Startups Tuesday Operational Roundtable - A Forum to Ask About Legal, Accounting, Project Management, or How to Get Started |
- Tuesday Operational Roundtable - A Forum to Ask About Legal, Accounting, Project Management, or How to Get Started
- Year 2 update now 10K / month
- How do you give constructive feedback?
- Need Your Advice!
- Here’s a little startup hack for you...
- Other cofounders are not contributing... I’m losing hope too
- Fellow Redditors: What's your total monthly SaaS spend? What services/products are you using?
- How are you building the first iteration of your product? How do you get to second iteration?
- Question about market research
- Warning/yellow flag if the main product is trying to solve several mostly unrelated problems?
- What Sorts of Free Advertising Have You Had the Most Success With?
- Can I go my own way? Very early days of conversations (no legal entity, no nda's signed, and I hate my would be co founders)
- Do you use any security programs for your startup?
- MVP is ready but we have trouble finding beta testers
- What are the legal complications for Indian residents for Incorporating Delaware C Corp from India?
- Broadcasting question : can I commentate on a live soccer game but not stream its default audio or video?
| Posted: 03 Sep 2019 06:06 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Operational Roundtable Thread. Ask about anything related to legal, accounting, project management, or how to get started. 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. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2019 04:35 AM PDT It has been about a year since I last posted our update on our company. It has been a crazy roller coaster of a ride so far and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I like to refer it to my "mid life crisis company". Some guys want fancy cars, new hair, wife, etc... We started a company with ~30K and alot of hard work. I had the idea for a couple years of creating a home wireless speaker out of reclaimed historic riverwood for years as I knew it was a unique brand differentiation and improve acoustic design. Seth Godin's purple cow references "make something remarkable", which means people will remark about it. Kind of like a viral co-efficient that will continue to spread the word of your product. I didn't start for a couple of years as the timing wasn't right yet for starting due to a couple reason. (small kiddies and free cashflow). Once the kids were out of daycare that gave me a bit more disposable income I could focus the money on. I found a great co-founder/friend and we were off to the design, iterate, repeat. The design process took approx a year to perfect as we are both full time working dads so had to grind early AM, late PM or weekends to continue to drive the product to perfection. For the founders this was the easy part of the process as we are both technical creator type. He is a mechanical engineer that has a passion for woodworking and I handle the electrical/acoustics/business development. The marketing sales are the area that are ever challenging. Originally we thought, if you build it they will come but the reality is nobody know what/who your are and need to continuously push brand awareness. Our product is a premium item as it is handcrafted in Canada so the high price point isn't for everyone and will take a few touch points before convert to buy. Now we are selling our 1st product across North America and are hovering around the 10K a month in sales. We have our manufacturing facility set up and supply chain setup for growth. Oh ya and we still are doing this with a normal 9-5 and raising a couple great kids each. So for all those who say you can't. because of <insert excuse> is you CAN. You just choose to not work at it. Here are my biggest takeaways for everyone who want to start a company from nothing in a hyper competitive area.
Finally ignore the naysayers, downers and rude people. Be yourself and enjoy the ride. Cheers [link] [comments]  |
| How do you give constructive feedback? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 07:53 PM PDT Hey all, I have a question that probably a lot of people have some comments on. I am a new team lead at a young Machine Learning / AI start-up (25 people, pre-series A). My team is currently just one person other than me, but I have the mandate to grow it by 4x in the next 12 months. My question is around giving constructive feedback. I am comparatively younger (30yo, probably the youngest manager in the company), and my direct report is a man in his late 30s/early 40s who has been in the company since early days. He's strong theoretically (has an academic background with multiple PhDs), but lacks industry experience. Consequently I'm dealing with someone who is fairly opinionated, intelligent, but also has big gaps in writing production ready or even readable code, version control, and collaborative development. He's definitely more knowledgeable than me in the area of focus we are working on, but he doesn't have industry experience (which I do) that give you an appreciation for good coding practices. My question is this: How do I emphasize development and need for improvement in the areas I want to without coming across as hostile and too strict? This is further complicated by the fact that he is not a native speaker of english, and some things are lost in translation. I am fairly focussed on work and usually pair my 'suggestions for improvements' with praise for positive things in his work, but many times there is not much in terms of praise. So far, I haven't faced any major crisis that would require me to push much harder, but I know it will come if he doesn't make major changes in the way he writes solutions and shares them. My concern is that the work my team produces will be shared across the organization and then any issues with the code will be my responsibility (as it should be at that stage). I want to get things right within my team WHILE we are developing the solution rather than once it is out and we are hit with a thousand issues. Do people have any tips and things they have learned over their careers in how to handle such a situation? TL;DR: How do I give feedback to a direct report considerably more experienced academically and older than me? