Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products |
- Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products
- Those who gave up a stable job to start a business -- how was that transition, what would you have done differently?
- My startup went bust and now I have to look for a job. How do I not feel like a complete failure?
- Why We Didn't Make It To Y Combinator (Latest W20 batch)
- I am being offered equity in a startup. How to best structure it?
- Leading company in our industry is developing a very similar platform, what to do?
- What causes enthusiast adoption? mass market adoption?
- Talk to your customers prelaunch, during launch and after launch
- Can someone help me think through my MVP for a mobile game?
- Where do you keep legal documents of your startup?
- How To Build A Sales Team In A Startup?
- Startup Community Mentor doesn't even care... (Mild rant)
| Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products Posted: 22 Nov 2019 05:07 AM PST Welcome to this week's Feedback Thread. This is the place to request feedback on your ideas and products. Be sure to give feedback if you are requesting feedback. Equivalent exchange goes a long way towards reaching your own goals and it makes for a stronger community. Please use the following format:URL: Purpose of Startup: Technologies Used: Feedback Requested: Additional Comments: Post your site along with your stack and technologies used and receive feedback from the community. Please refrain from just posting a link and instead give us a bit of a background about your creation. Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, or code review. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2019 01:15 PM PST Many dream of leaving their 9-5 to start their own business. Understandably, many people aren't cut out for business ownership / management on a fundamental level. Many are not cut out for it on a financial level. And many do not have a realistic idea or starting point to progress their idea from. Some plan carefully before transitioning to a startup, while others leave on a whim or after success while pursuing their startup on the side while still employed. I know of some who quit, and despite success in their startup, desperately missed security and sanity of the 9-5. I know of some who quit and never looked back. Some quit and failed, but were happy to learn from their mistakes and go on, yet, to others this failure was devastating. Different industries, different capital needed, different geographies, services vs products, starting alone vs with a founder, different levels of experience, having commitments (family, kids, mortgage, medical issues) -- all these elements play into the decision. Many important considerations need to be made before leaving the relative security of a job to the relative risk of running a startup. Despite all the pros and cons, founders weigh the situation they are in and decide to make the leap. I am interested to hear about those who made the leap and how that transition was. What unexpected (good and bad) changes came as a byproduct of this transition? If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently? + Other general advice appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| My startup went bust and now I have to look for a job. How do I not feel like a complete failure? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 03:13 AM PST First of all, I would just like to say that this is not in any way a validation post, nor am I trying to fish for any sympathy, though that is welcome. With that out of the way, as the title says, my startup went bust (or, rather is about to) and I have been in the process for looking for a job for the past month. I started my startup in my penultimate year of studying with hopes of it becoming my full time job and supporting me financially for the foreseeable. I was going to be one of the cool, young 20-something entrepreneurs that wouldn't ever have to answer to a boss and worked my own hours. The first few months were great but as time went on, mistakes started to snowball. I signed terrible long term contracts, carelessly spent money and failed to properly scale the business which has landed me in lots of debt. Looking back, these were easily avoidable mistakes only an idiot would make and I would redo nearly every decision I made. But whatever, hindsight is 20/20. Because of my failures, I feel mentally and physically tortured. I very often get mood swings, depressive episodes and can literally always feel a heavy weight pushing me down. Now comes applying for the jobs. For job interviews, I have to go in with a fake happy personality and pretend I am interested in their company when I am extremely depressed and just need a salary to pay off my debts. Worst of all, since I list my startup as work experience, I have to explain that it was just a 'cool side project from university' when I had plans to pursue it full time. I know it sounds very "first world capitalist problems" but my entire life for the past 3 years has been for nothing. My dreams of being a young entrepreneur out of university are over and now I must return to normalcy. I feel like a complete failure and an embarrassment to all my friends who already have proper jobs and my parents who immigrated here and worked hard jobs and paid for the funding of my startup. [link] [comments]  |
