Startups Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital |
- Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital
- Never used any development methodology yet. The team grew and I am struggling!
- Issue surrendering control
- What are some best business strategies ever heard?
- How to work with cofounders with fundamental difference?
- Code for equity
- Emergency plan and missed payments worry me as the only technical co-founder
- Landlords and Startup Housing
- How should I price my subscriptions?
- Remote partnership
- Do you need social media for your startup?
| Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:06 AM PST Welcome to this week's Fundraising Thursdays Thread. Ask about anything related to fundraising, investors, accelerators, grants, and other sources of capital. That includes how to find these sources, how to work with them, and how to negotiate with them. 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]  |
| Never used any development methodology yet. The team grew and I am struggling! Posted: 28 Nov 2019 08:49 PM PST I lead a team of ~60 engineers ( Includes backend, frontend, QA, Devops ). All developers and hands on people and we dont have managers in the team. We were a very small team of 2 engineers including me who started developing our platform. Our startup has scaled in a short span of time. When we were small the development and roll out was quick. But now with more than 50 engineers in the team and sub reporting under me, it has been very difficult to follow and time track the product development. All the team members were reporting directly to me and I was handling every development and as when the team grown, I assigned 3 initial members under me to lead each vertical ( frontend, backend ). None of us were following any development methodology till now. Being frank, our project management tool was 'notes' app with todo list in it :> which worked amazing for us. But I understand its time to move on and get into 'agile' world of development. We tried using trello, asana and couple of other tools but the backlogs logged by PMs started becoming too much and messy and we had to abandon it. I realised that, whatever tools we use, unless a development methodology is followed with someone dedicatedly working on just updating it and making sure the team follows it, it never works out. We are trying to use Jira ( again not following agile ), but using it just as an advanced version of 'notes'! But I am not sure, because I feel its just another tool. My question is, the team has grown and is still growing. There is no proper development process in place.I still feel that, I miss time tracking, developer efficiency, we are not meeting deadlines nor able to find out what went wrong and where and I feel I am not scaling the dev team the 'right' way. How do I proceed? Do I need to hire an agile coach to help setup an engineering process in place or do I have to learn or hire a scrum master ( btw whats a scrum master and whats agile ?! ) PS : I was a developer and has been leading small team of engineers. This is my first experience as a CTO leading a large number of teams. Looking for some insights here on which direction to take to covert my engineering team to a much more efficient team. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Nov 2019 02:18 PM PST So, my friend and I are starting a company in an industry in which I have been working in for years and he's fairly new. Now, I'm not going to ask if he's capable because of so and so, he has proved to me he's knows what he is talking about and is willing to learn more. But, I have come to a dilemma. How do you guys surrender control and delegate to others and trust them to hold an idea up to your standards? I'm not saying he will be doing all the work, the load is shared, but recently I've noticed I've been completing tasks on my own because I'm worried about standards that I want to see. What I'm asking is really how do you guys trust others to do work for your brand? How do you help them work towards your grand scheme? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| What are some best business strategies ever heard? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:57 AM PST I must admit, I myself have struggled in formulating an effective business plan for my clients. At times, it gets quite challenging trying to understand the dimensions of strategy. Not to forget, business strategy is amorphous but it is an overwhelming subject if it is being dealt with properly. If you'll notice, it is because of effective business strategies, companies like Apple, Nike, Google, Coca-Cola, and many others have made great strides in the market sector today. [link] [comments]  |
| How to work with cofounders with fundamental difference? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:41 AM PST Having been in the startup journey for 1 year, and recently start to see some real difference between me and my co-founder, especially in how we treat startups and our values. Specifically, my cofounder is more interested in making money out of doing startups, while I'm more interested in building a successful product and business. Not about right or wrong, just difference. I would imagine with different purpose, we could work together, and the bright side is we can provide different perspective. But after recently discussions about the product and various things, I start to think this difference is going to kill us. For example, he would insist to charge money for our product, which is fine by me, but he does on small features that I even couldn't find a logical reason the user would pay. It seems that all he cares about is whether we can make some money, what the product does, who the users are, don't matter. Another example would be, when testing a feature, he would make very little effort IMO, just build