Startups Sunday’s Success Stories - Celebrate Your Successes From the Past Week: Anything goes, none too small! |
- Sunday’s Success Stories - Celebrate Your Successes From the Past Week: Anything goes, none too small!
- Three Make-it-Or-Break-It Tips for Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup
- Thinking of starting a business that already has competition?
- Advice needed on small business offer.
- VC BUBBLE BURST AND IMPACT ON STARTUPS
- What to know for Spin-off equity negotiations with University
- Peer Support and Self Management Saturday’s - A Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant
| Posted: 19 Oct 2019 06:05 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Sunday's Success Stories Thread. A lot of us get way too hung up on the destination and the fact that we are not there yet. It is important to take a moment to reflect on a great quote from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., "The steps you take don't need to be big, they just need to take you in the right direction"- Jemma Simmons This is extremely relevant to all of us in this community. We should all be more aware of the successes we achieve every day that carry us closer to our goals. Celebrating these successes, no matter how small they are, allow us to stay motivated, focused, and happy while we struggle to achieve dreams of various sizes. The purpose of this thread is to share our successes from the week with one another and have something to celebrate together. So, let us know what successes you have achieved this week! Nothing is too small or insignificant! #Because this is meant to be a safe place to support emotional and physical health there is a zero tolerance policy in effect. Be KIND. Be sure to report any conduct that is in violation of that key tenet. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Three Make-it-Or-Break-It Tips for Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup Posted: 19 Oct 2019 06:08 PM PDT Hi Entrepreneurs! Have you ever thought about launching a SaaS? I've spent the last two years bootstrapping my SaaS company and have just started picking up serious traction. In hindsight most of those two years was spent learning and I could probably do it again from scratch in a month. Sadly, I can't do the learning for you, but I can leave you with the highest leverage tips I discovered along the way. Tip 1: The first concept is what started my business on the right foot. Before I figured this out, I had built several products I didn't sell at all. And it's actually really simple. Start with Sales. Wait, what? Doesn't a SaaS product need a product to sell? Doesn't it start with a website or an idea at least? Not for me it didn't. It didn't even start with an idea. My first customer came to me and asked me to automate a tiny tiny piece of their business. I realized that millions of businesses have this problem and would pay exactly what he's offering for a solution. So I said "Andy, If I sell this to you and it breaks, then what?" He asked if I would fix it and I said yes but not forever. So he said "I guess I would have to pay someone to fix it. Can you document how it works?" Well, that means I have to spend even more time on this (yes you should always document but time is money, right?) So I told him "Andy lets do this - I'm going to build this but I will own it. I'll host it on my own website and you can use it through there. I'll sell you a lifetime license for the same price you're asking me to build it for. If I go out of business I'll give it to you. Until then, if it breaks I'll fix it and I'll actually continue to update it and make it better." Boom, no brainer. I could have sold him a frickin' pen to sign on the dotted line. Before I'd sunk a dollar into development I already had a customer. And there were millions more just like him. Think about it from the viewpoint of the customer journey - before he had even heard of my SaaS product, he identified his need, allocated a budget, and started looking for a solution. And he didn't find one. He was ready to buy my product before my product even existed! Imagine pitching that story to an investor... Tip 2: Leverage third party tools. This should be a no-brainer in some regards - obviously you're going to use Stripe or Paypal to process payments. But there's a little more too it than that. Back in the days when Twilio and Google Translate APIs were the new sliced bread, I built a VOIP application that let you call a phone number and speak in any language and it would come out in English (or whatever you wanted) on the other side. Then I could speak back in English and it would translate it back into whatever language the caller was speaking. It wasn't real-time, there was a delay of about 3-5 seconds and it sounded pretty robotic. Sometimes the translation was way off because it misheard a word. And since it was all API driven, it was only about 10 lines of javascript. But because I'd used API's and third party services, the underlying technology was constantly getting better on its own. Think about it... 5 days a week 9 hours a day there was a team of Engineers at Google and Twilio working hard to make my product faster, more accurate, and more human. And how do I get those improvements? I don't even have to install a software update - because I'm using API's my product just gets better for free whenever they push an update. That means in 3 years it might be extremely accurate, real-time, and indistinguishable from humans. All without me having to spend a dime or lift a finger. Tip 3: Integrate AND COMARKET with other products. The first part's obvious - but did you know that your integration most likely adds value to the platform you integrate with? For example my product integrates with six different cold email marketing tools. And of those, we are currently featured by three of them on their site and are developing comarketing relationships with the other 3. Here's the thing - They all want their customers to use my product because my product increases their customer's success on their platform. That means they stay longer, spend more, and recommend the product to more people. In other words my product converts their users into power users because it eliminates most of the time consuming hiccups and increases the total value they can get from the platform. So they sell my product to their customers, who already know how to drive value with cold email, and those customers sign up for my product faster, stay longer, and buy more than people who have never used cold email. The best part is I don't have to pay them a dime. At the end of the day, SaaS is all about high leverage thinking. You need to leverage your customers existing process. You need to leverage third party tools and you need to leverage the audiences of products that you're aligned with. If you feel like you're reinventing the wheel, stop, and focus on what you can do that is extremely high leverage. There are too many rabbit holes to get stuck in if you're not careful. