Startups Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week |
- Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week
- Does not using .com look unprofessional?
- Should I seek investors during the beta to help with launch marketing, or wait until I maybe have more traction?
- How much would your employee shares be worth if...
- How or Where to Draw up a Contract Agreement with the Founder?
- How to get initial (pre-MVP) customer interviews?
- How to avoid sell too much stock (seeking advice)
- As a developer, how do I find someone to hire me/use my skillset?
- Co-Founder to be brough into the startup gradually. What equity structure do you suggest?
- Starting to get angry at my co-founder
- Discussion: Would finding out a good product idea is already taken stop you from pursuing the idea?
- What is the role of a team of developers?
- What are the general phases from start up all the way to large business?
| Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week Posted: 07 Aug 2019 06:07 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Social Club thread.Share what events and meetups you are going to so we can discover new ways to be social together offline and help grow your local community. Focus on sharing events that are happening within the next 7 days of this date of this submission. Anything that falls outside of 10 days will be removed, no exceptions. No duplicate posts. If you happen to be attending an event that is already posted, leave a comment to inform the community that you will also be there. If you are hoping to organize something on your own, outside of an existing event, feel free to use this thread to rally some people together to meet up. Please use the following format to share an event: Event Name and URL: Location: Event Date: Event Time: Event Description: Event Cost: Discount Code: [if applicable] Please use the following format to organize people to meet up together: Location: Purpose of getting together: Suggested Places to meet up: You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  |
| Does not using .com look unprofessional? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 10:46 AM PDT Hey! I'm currently in a very early phase of my startup, and I'm considering using a .marketing domain. It's been impossible to find a catchy domain name with a .com termination, so I'm recurring to this. It kind of looks cool, but I'm worried about the long term implications of doing so. Do you think it looks unprofessional, inconvenient or too long? It would look like "stars.marketing" or ["Nico@stars.marketing](mailto:"bob@startup.marketing)" It's not really called "stars", but it's also 5 letters long. Is it wiser to just go for something like "starsmarketing.co" or something like that? The company will be doing market research for small to medium sized clients, if that helps. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2019 09:37 PM PDT Background: I've been self-funding my app company out of the proceeds of my lower middle class day job. I am not a programmer but I'm marginally tech savvy and had a potentially great idea for a social app. Everyone I talk to or show the prototype to has great things to say about it. I found a programmer a year and a half ago to build my MVP and paid him cash out of my own pocket to build the MVP (server and Android beta). He then asked to come in and work for equity and agreed to code the next roughly year worth of point releases (iOS beta and three point releases on each platform) for 15% equity and no cash. He has now laid out some of his own cash to get the iOS beta done and it's pretty good in my opinion. Not perfect, there are a lot of bugs and still a few missing features, but on the whole it looks like we're on track for our planned mid-September public launch. Now here's where the problem comes in: I'm pretty short on cash and approaching a point where I'm going to need to get serious about spending on marketing. My day job (law practice) has underperformed expectations and ended up itself requiring some reinvestment to deal with some issues, so presently I have very little to invest in the app, probably around $1k per month or less which may not be enough for an aggressive marketing campaign. Because it's a social networking platform, early user base development is pretty critical to the app's survival and success so it's important that I get the early growth phase right. A few people have approached me about investing. A couple on Reddit who read about the business in this sub, and a couple on Facebook who've seen my posts including an old friend looking to invest her life savings (I said no quickly). That excites me as an indicator that I'm not alone in seeing the value in this product. Tonight I found myself on an airplane seated next to a participant in an angel investing group who, while he didn't directly offer to invest, strongly encouraged me to seek out angel investors as he thinks my product is exactly the sort of thing a group like his would go for. (Stupidly forgot to get his card at the end of the flight.) My question is this: Should I at this point, facing a shortfall on my self-funding plans, seek an investor to assure we have the capital to effectively market at this critical early stage? Or should I take it as far as humanly possible without an investor to maximize the valuation of the company when we do bring an investor in? We want to bootstrap to the maximum degree possible, and in theory it might be possible if we get lucky with virality and quickly acquire a large enough user base to get revenue from ads quickly. But it is also reasonably likely that ad sales will be slow at first and it will take a while before we have enough revenue to start paying staff including myself. If we get the right investor, maybe I could even take a sabbatical from my day job and focus on this full time. On that last front there is also the very real question of whether investors god trust me, a novice CEO, to continue running the company after cash is infused. So bottom line, seek investment or see how far we can get without it? [link] [comments]  |
| How much would your employee shares be worth if... Posted: 08 Aug 2019 01:09 AM PDT Let's say hypothetically you're one of the first 100 employees at a company that now has 500-1000 employees. You joined when let's say the post-money valuation was at $120MM (data I have shows $40MM Series C). That same company just posted up a $1B+ valuation. My question is -- how much did my former colleague make in granted stock options? He's vested. [link] [comments]  |
| How or Where to Draw up a Contract Agreement with the Founder? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 05:25 PM PDT So to give the background directly. I'm looking on where or how do I draw up a contract agreement with a founder that involves a percent equity of the company and not payment of salary since we are not generating revenue. I've been with the company for a year. We've just gotten our first customers for beta testing and as a software developer I've worn many hats (quality assurance videos, conferences, debugging, meetings, business plan editing, etc.). I'm unsure of the jargon on how to write up this and I don't know if there's a lawyer requirement to be present while signing occurs? A little worried needless to say (been a part of a start-up that went down before it started). [link] [comments]  |