a MVP, do some paid ads, then if there's no whiff of traction, move on. The way I see it, is we didn't even try to a) do some basic marketing, b) get real feedback from some real people, even bad ones. Not even to mention paid ads probably don't count as an effective way of marketing. I'm always skeptical about why we kill a product, because we have no idea. His reasoning is, we don't have enough time to find out the reason, just keep making assumptions and validating them. But in my view, we're not really "validating" them. The way we did it is just another assumption. We both agree we cannot change each other's opinion on methodology, but I'm seeing we struggle to find a way to work together. When building product together, it's mostly fine. But we would fall into argument whenever it's sorta launched. He's very anxious about not getting any traction, wanted to move on, but cannot find a good "next" idea. I'm typically on my way to figure out why there's no traction. He thinks I'm wasting time and don't know what I'm doing, I think he's not making any effort on anything other than building the product. This has happened a few times in the past. And I'm starting to worry this fundamental difference between us is slowing us down, and eventually will kill our startup. Or maybe people with different values are not supposed to work together as cofounders in the first place. Sometimes it feels we're two individuals working on different things. Funny thing is, I actually think it's OK - one does new exploration, and one follows up with previous work making sure they're taken care of. He does not agree. We couldn't reach agreement on this thing either, lol. Thanks for listening to my whining. Any suggestion is greatly appreciated, I could really use some guidance. Feel I'm starting to losing faith in my cofounder. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:23 AM PST I have been developing an online solution in my area of expertise . I am a business person not a developer or coder. So I have to pay for the work to be done. My solution has had a lot of work done but now needs some bugs sorted out then the graphical user interface finalised. I have created few other solutions in the past. I've run out of money, so it's been on hold for the last few months . I'd be every interested to find and partner with a developer that can handle that side of it for equity share. Their is a lot of upside as the current solutions in my industry are fairly dated, & our solution does things much smarter. Anyway. I have no idea even if this is something a developer would be interested in or how I'd go about it. Which is why I'm posting here for some guidance. [link] [comments]  |
| Emergency plan and missed payments worry me as the only technical co-founder Posted: 28 Nov 2019 03:14 PM PST I run a small startup with my co-founder (and 3 employees) and I'm the only technical guy in it. One of the things that worries me most is that somehow we miss some critical provider payment (servers, email accounts, backup service, etc.). We have our credit card there and I have set reminders long time before its expiration date, but what if I need to be away for, let's say, more than a month (i.e. sudden accident). Do you have an emergency plan? How detailed is it? What happens when you miss a payment for servers (Amazon, Digital Ocean...) or for email (GSuite) or other critical part of your business/startup? What is the retention policy for these companies? Can you recover your data in case shit hits the fan or do they wipe it out? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:35 PM PST My co-founders and I have been living together for the last two years. We do this because it saves money, commute time, and opens the doors to making every interaction a work interaction. However, this has not come easy. As a startup, we choose to rent for obvious reasons. Understandably, landlords do not like having startups, especially early stage ones , as tenants. Paying the deposit plus three months upfront has been the norm for us. However, it's getting annoying, and I was wondering, is this the norm for you? [link] [comments]  |
| How should I price my subscriptions? Posted: 28 Nov 2019 12:29 PM PST Just focus purely on the information I am explaining. Here's my ideas for subscription plan: Free Users:
Premium Users:
I'm thinking of pricing Pro Mode / Premium at $5 / month. Do you think it's better to price this low and expect higher conversion rates no only purely on a low price but because of the perks provided for "more convenience"? Pretend this is for an app your using daily and it's about gathering information. Imagine you are having daily traffic of a few hundred people and thousands monthly. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Nov 2019 04:20 AM PST I've posted on /r/cofounder looking for co founders today, and it looks like there's a lot of interest in my project. It won't be my first, I have a few companies, some I started with partners, but always people I've known for a while and had comparability with. In most cases contracts we're either emails I wrote, or a quick contract our lawyers banged out in less then a week.... I find that trust is an effective lubricant in business. Now I'm wondering if people here might have success stories and general advice to starting a project or company with people you meet online based just on qualifications. Caveats? Best practices? [link] [comments]  |
| Do you need social media for your startup? Posted: 28 Nov 2019 06:48 AM PST I've learned that social media can be very helpful and we know that there are many successful businesses, many successful personalities for instance built on Youtube, Instagram and so on. How much of a focus should it be especially when you are building a startup? [link] [comments]  |
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