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Thinking of starting a business that already has competition? Posted: 19 Oct 2019 10:09 AM PDT Consider this first... If you are trying to start a business that 1) has already been created by others and 2) you can't compete on price with, don't justify it merely by saying your product has a few different bells and whistles. I am not going to overpay for a product or service because it comes with a bag of chocolates, unless I'm just an insane chocolate-lover. Now if you think there is a large enough market with enough people who will buy because of the chocolates, go for it. However, if you want your business to be sustained, you likely will need a larger group of potential customers. The only way to get consumers to pay a higher price than what the competition is charging is to sell them innovation. This is not to be confused with switching which side of your product the power button is on. I'm talking about real innovation. Your product needs to be innovative in such a way that it is not the same product your competition is selling. That seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes it is really easy to miss it. Sorry, this was kind of a rant and also a tip for anyone listening. You're welcome to disagree or agree. :) [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Advice needed on small business offer. Posted: 20 Oct 2019 04:49 AM PDT Hi, My wife has been invited to become part of a business in the UK. I wanted to run this by you and see if there were any questions or concerns. The business relates to letting in the UK, focusing on Chinese students. There is the initial entrepreneur, who is a young Chinese businessman, he has been working on building the business for three years now. He has provided the initial investment into the company. The business has two main elements, one of which he has been focusing on up until this point and has built an app and begun to trade. My wife (also Chinese) has been offered the following to help set up the second part of the business.
The expectation is that she will not receive payment until the company receives its commission income, which it will not do until this time next year. What questions should I be asking? Is this compensation package reasonable? Is it normal? Cheers guys [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| VC BUBBLE BURST AND IMPACT ON STARTUPS Posted: 19 Oct 2019 07:32 PM PDT This may be a very stupid question. Is anyone else thinking about the impact of vc bubble burst on their startup? Maybe the uber, wework, softbank headlines talking, but feels imminent, no? I've been doing some light research on the 2000 market burst to try to understand what happened last time. I understand that the stocks collapsed. But what about the companies that were not public? I know that many went under. But I can't fully understand why that would be. Is it merely the fact that they were poised for really rapid growth and when the funding dried up, they didn't/could contract in time? Or is it something more existential? Anyone reading/thinking about this problem in an interesting way? How should young companies brace themselves for this? Simply, opt-out not-raise, and bootstrap? Or something less conservative and more interesting? [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| What to know for Spin-off equity negotiations with University Posted: 19 Oct 2019 03:56 PM PDT In the upcoming days our spin-off business will have negotiations regarding the equity that the University should have of the company. Patent licensing, software and prototyping help will be the main assets that they have/will provide. Is there anything to know before the negotiations which could bring the percentage they ask down? ( the one argument that comes to my mind is since they require to associate the project with their University, we should be able to use the softwares (for atleast a year) that we have used to get to this point in the first place and not ask a percentage of equity for this). I am completely happy to give an amount of equity to University, since they have provided many assets already but we want to control the company even after rounds of investment, hence we need to bring the ask of theirs down. Every input is extremely valuable!! [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 19 Oct 2019 06:05 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Peer Support and Self Management Thread. This is a Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant. The goal for this thread is to help one another manage mental and physical health so we can more easily find success. We all struggle sometimes and it is important to recognize that the struggle is part of the journey. The important thing is to learn how to overcome that adversity to grow and succeed. Be tactful and classy in how you vent your feelings and share your frustrations. Act in a mature manner. Ask questions, share experiences, and be there for one another. Practice empathy in giving advice and remember that what worked for you isn't guaranteed to work for others. Make suggestions, not demands of others. #Because this is meant to be a safe place to support emotional and physical health there is a zero tolerance policy in effect. Be KIND. Be sure to report any conduct that is in violation of that key tenet. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  |
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