| How to get initial (pre-MVP) customer interviews? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 05:07 PM PDT Hi guys, So I'm working on a platform (pre-MVP) to help financial advisors and am looking for advice. Specifically, I'm looking for advice on how to get that initial interview with potential customers prior to having a product. Essentially, I'm trying to validate my idea before investing any time into building it. I planned to contact a few financial advisors by scouring for contact info online, but I wasn't quite sure how to go about contacting them such that I receive a response, or whether this is the right approach to begin with (probably sounds sketch I know). A few points I've been thinking about:
If anyone has any feedback (whether or not it's related to the above questions), I'm open to any and all suggestions. To anyone who takes the time to read this, thank you! Any advice is greatly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| How to avoid sell too much stock (seeking advice) Posted: 07 Aug 2019 04:41 PM PDT I'm after some advice about how to avoid selling too much of the company. I'm currently 50/50 with my co - founder but we will be looking for investment within the next 6 months. I want to avoid diluting our holdings too much and just want some advice from people who've gone though this experience before. I'm all about learning from others experiences. I'm mainly concerned about the initial investment we receive, as it will probably be the easiest one to give away too much. Any tips are greatly appreciated, thanks for your time. [link] [comments]  |
| As a developer, how do I find someone to hire me/use my skillset? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 11:41 AM PDT So this might be a different question to the typical thread here. Basically I'm not very creative in terms of ideas, but I'm interested in being someone that can be brought in as a developer. The reason as to why I wonder this, is that I for some reason can't see problems that need solving. The moment the problem is present to me, I can solve it. I've tried to think of things (even asking family/friends about things they think would be problems that need solving) but I can never come up with anything viable. I don't mean passion projects or fun projects that are mostly for learning but actual problems that can become products that mean something outside the my own personal scope. [link] [comments]  |
| Co-Founder to be brough into the startup gradually. What equity structure do you suggest? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 09:36 AM PDT I found a co-founder who is able to commit to X numbers of hours per week with my startup. He agrees in being recognized a small equity participation for his consulting effort, say 10%. Some scenarios I thought about:
I'm definitely not keen on #1 as he could drop me after a week and I'll be losing 10% equity for nothing. What other approaches would you suggest? I know I should consult a lawyer, but I'm looking to have some real-world experience examples first. Thanks in advance [link] [comments]  |
| Starting to get angry at my co-founder Posted: 07 Aug 2019 03:01 PM PDT Hey, Im part of a startup which I founded with two others. The idea for the service was mine but I knew that I couldn't pull the thing myself so I started to look at people vive meet through my previous business carrier working in IT and sales. I knew that I needed a sales guy and a tech guy so I looked in my network (not of friend only business network) and found a perfect match what I thought. So now we are apron 7 months in and the sales guy and partner have really started to annoy me and I don't know if I just overreact. He is the head of sales and doesn't do anything in sales right now and has to started to go to my department of marketing. We have clearly talked about our roles and how crucial the sales part is when we launch. He reaction is that we need users before the companies will start coming. We have some companies already on board and today he told me that he have started to mail influencer and I just hot chocked.. I told him that we already started to do that and he knew that plus that he mails the same influencer vive already had a conversation with. I don't really know how I need to express the need of him focusing on Hess task and that the marketing department is not in Hess area.. Do you guys have any suggestions on what to do? [link] [comments]  |
| Discussion: Would finding out a good product idea is already taken stop you from pursuing the idea? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 07:34 AM PDT As startup founders, most of us can agree that there is nothing worse than when you come up with a brilliant idea, just to find out that another company is already doing something similar. The heartbreak of finding out your "original" idea isn't as original as you thought is something that every startup founder, wannabe startup founder, inventor, and engineer has experienced. We are conditioned to believe that the only way a startup product can be successful is if no one else on the planet is doing it. But we tend to forget that some of the most successful businesses of our time have all been founded on unoriginal ideas. Starbucks wasn't the first business to ever sell coffee, Google wasn't the first company to ever create a search engine, Tesla wasn't the first company to ever create a car powered by electricity, most companies did not create 100% unique products. If you had a good product idea, would seeing another startup doing the same thing stop you from pursuing the idea? What would prevent you from pursuing that idea? What workarounds have you used to make an idea that isn't so unique something that is unique? [link] [comments]  |
| What is the role of a team of developers? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 06:08 AM PDT Say for instance they build you a web app for your startup. What are a team of developers needed for after building the app other than occasional maintenance and updates? Asking because I see companies and startups bring on a team of developers all the time, but I'm not sure why they don't hire freelancers or a company to do it rather than give up equity or pay a full time salary to a team. Anyone have any insight into this? [link] [comments]  |
| What are the general phases from start up all the way to large business? Posted: 07 Aug 2019 02:38 AM PDT Meaning it should be from start up MVP > product market fit, to next phase improve MVP, to next phase diversifying product line for growth. Increasing capabilities + resources to get to the next phase. Something in this general idea. What would you say the phases are in a general sense from start up to large scale high revenue business? And what are the general things a company needs in spades to really be able to compete at very high levels? (capabilities, expertise, culture/learning, systems, marketing, strong strategy) [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