]

How do you all feel about hiring SEO firms? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:16 PM PDT Do you guys think paying a few thousand dollars to a marketing firm for SEO is worth it? I'm debating it but I'd rather pay for organic traffic than ads which seem to be a waste of money most of the time. Has anyone hired an SEO expert from out of the US (India for example)? submitted by /u/taylordabrat [link] [comments]

If you have clear evidence of fraud, where should you start to report it? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:07 PM PDT Not just the typical CEO exaggerating projections or generally being optimistic when speakers to investors. But full on lying to and deceiving regulators. Have documented evidence of it happening. Committing this fraud is the only reason they were granted access to very sensitive data. Any help is appreciated. And I'd prefer to report it anonymously so as to not be outed and fired. submitted by /u/cutestain [link] [comments]

Options for software development: Finding a co-founder, Hiring an employee/freelancer, Or using an agency? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:57 PM PDT The title pretty much says it all. I want to found a SaaS startup as a non-technical person. What variables should I consider when deciding how to find a developer? Anyone have experience with these different options? Were they successful? Do you wish you had gone another route? submitted by /u/SquirrelGuy [link] [comments]

SaaS - When do you track a customer as “active”? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 05:14 PM PDT I run a B2B SaaS with a free tier and a monthly tier that doesn't track user activity counts. We want to start tracking better stats around our daily and active users and have a more accurate number between our users who are paying customers and free users - purely from a data standpoint and to better understand how much we are being utilized. I am struggling to figure out at what point I should add some code to "mark" the user as active for the day, so I wanted to see what others are doing to help give some guidance. Assuming that the user doesn't always have to login every day - At what point do they become an "active user"? Is it the first response to the server? Is it a certain first action that starts the checkpoint? submitted by /u/noobishdeveloper [link] [comments]