| Why We Didn't Make It To Y Combinator (Latest W20 batch) Posted: 23 Nov 2019 01:33 AM PST Just a few weeks ago, I was sitting in a small meeting room in central Paris having Gustaf, Aaron, and Stephanie from YC asking how WebARX is going to be the next big thing in cyber-security you're all going to hear about. Even though this time we did not make it, we got some really good feedback and I decided to write down our whole experience. We will definitely apply again! Is there any YC Alumni here who could share their experience and some tips? Full article I wrote in Medium: https://medium.com/@oliversild/why-we-didnt-make-it-to-y-combinator-w20-batch-65a16c1d52a5 [link] [comments]  |
| I am being offered equity in a startup. How to best structure it? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 09:55 AM PST I am being offered a salary and equity in a friend's startup. We haven't started negotiating it yet. He's been running it for 2+ years, and he recently got an acquisition offer of $1.5mn which he declined. There's a couple of investors with minor equity onboard. What I want to know is - how can I actually structure it to maximize my potential of it realizing into actual hard cash? What are the potential ways this equity can be sold later on, excluding acquisition and IPO? Can I sell it to investors? How can I best structure it in the shareholder agreement? Throw me some ideas! [link] [comments]  |
| Leading company in our industry is developing a very similar platform, what to do? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 04:10 AM PST For the past 10 months, our team has been developing a marketplace in a fragmented industry and we found out this week a well funded company whose becoming a leading company in our industry is developing a similar platform with bery similar features and has existing clients base that they can easily convert into users for this new platform. The platform is still in beta and hard to find on their main website but they are clearly putting a lot of resources to bring it to market. Our platform is very similar while we do have a couple of different features however it would be easy for them to replicate them. What should we do? Give up...or wait for them to go live and reassess or continue working on it? Thank you [link] [comments]  |
| What causes enthusiast adoption? mass market adoption? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 12:25 PM PST How would a company get their products to be adopted by 'enthusiast', to early adopters then mass market? What is the transition that a company takes with its product to get features that are suited for mass market adoption? Is the idea to try to keep the 'dna', the vision of the company alive, offering a product that suites mass market needs that only your start up can with its 'dna'? How could a company look at this type of leap as a progressive transition, or should this be looked at as a leap? [link] [comments]  |
| Talk to your customers prelaunch, during launch and after launch Posted: 22 Nov 2019 08:25 AM PST Posted this on r/shopify, but thought it'd be helpful here too. Hey all, Wanted to drop in and talk about something that most people ignore. So before launching my commerce store, I was working on a startup with a couple of friends. Long story short, we got an interview at Y Combinator, one of the biggest tech startup accelerators in the world - companies like Stripe, AirBnB, Coinbase, InstaCart etc. came from that accelerator. During the interview the partners got stumped on 1 question: How do you know that people want what you're making? Have you talked to your users? We didn't talk to anyone. We were building the startup in a bubble with no real communication with what our end users actually wanted. When we talked to them, we realized that there were other solutions that were more technically advanced than ours. That hurt, but it was a huge reality check and I'm thankful we found out before we funnelled in a lot of money and time. Anyways, I eventually decided that I didn't want to be part of the startup anymore mainly because I wasn't really interested in the topic, I kind of went into the field because I thought it'd be a money maker. Instead, I thought about going back to ecommerce. I had some initial success with it before the startup and figured, hey what the heck, may as well go back. This time, Im taking YC's advice to heart and I've spent some money building an email list + social media following for my brand prelaunch. I spent a couple hundred and I have an email list of >1000 people. My product has variations - colour, style etc. so instead of shooting in the dark and hoping they like my product, I sent out an email blast introducing myself in a simple text email. I said who I was, what I want to build the company to be, and why I'm doing what I'm doing. I kind of felt like I may be annoying, but the response was actually surprising. They were an open book, sent me photos of similar products and explained why they don't like it, what they wished was improved and what styles / colors they wanted. Now, I have a blueprint before making a large order with my manufacturer, and it's