Startups Share your startup - October 2019 |
- Share your startup - October 2019
- Tuesday Operational Roundtable - A Forum to Ask About Legal, Accounting, Project Management, or How to Get Started
- Building B2B app — how to get customer input?
- How to obtain an expression of interest/commitment to evaluate
- Any other accelerators/incubators/investors offering SAFE except from YC?
- How much bullshit are you going to take before you call it?
- Formation thoughts -- How do you valuate intellectual property?
- Got a job offer at a startup
- Anyone else get slightly ragey when customers constantly ask for discounts?
- Can I release a Beta/MVP without worrying about all of my business logistics?
- Does anyone have trouble with references / proving to potential customers that other companies actually use your product?
- UK business potentially offering software services/consultancy in Canada?
- How do you ask current users to have a 1:1 call with you about the product?
| Share your startup - October 2019 Posted: 01 Oct 2019 04:06 AM PDT Tell us about your startup! /r/startups wants to hear what you're working on! Contest mode is on, so remember to select 'Show All' to see all the replies. If you don't see your post, you probably need to load more comments at the bottom. Also, all posts are sorted randomly, so the sort function doesn't seem to work.
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| Posted: 01 Oct 2019 06:07 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]  |
| Building B2B app — how to get customer input? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 07:44 PM PDT I'm trying to build a B2B app. I'm trying to follow the lean startup method, and starting small and build as customer needs grows. However, I'm still building my initial iteration, and want to get customer reactions early. Unfortunately, my customers would be businesses. It's hard to attract their attention to reply to my questions on what they would like to see. I've sent demos videos with a small subset of their public data. Some bites, but very few. Anyone have tips for attracting business customers to give feedback? Do the demos need to be very flashy in your experience? [link] [comments]  |
| How to obtain an expression of interest/commitment to evaluate Posted: 01 Oct 2019 09:46 PM PDT Applying for a grant to finish building a software prototype (packaged as java microservice). The grant requires expressions of interest/ commitment to evaluate with the intent to purchase. There is no commitment to buy, just provide feedback is my understanding. So go through my contacts, and start cold calling companies ? Or any other tricks I am missing ? [link] [comments]  |
| Any other accelerators/incubators/investors offering SAFE except from YC? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 01:49 PM PDT Hey guys, Just wondering if anyone knows of any accelerators/incubators/investors providing a similar deal as YCombinator i.e. a SAFE as investment ? Or any deal as attractive or close to YC's? Just as FIY, what YCombinator offers is a 150k investment for 7% equity that they own at the first round of equity financing. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How much bullshit are you going to take before you call it? Posted: 02 Oct 2019 01:07 AM PDT Half a year into this "hopeful" startup, i have gone through the following: (1) the SVP that hired me quitted after me 3 months joining the company. He has had his own issue. He was called out as the being the weakest part in the company for being a weak sales. I am not sure if he quitted because he saw how sucked the company cash flow is or if he had been tired of being called a bad sales. No one would know. But fact was he quitted. (2) the admin/finance/HR payroll woman quitted. Not sure if she had seen the bad cash flow of the company again. Nobody knows. But there are interactions between me and her. One time I get a paycheck which was 5% off my normal payroll. We had an legal obligation here that we have to pay 5% into the retirement funds out of pocket and the company does that. The legal requirement comes in 3 months after employment but one can do it earlier. I was confused when I received the 5% off paycheck when she say the retirement fund payment would be made next month. Until I asked, she then confirmed and apologized that the retirement payment was already paid starting front hat month. I smell her incompetency. She then later quitted "for something else", and mentioned that she would still help the company doing admins and HR stuff. (3) Just yesterday, she put in the check of my payroll for me. And say that she would ask for my signature on the receipt later. Which was unusual, since we usually do it ourselves to bank our check. And then, this Monday, the check bounced. She said about she had forgotten about transferring funds to the current account and the check has been bounced sorry sorry blah blah blah. And for the third time I have a doubt for the company. Accidents can happen. But I am not sure if I can trust this company anymore. I am on the fence now. What funny is that, my payroll was on a government startup funding dedicated to my name, for sure. So they really have to pay very little to make up my pay (like US$1000 a month from the company, and then the rest was on the gov funding for 2 years). So I am not entirely sure if this is really an accident or if it is some funny trick to delay payment. I guess I am going to stick a little bit more. But I can feel that this company has a lot of way it is really incompetent. How much are you going to stick with it? Or is there your story to share? [link] [comments]  |