Make Something! (2 / 19, Competition and Lookalike Apps) Posted: 13 Jun 2019 03:40 AM PDT This is part 2/19. Part 1 is here. The goal of this is to make something (an app or a website). It's targeted at non-technical founders, but the early sections might be useful for technical people as well. --- What you should have now - A short pitch for your app - Why you are doing this (be clear and concise) - An idea for your MVP and where you will get your first users - A list of jobs that your users want to accomplish --- Section 2 Objectives To understand a narrow view of your competition, and how your solution compares To continue to think about the needs of your immediate users, and how to help them achieve their desired outcome To gather inspiration and lookalikes to use in your design and development ​ --- Each of these steps could take an infinite amount of time. Our goal is to limit that. --- Tasks A. Competition i. Who are your competitors? ii. How did you search for these competitors? What specific job were you trying to do when you were searching? How were you limiting your search? iii. What are the main problems your competitors solve? (i.e. What jobs are the users doing when they are using your competitors?) Iv. From your list of jobs that you've written in part 1, go through your competitors and rate them on a score of 1-10 how well they do each job, and how hard it is to complete each job v. What are the 'table stakes' jobs that all competitors are doing for their users? vi. What are some features from your competitors that you would like to replicate? vii. What are the main issues stopping your competitors from solving your problem? viii. How do you solve the problem differently from your competitors? What is your USP (unique sales proposition)? B. Inspiration & Lookalike apps i. Who are your inspiration & lookalike apps/sites? ii. What do you like about each site/app? ​ --- Task Explanations A. Competition i. Who are your competitors? Spend 5-10 minutes searching for solutions to the problems you listed in part 1. If you already know of competitors, be sure to include those as well. How are you currently solving the problem? What are your substitute solutions? When trying to find competitors, imagine that you are searching for a solution to a problem you have. You want to focus on the actual problem you are solving for your customer. We also want to be quite broad; we want to think about alternate solutions as much as possible. Open each potential answer as a new tab, or just write a note. After we have them all, we'll analyze our competition against our current ideas. It's best not to use sites like angel list (i.e. try to think like a user, not like someone trying to research your space), but that's okay too. ​ ii. How did you search for competitors? This is important in keeping us on track and really understanding the problem that we're trying to solve. Write down any google searches you did, or if you used facebook groups, or a specific subreddit and what you searched for on each site. Where would you go to solve your problem? ​ iii. What are the main problems your competitors solve for each user? Now we're going to go through each competitor and You want to think about the main problem that each competitor is solving — is it different than what you are solving? ​ Iv. From your list of jobs that you've written in part 1, go through your competitors and rate them on a score of 1-10 how well they do each job, and how hard it is to complete each job. We want to look at all of the jobs we have written; which are the most important and which are being satisfied by each of the competitors. I like to do this as a table, with the rows being the list of competitors, and the columns being their ranking for completing each job. ​ For how hard it is to complete each job, think about all the steps a user has to take to complete the job. ​ v. What are the 'table stakes' jobs that all competitors are doing for their users? These are jobs that all of the competitors are doing for their users. These are things you will want to make sure to include in all forms of your app, including your MVP unless you can be sure that they are not significant to your users (i.e. through user surveys and interviews, but more likely through user testing) ​ vi. What are some features from your competitors that you would like to replicate? Take screenshots and write notes about the specific features you think are useful. Think about how to improve these features, or to narrow them down to distill just the most valuable parts of the process. ​ vii. What are the main issues stopping your competitors from solving your problem? You want to think about this -- is your problem really big enough for a large enough audience for them to move to a new service? What are the main issues that you have with each competitor? How does this relate to the jobs that you are doing, and are there new jobs that might be more important? ​ viii. How do you solve the problem differently from your competitors? What is your USP (unique sales proposition)? You really want to test your assumptions here — is the problem you're solving really important enough for someone to be looking for a new solution? Are you meaningfully better/different from your competition? Again, try to think about your first set of users here. How hard is it for them to be able to solve the problem? How important is it? ​ At this point you will also want to go through your list of jobs and add any jobs that you hadn't previously written down, and expand on that list as your idea evolves. B. Inspiration & Lookalike apps ​ i. Who are your inspiration & lookalike apps? Spend 5-10 minutes looking for inspiration and lookalike apps or sites. After that, spend a few minutes going through each app (5 minutes each should be enough) taking notes on interesting and useful features. Inspiration apps or features are just that — ideas that you can use for inspiration when planning your solution. Lookalikes take it a step further; these are apps solving another problem that could be easily changed to solve yours. This is good for your first project as it will give you a solid base to start from. Generally we want to focus on functional requirements here, but it's good to keep in mind any features that have an emotional benefit as well. This is something you'll want to do as you go around the web. Every time you use a useful site, nice design, or cool feature, take note of it (I use bear, where I keep a #examples folder). Take screenshots of features that you like, or cool user experiences. I like to focus on simple things that are really pleasant to use (simple hopefully means easy to implement in this case, but it's not always easy to judge that unless you have experience). ​ ii. What do you like about each site/app? Go over what it is exactly that you like about each site or feature, and why you find it good or useful. This will help you bring clarity to the exact parts of the app or site that you may want to incorporate into your solution. You'll want to use these to explain to designers and developers in the future, so try to keep it short and specific, and relate it back to your app/idea if possible. ​ --- Deliverables ​ What you should have after this section ​ - Part 1 Deliverables - A short list of your main competitors - A table outlining how well competitors are doing each job and how difficult it is to do each job - A USP (potentially one USP for your first users and one for your long term app) - Inspiration and Lookalike apps/features that you can share with developers and designers --- Next Up ​ I will probably skip sections 3 and 4 ('User Surveys and Interviews', 'Idea Refinement') in my first version of this. So next up we're going to write some user stories (section 5) and start with our screen-by-screen requirements (section 6) and wireframes (section 7). After section 7, I will be releasing a few examples which will probably be the most valuable part of this for most people, and then we'll start with the design and development! submitted by /u/sobbuh [link] [comments]

Theory: Ecosystem Versus Value Chain? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 03:24 AM PDT Hi, Have anyone in here read about Weill & Woerners theory about Digital Ecosystems? I have a question about this theory: Whats the exact difference between a Value Chain and a Digital Ecosystem? ​ Thanks in advance :) submitted by /u/aced145 [link] [comments]

Product Website Sales to SaaS App User Creation Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:18 AM PDT Hey everyone, I am hoping to use a WYSIWYG site hosting platform like Squarespace to make a beautiful product site for my SaaS app. However, once a customer purchases subscription access to the app, what are the best ways to automatically trigger creation of the user account? Does Squarespace have custom API integrations? Am I even thinking about this in the right way? What about Stripe? Thanks!! submitted by /u/shadowcorp [link] [comments]

Early adopters finding process. Posted: 13 Jun 2019 05:26 AM PDT Hi, everyone! I'm interesting in HowTo for early adopters finding process. How do you looking for early adopters now? What is the most effective method? How were you looking for the first 100 paying users? share secrets with me. I made new service, but I haven't users, what I must do firstly for acquire my first customers? submitted by /u/daniilkhanin [link] [comments]