honestly reassuring. I'm going to keep engaging with them and talking with them to make sure that what I make is something they truly want, and I think thats some invaluable insight. With them engaged and involved in the process, they feel like they're actually part of the brand rather than just an end consumer. This could even lead to an awesome kickstarter! So try it! You might be surprised at what response you get. Whether its email, social media, surveys, reviews - you should treat them like people and not as just a means to get some money. Surprisingly, taking this approach will actually help you improve. Paul Graham, one of the founders of YC, bases the entire accelerator around this ethos. Make something that people want, and the only way you can know what they want is by engaging with them. [link] [comments]  |
| Can someone help me think through my MVP for a mobile game? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 11:13 AM PST Hi everyone, Happy Friday! I've worked at startups for several years as a product designer and have been doing some heavy exploration for the past year around opportunities for baby boomers. To me, they are a huge market and more digitally accessible than many give them credit for. After doing some covert user research (by disguising as an older woman on Facebook), I decided that I wanted to build a mobile multiplayer game where users create avatars, travel to worlds themed around past decades and play minigames with other people to earn rewards and currency for their avatar. If anyone has ever played an MMO like Neopets, Club Penguin or MyCola, it's a very similar framework and one that is ripe for mobile. To me, this is perfect because it satisfies my audience's desire to be social with their love for a variety of things to do / games to play. Here are some mockups of the game here: https://imgur.com/a/pvc7w1c So, I'm getting really tripped up about how to turn this into an MVP. I can create fake Facebook ads but it's not obvious what metric clearly defines whether people are interested or not. Is it the % of people who liked the ad? Or do I put a fake download button and see how many people click it? I can also send screenshots of the app to older people (via my incognito account) and ask them if they'd play but, again, the threshold is confusing and I feel like it's not advancing me further. What I love about working on a game is that it's very much an art form as well. The success of it can well be as much about the execution and enjoyability of the game rather than the market's readiness for it. My instinct tells me to continue exploring my vision and take my mockups and start implementing core parts of the gameplay. Then I hold myself back because you always hear about how you should validate your hypotheses before wasting resources to build. I just don't really understand how I can test my hypothesis -- boomers want a virtual setting to play and socialize -- without building it out. Should I take the Facebook ad test more seriously? One idea I had was that I can create a video of simulated gameplay and use that on Facebook ads. Does anyone know of how other games started as MVPs? Let me know if I asked the right questions. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Where do you keep legal documents of your startup? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 02:35 AM PST Title says it all: I'm curious where you guys keep things like certificate of incorporation, bylaws, business licenses, annual reports, BoD resolutions, stock purchase agreements, etc. Dropbox folder, accountant/lawyer keeping them for you, use a software, ...? [link] [comments]  |
| How To Build A Sales Team In A Startup? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 02:19 AM PST How is your search for a sales team going? Hope this helps some of you - 2nd part to the article shared last week. Founders are usually the first to start doing sales in their startup. They offer the product to their friends, former colleagues and acquaintances or simply ask for their recommendation to some other business that may need a startup's solution. Those few first customers are enough to get you going and help you grow. But, then it is time to grow your own sales team. But how do you start? How do you know what makes a good salesperson? Should they have same qualities you're looking for in your developers or completely different? How many employees does your sales team need? We help you answer all of these questions and more with our simple sales hiring guide. Hire Two Or Three Young Sales RepsLet's suppose you have determined your first sales targets, customer journey, pricing and revenue to make you (nearly) profitable. Then you calculated how much hours aka people you will need to reach those targets. Say, for a start, you should hire about 3-5 younger sales reps. Of course, younger sales reps are far less costly. By experimenting they can give you valuable data on what kind of companies need your solution (i.e. build your ICP), what they are willing to pay and what messaging sells your solution best. Having more sales reps will help you see which one of them is better than the others and by creating a competitive environment you will instigate them to try hard(er). However, young sales