| Formation thoughts -- How do you valuate intellectual property? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 11:20 PM PDT This isn't per se an interest for investment. This is so that two co-founders merging their IP have an agreed-on accounting mechanism that will eventually translate to investment. Look, I know many of you are going to come at me with you 5% R&D businesses that operate by trimming away your margins with SaaS offerings.. I know many investors out there just simply don't care about those costs because it's squiddles compared to commercial real estate and what you make if you grow big (unless you're really churning the cloud spend). Uh, but screw all of those people. Ok, you're still here! I want your advice. We're just two guys with pools of IP. Imagine you're Amazon or Facebook. You run your business every two quarters devising what software to roll out to market from the throes of R&D. If you're always two quarters away from the next incremental competitive advantage, how do you valuate that R&D T-6 months? Here's the thing fellas, for those of you who might say, "oh it's too hard". I'm gonna give this thing about 9 months of time to figure out the valuation, so I can do quarterly check-in's to get the valuation right. Any data collected should 100% go into a prospectus. Thoughts welcome, I'm sure this might not be the right place to post because I'm gonna get tomatoed for saying something interesting and practical. EDIT: I think I might have answered my own question above, but thoughts welcome please :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Oct 2019 07:08 PM PDT I'm their first full time hire and will be taking on a marketing role. I got a basic salary offer with a stock option. Any advice before I take on this offer? Salary is not bad but I was thinking I should ask for something more. This startup recently got VC funding for 1M and are looking to grow hardcore in the next two years. I honestly don't know what to ask here but just looking for advice in general. Cheers. [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone else get slightly ragey when customers constantly ask for discounts? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 06:49 AM PDT As per title...I run a small business manufacturing niche safety products. They are expensive for us to manufacture and we know they are expensive for our customers to purchase, but we do have a unique technology in them that make them both great quality and radically different (biased opinion: better) than the competition. We are still the small fish in our industry however so every sale and new account still makes a difference to us. We constantly get asked for discounts by customers. People will write in saying "i know it is listed for $x on your website, but I wanted to know if you could do better?" or, even more annoying: " i know you're already offering me 20% for a bulk order, but I've been in touch with your main competitor and they have offered 45%. can you match it?"....and I know the answer here is set boundaries and just say 'no sorry' and let the sale roll on by because it's better to have no sale than a sale where you don't make any margin...but its giving me the rages. it feels so frustrating to work so hard and offer a product that is good (has won multiple design awards etc) and in line with industry pricing, only to then have to pander to constant discounts if you want to complete the sale. Anyone else experience this and have any recommendations on how to deal with it? Normally I don't take this sort of shit personally but today has dealt me a certain customer who has got right under my skin. They want you to discount so deeply that they walk away feeling like they have won, but they dont realise that there is a small business fighting to keep the lights on on the other side. [link] [comments]  |
| Can I release a Beta/MVP without worrying about all of my business logistics? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 02:40 PM PDT I'm almost ready to begin developing a small MVP of my startup idea - a peer-to-peer marketplace - to release as a beta, as well as a landing page to provide early access to users for that beta. Because my startup is a marketplace, there are logistical issues I have to deal with, such as settling buyer/seller disputes, determining who handles the cost of return shipping (or whether I should take the loss with a pre-paid label), etc. This is a unique idea of a P2P Marketplace - not like Mercari, or Letgo, or OfferUp, or Facebook Marketplace, etc. Because of that, I mainly want to validate my idea through the MVP without having to worry about those aforementioned logistics - return shipping, disputes, etc. at the current time. Is it reasonable to release an MVP to users and say that all orders are final no matter what and that there will be no settling of buyer/seller disputes for the period of the beta test, and then, depending on the results, determine if I want to move forward and fully develop the idea? I ask because I'm concerned that I might spend all of my time thinking of the best business model and solving logistical issues, but still end up with an application that no one wants to use. The majority of charges should be less than 25 USD, probably more around 0 to 10 USD). I'm planning to earn money by forcing users to create shipping labels through my front-end, and I'll charge an additional fee on top of that. I'd still have to monetize to that regard in the beta to afford the cost to operate (AWS, PostgreSQL, etc.) Thank you for your time. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Oct 2019 11:49 AM PDT I'm working a SaaS business that sells to larger enterprises (sales enablement stuff), but my biggest hurdle is that potential customers ask who else I'm working with / if they can speak to those customers. I can't reveal any of this info because I have NDAs with my other clients, and I so assume the customer thinks that just means I don't *really* have any other customers. Does anyone else have this issue? How have you gotten around it? [link] [comments]  |
| UK business potentially offering software services/consultancy in Canada? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 02:20 PM PDT Probably need to engage an accountant/lawyer to set this up properly, but just wondering if there's a simple guide written from the perspective of a UK company about how to sell services to companies in Canada. Software services and consultancy related to its use, specifically. Like whether you have to incorporate there, etc. Basic stuff, so I can then have a sensible conversation with a professional! [link] [comments]  |
| How do you ask current users to have a 1:1 call with you about the product? Posted: 01 Oct 2019 04:37 AM PDT Hi folks, my today's question: how do you ask users to have a 1:1 chat with you about the product / their problems. I've just red "The Mom Test" book and I don't want to screw it up. Wise elders say: "Talk to users!". So I want to talk to them. But how do I ask them so they don't ignore me? Here's a context: I have an app with a few dozens (not very active) users. I have their emails. I want to talk with them, not send surveys.
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