Where do I even start? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 10:52 AM PDT Hello, I'll get right to the point to make this as short as possible. I've recently got the idea to start a clothing brand. Currently I'm at university for criminal justice, and the plan is to become a lawyer. At first I wanted to start my own law firm, and maybe that can still be the ultimate goal. But I was more looking at some things out of my field. I know clothing is a very saturated area, and there's plenty random sites I see advertised on places like Instagram every day, so that's why I'm here. ​ Honestly, I don't even know where to start. How do I get things made and shipped and all of that? Creating a website can be easily learned from YouTube, or even just done with templates from like wix and squarespace, but how do I set up an effective online store with those things? The thing is that I don't really know anything about business, but it's not unheard of that people who never studied business started one and were successful with it. ​ I guess I'm just asking for any and all info you guys would have for someone like me with not much knowledge, but an idea that I would like to turn into reality somehow. Thank you. submitted by /u/BrownShugah98 [link] [comments]

Affiliate Marketing Inside a App Posted: 13 Jun 2019 08:56 AM PDT I created an app that pays users to play pickup sports . Pickup sports are sports that are played for fun usually at parks, rec centers, YMCAs, LA| Fitness, etc. Users earn money playing basketball, football, or soccer Is there a going rate for affilate marketing? For example: The minimum cashout in my app is $20. If a users has 200 credits in my app its equal to $5. If he purchases something worth $20 through my affilate link is there a going standard for how much it's worth? I assume that there are different rates for different companies. Amazon vs Nike vs Adidas vs some 3rd Party. Is there a standard rate that I could base my projections off of? Or some way to find a sort of table to look that info up? Anybody with any experience in this would be helpful! submitted by /u/coast2coastapp [link] [comments]

Setting up company policies and don't know where to start - need advice about policy creation and wiki usage! Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:30 AM PDT We've just secured our first big contract and basically need to create a large number of policies from scratch to meet the vendor assessment requirements and fill in their forms. The client is a massive company and has formal procurement etc. ​ I have a lot of pretty fundamental questions. Is there anywhere I can download some boilerplate company technology policies, relating mainly to things like data security policy, patching, monitoring, assessments, etc. I will obviously edit them to reflect what we are actually already doing / planning to do. ​ Also, what's the best way of setting this up, in your experience? I'm thinking some kind of wiki structure, so updates can be tracked, users can acknowledge in the comments that they have read them or completed various processes, etc, everything audit trailed. I'm really looking for the most simple and cost effective way. ​ Until now our only formal knowledge sharing has been related to coding and sits in github. ​ We are a tiny tiny team, so maybe just using our existing file sharing system (currently using google drive)? ​ Any thoughts or input either on these specific questions or from founders who have been through a similar process would be extremely useful. Thanks! submitted by /u/odonnthe [link] [comments]

App has some traction, but where to go from here? (Numbers & Questions) Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:13 AM PDT Hi there, I'm really lost on where to go from here. Hoping to get some advice. I launched my first app 3 years ago, it had a decent start, all of these figures are without any paid advertising being ran, mostly reddit posts and people sharing it with each other. First 8 Months: Unique Visitors: 103,964 Pages Loaded: 941,997 App Downloads: 20,000 + Registered Members: 5,000+ After the first 8 months I unfortunately suffered a significant injury that left me unable to continue work on it, and I pretty much neglected it over the next few years as I recovered. Fast forward to today, 3 years later - I've relaunched a little over a month ago, here are the stats from the first month's relaunch. Unique Visitors: 18,329 Visits: 22,662 Pages Loaded: 212,662 App Downloads: 8,387 Average Session Duration: 2:28 Again, I've run no paid advertising, these figures come from an accumulated 8,500 upvotes on reddit. I'm really unsure on where to go from here, are these numbers worth pursuing and dumping money into some form of advertising campaign? I'm honestly just lost across the board. It's in the nutrition field, I'd be happy to share more details over messages. The app is free, and currently there aren't any ad's being ran on it - eventually I would hope to sell sponsored ad's, coupons, and data analytics. I'm sorry if it sounds like i'm rambling or maybe not providing enough information, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Unfortunately I do work full time, maybe finding some kind of marketing partner might be a route to pursue? Thanks for your help! submitted by /u/Det-MichaelScarn [link] [comments]

Business plan help for a medical diagnostic test Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:08 AM PDT I'm considering joining up with a university biology team who developed a new medical diagnostic. This will be my second company. My first company was a life sciences hardware startup but nothing that was regulated. I'd like to spend a few months learning about the field and doing business development before making any decisions. The lab test works on human tissue samples and the research group currently has enough academic interest that people are sending them tissue samples. The researcher thinks it would be a good idea to set up a lab and do tests on patient samples that are shipped in as a business. Obviously, this is a regulated space and we'd need to raise a bunch of capital. I need some help even figuring out what questions to ask regarding a business plan. How do I test the business hypothesis? Go to clinicians, I presume? Do we set up our own lab or partner with an established lab? How do I learn about reimbursements and what questions do I ask there? Are there any good advisors who have done this before? How do I go about finding them? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/flobear3 [link] [comments]

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