reps are without any connections that you can benefit from immediately. They are practically replacing you and saving your time by contacting people they don't know and offering a solution that is new to your potential customers. They still need guidance from founder and convincing that the product they're selling is worthy of their effort. You will probably need to provide your sales team with a lead list to help them contact the right people if you want them to focus on selling only. If you think they have enough time, they can look for leads themselves. Some of them will require basic training in CRM, ABS tools, negotiating and cold calling, so make sure you can afford to hire someone to give them those first lessons or simply set aside few days and do it yourself. Your team must know how to write cold sales emails because they are your startup's first contact with potential customers. If you're unsure about how the average day of a sales rep should look like, there are best practices that you can follow. Joe Curtis from Sales & Marketing Management believes that sales reps with no or little previous experience are the best choice for startups since they can adapt quickly and are far more flexible than their experienced colleagues. Once you determine how much they can sell – start with a commission to motivate them to sell more. You can even set up a success board that shows who are the best sales reps in the team of that week or that month. How do you know who would be a good employee? Salespeople should have outstanding communication skills and competitive nature. They should be so charming that they can sell an ice to an Eskimo. But don't let their seductive skills work on you. Simply come up with a set of questions that show their ability to solve problems, ask them about their hobbies and expectations at your company. Then explain your own expectations clearly and see how they react. If they think they can't handle it and are being fair, they'll probably back down themselves. The more transparent you are in the interview – the fewer problems you will encounter once you hire them. You should ask for the same approach from your future employees as well. Be careful, because a lot of people are able to market themselves so well, especially in sales, you will think you hired the best person in the world for next to nothing, when in fact their daily work skills are far from what they presented them to be. Let your candidates know that if they promised something that they can't handle – it's not going to be a fun ride. To minimize the damage in hiring, you can always ask for recommendations from your friends and colleagues that are known for providing honest and detailed information. Most experts advise to avoid hiring anyone expensive and too experienced at the very beginning. You should also avoid hiring too fast, no matter how big investment you receive. If you want to do a good Account Based Selling, you should have a few people in marketing as well who will create content that your sales can use and generally develop your brand. Hiring a Sales LeaderOnce your team is able to function by themselves, a founder can finally take care of more important business and give a job of a sales leader to someone else. It can be a manager or director, depending on your team size and revenue. Make sure you find someone who already has experience in managing 2 to 20 people. Because if they don't, all the problems will come back to you, the founder. Ideally, they would be someone who got promoted from their junior position to a managerial one in the company similar to yours that they previously worked for. That means they have already gone through the nitty-gritty of everyday sales process and have proven their value enough to be taken to the next step. Sales managers can track the success of your sales reps, make sure they are meeting their daily, weekly and monthly quotas, as well as coach and guide sales youngins when extra help is needed. Manager's main goal is to improve the current processes and optimize them, but occasionally they can come up with something, although it's not necessary. Hiring a Senior in SalesThis will happen once your sales team grows beyond 25 people. You will need someone able to handle multiple sales managers/directors and it's usually a VP of Sales. Similarly to a managerial position, you need someone who has already been in a similar role at a company similar to yours and are known for results that have benefited the company in a great manner. Your VP should be able to come up with and execute sales strategy, scale and expand your sales partnerships, develop hiring and training processes, guide your best sales reps to a better managerial/directorial positions, close the largest deals and open new offices. Your sales senior will probably cost a lot of money, but hopefully, they will be well worth it. So take your time, don't rush your VP hiring and make sure you've picked the right person. Can you do without a sales team?We'd always say no, because it will take too much of your time, but if you are already determined to do it yourself make sure you get good CRM or ABS tool, collect data that will help you tailor your value propositions and that you get used to rejections. Read the original article for some extra links! [link] [comments]  |