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2019 01:46 AM PDT Hello Everyone! I am a 22 years old student from Sri Lanka. Currently, I'm studying entrepreneurial business management in a major university. I have many ideas for startups and I can't figure it out where should I start. I have plenty of skills such as graphic designing, programming, capital markets trading and many more skills. Normally, I'm a person who learn things very quickly and master it within few months. I'm good with other things like business planning, business model innovations, financial projections and many more things that require to start a business. But unfortunately I don't know how to earn from this skills even if I tried many things. I maintain a journal with the business ideas that comes to my head and these are the main ones I'm focusing right now,
I just need advice from someone who had these frustrations when starting out just like me. Your comments are much appreciated. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Here’s a little startup hack for you... Posted: 04 Sep 2019 01:28 AM PDT If you don't have the need for a full time office yet but need a place to work, consider getting a virgin active membership. They usually have a 'business lounge', it's cheaper then serviced offices (we-work etc) and comes with a free gym. Wework - £350/month avg for shared workspaces. Virgin active - £150/month max (and comes with gym, pool...) - To me it's a no brainier. [link] [comments]  |
| Other cofounders are not contributing... I’m losing hope too Posted: 03 Sep 2019 01:09 PM PDT I had the idea for a new product and worked on it for a while before recruiting two good friends to join me. Things went well for 3 months then started slipping away. One girl is getting married and has been spending a lot of time wedding planning. Another person has been getting crushed at his full time job and hasn't made any progress. People started complaining about this and that without doing anything to improve the situation. I feel like I'm the only one still trying. I'm debating if I should just fire everyone and keep going on my own. The lack of effort + drama is just a bit too much. But if I go back to running it solo, I don't have all the skills or resources to cover their parts. I can do some but not all. I also won't be able to move very fast as the only one remaining. Has anyone else dealt with this type of problems? What do you do in this situation? [link] [comments]  |
| Fellow Redditors: What's your total monthly SaaS spend? What services/products are you using? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 07:47 AM PDT Recently I was looking at how much we spend on SaaS, and it made me wonder - For those who don't mind sharing, what's your total monthly SaaS spend? Where? Here're some SaaS expenses that I can share off the top of my head: (amount in USD)
Total -> ~750 USD + PLUS Few hundred dollars every month, while testing out a few SaaS, that requires credit card upfront, which you forget to cancel. (Q2 - Does this happen to you often?) PS.• This does not include tech expenses. I'll sync up with our tech team and update soon. [link] [comments]  |
| How are you building the first iteration of your product? How do you get to second iteration? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 02:22 PM PDT I am assuming many of us write code here, but would love to hear if that isn't the case. Lean startup definitely would indicate to test assumptions before building out a full massive product. So my question is, how do you each build that first version? Are you using Squarespace/Wix? What happens after that? Are you coding everything manually as you go? Would you prefer not to write code for it if you are? At what moment does it make sense to write the code? [link] [comments]  |
| Question about market research Posted: 03 Sep 2019 04:15 PM PDT Hi, i've got an idea and started working on it recently. Since this is my first time starting something, I wanted to know if calling companies and asking if they would hypothetically want my product is a good idea? Will people be welcome to a conversation and does someone have some experience with this? Any other advice would be appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| Warning/yellow flag if the main product is trying to solve several mostly unrelated problems? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 05:20 PM PDT I replied to a job ad seeking a web developer, for an unspecified company. I thought this was a job recruiter's post, but no, surprisingly it got me directly to the owner of the company. He said that he's looking for someone to help build their product to launch in a couple months. We got to talking on Google Hangouts and as I kept probing for details, I found a couple of issues. The first is that he doesn't seem to be sure what his target audience is. It's like the audience is both everyone and no one. I tried to get him to go in specific use cases but he spoke of several general ones- a place to hold video conferences, post job ads and events, sell items, or have a blog for personal posts. It's a one stop hub for many thing social I guess. Fair enough a certain major company is doing that right now, but it seems like it's a common practice for budding startup owners to compare their business to "X as it is now" and not to "X as it was in the beginning". But I can't help but wonder if that approach is just hand-waving- a way to conveniently leave out the "research your market" step of starting the business