| Startup Community Mentor doesn't even care... (Mild rant) Posted: 22 Nov 2019 07:10 AM PST Nothing really something i need help or approval with. Just a small (edit: Turned out to be quite a text. Sorry.) rant... So, i think our entrepreneurial journey is going pretty decent so far. Backstory: Me and my co-founder working full time in a business field, that has a pretty big pain. We've been bouncing around an idea for a whole now and jumped into trying to fix that pain about 4-5 months ago. On the path so far, we created a business plan and ran through numbers and financials. We built a road map and put together a rough strategy, at least pointing us in a direction. We (anonymously) reached out to other business professionals to have them participate in a survey about the problem that we identified, how they see this problem and what they think about our proposed solution: We got around 150 people to participate and a little over 90% of them acknowledged the problem, 86% of all participants think what we (roughly) outlined in the survey would benefit them. We talked to potential customers about their point of views of the problem, and ended up refining what we thought would be a great solution already. In the process, we dropped part of what we thought would be a good idea and worked in some other pointers. In the process, our product changed to what it currently is. We are now at a point where we have an MVP ready, recently started talking to other businesses in person, and are collecting signed Letters of Interest. We also got signed pilot agreements from companies, willing to participate in the pilot run of our product in Q1 2020. We got companies to "sponsor" our product and pitch in some money, to help us build it and put it on the market. Our product is - simply put - a web based solution to fix a problem in a physical, hands-on market. So, we are somewhat of a startup (even though we are not making any money and we are not live yet). We think we have done our homework as good as we could and didn't just jump into a "hey, we've got a perfect idea and don't need to verify the market need for it" kinda situation. Can we still fail? Of course we can, and we are fully aware of that. With this being said, i'll get to the point of this post. I recently started to network in the startup scene, meeting other entrepreneurs, see how other people do this thing, trying to get connections, learn a thing of five, maybe find a mentor. The usual thing you would expect. A few days ago, there was an event at a somewhat local starter space, where a mentor talked about the upcoming startup weekend and he presented two (successful and having a great idea imho) companies that he's been mentoring and he invested in. How he is always looking for "that unicorn idea". He's a mentor for the starter space, and also a private investor. After the event, he ended up talking to some of the other founders and me. The problem was: He simply wouldn't listen. Asking about our project, i told him we are building a service for the tradeshow/event industry. Halfway through my second sentence, he started: "So you are another event business in the event market!" And then he went on about how this starter space is always willing to help brick-and-mortar businesses, bust is actually focussed on tech or at least tech-enabled startups ("Take Uber for example: They solved a non-tech problem through tech"). About how we don't even have market fit, because "you think you might have a great product! But trust me, you haven't, before you talked to your potential clients"! About how we need to work on a business plan, before we actually start working on what we think is our product, and so on. He wouldn't even listen to my answers, just bouncing them back with "No, you haven't done it right". I wasn't offended or anything. Yes, we are a small startup with first-time founders. Yes, we are nothing yet. Yes, there is a 90% chance we will fail. And we are aware of that. That is why we would love to have a mentor, giving us his opinion and pointing us in the right direction. But i would expect to sit down and have a "so, what have you done so far"-talk, before giving us homework to do. I am just wondering about his mindset, asking people about their product and then literally cutting them off one-and-a-half sentences into their answer, telling them about how they haven't done our homework, unlike the companies he has been mentoring and he invested in. Not sure how to say this: I'm glad he's successful with what he's doing. But i don't think he'll ever find "that unicorn idea" when he's insisting on "no matter what business you're in: I've started previous successfull startups, so i know better than you". So, to leave you guys with a question: Anyone having similar experiences? I am sure that won't be the last time we run into a scenario like this, but how can i try to avoid this or turn it around in the future? Have a paper stack of our business plan / customer conversation / product history with me, even for informal events just so i can whip it out and show it? Or simply move on, walk away and find someone else to talk to? How do you handle situations like this? 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