because you might consider everyone to be your market. Another thing that struck me as odd. I was discussing rates and he gave me a fixed price, which I told him is too low for the number of months expected. He has no web development experience but has already made his own assessment that the project would be "of medium complexity"- another interesting discovery of how his mind works. But the real kicker was when I asked him if he had gotten price estimates from other candidates, and he replied, "from millions to peanuts". I'm not sure about you but for me that's a call to action to refine the scope of the project so that your quotes have a smaller deviation. Finally the other odd thing was that he did not state the name of his company. He didn't even introduce himself as "Hi, I'm [name] and I am the founder of [company]" oh well I get it some people can get caught up in the moment and show a lot of excitement about talking about their product that they might overlook some things. Maybe he just need to rehearse his pitch better. Anyhow any ideas if it's possible to realize his product at least to MVP stage or is he trying to tackle too many problems at once? [link] [comments]  |
| What Sorts of Free Advertising Have You Had the Most Success With? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 03:56 AM PDT As the title says, what sorts of free advertising have you had the most success with? I'm just hoping we could share some ideas and help one another out! I've recently launched a sports related website. I'm not making much off it at the moment as visitor numbers are still relatively low. And for that reason I don't really have money to invest in advertising. I've started using Instagram and my main tool for attracting new visitors. My Instagram page isnt for my website, but its within the same niche. I'm getting a lot of followers there and every time I do get a new follower I send them a DM which includes a bit of information about my website. I know it seems very basic but its been very effective for me! Another is using cloths to promote my site. Im a season ticketholder and so go to a lot of football games. I've started wearing a t-shirt (and sometimes a cap) with my website name on it. It's very much a t-shirt that stands out. And yes I might look a bit ridiclous. But I always see an increase in traffic after attending games. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2019 01:00 PM PDT As the title states: Things are super early at our "startup." essentially, I came to a couple of guys a few weeks back with an idea, and they liked it. We have discussed starting a company, splitting equity, and plans for the company, but frankly, I already fucking hate these dudes and think they will be a net pain in the ass for the direction I wanted to take things. Nothing we have discussed is even remotely protectable, and even if it was, I haven't signed any NDA (haven't even discussed confidentiality) and have not entered into any legal business structure. Essentially it has just been a few people having conversations about starting a business, but nothing has materialized. My main question is: can I just ghost these dinks and do it on my own? I'm going to be raising the money for the business anyways (the only real entrepreneur of the group) and think that it's totally possible to do it on my own, the more I think about it. Initially I came to these people thinking that they would help grow the startup, but as we have more and more conversations, I'm increasingly worried that their influence will actually hinder the success of the business long term. Just want to make sure I'm not going to have some sore dude trying to sue me in 5 years. I mean, I guess anyone can sue anyone at any time, but my main concern is clarifying that there is no real president for a case. Mainly just trying to get in front of this problem before it actually becomes one. [link] [comments]  |
| Do you use any security programs for your startup? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 04:44 AM PDT I'm concerned about business safety, because I only use VPN for safety. I want to ask you, do you prepare all your security programs before launching your startup, or do you start to secure it on the way later? [link] [comments]  |
| MVP is ready but we have trouble finding beta testers Posted: 03 Sep 2019 09:39 AM PDT Hey there, Today, the MVP is ready and ready to be tested! I'll be very interested to read your comments :) Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| What are the legal complications for Indian residents for Incorporating Delaware C Corp from India? Posted: 03 Sep 2019 05:40 AM PDT Hey folks, It seems relatively easy, setting up and operating a U.S. company and inexpensive (We got great deals for Clerky and Stripe ), many founders like me who are Indian residents and have no relatives or connections in the US confused about the process. We may end up making mistakes in signing up with inexperienced advisors or seeking help from online sources ( Clerky or Stripe), resulting in tax, regulatory ( round tripping, RBI, FEMA etc.) and/or immigration issues that many times become difficult or impossible to resolve at a later stage. I considered getting experienced advisors involved early on in the process but they charge a bomb ( A minimum of $5000 ) which I cannot afford right now. What are your views ? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2019 03:05 AM PDT Hey guys, As I understand it, if you stream the video of a soccer match without broadcasting rights, you can be shutdown or sued. I guess, it's the same thing when broadcasting on the radio. However, what if you're talking about the game without the the game's default audio or video being broadcasted - just my voice and me commentating on the game. Would this be considered as violating the broadcasting rights? Thanks [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