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
- University Class and Startup Opportunity -- Advice for what can I go above and beyond? What did someone do for you which you found invaluable?
- What are the cons of going live early?
- Anyone been in the situation of moving back in with parents for a year or two and start a new business over building one up on the side whilst employed?
- LLC vs C-Corp conversion (tax bills)
- How in the world do you get ahead?
- Epic Fail: The Story of Our Product Hunt Launch
| Posted: 30 Jan 2020 05:05 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]  |
| Posted: 30 Jan 2020 06:36 PM PST Hello, I am in an undergrad class where researchers pitch their new technologies to students who form teams to commercialize the product idea. The way I see it, I'm dedicating a semester of free labor to help kickstart this potential founder, but I know the course rubric can't reflect all of the challenges someone faces with bringing an academic discovery to the market. Therefore, I'd like to best utilize this time and make myself as valuable as possible to the founder. I was hoping this community (and any previous founders here) could provide some insight on to how to do this? I'm talking about the day-to-day, thoughtful things that could have made your process easier or clearer. Also, as these potential founders are mostly specialized researchers who are not necessarily business oriented, I know they'd appreciate any little things they might not thing of which help them see a path to success. Anything that comes to mind is greatly appreciated! Some simple things I've thought of include creating the branded G Suite organization, website, and product animations -- I think things like that make it more real for the "academic" inventor. Of course, one way to view this class is as a semester-long interview for a tech startup. With that in mind, I'd like to absolutely set my academic founder up for as much success as possible, and get them even more excited about their product! [link] [comments]  |
| What are the cons of going live early? Posted: 30 Jan 2020 07:09 PM PST I read somewhere that going live early is as bad as going live late. Can anyone help explain why? What's the downside if you already have something live (while still building) that you can use to test that can also make it easier to share to users for feedback? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jan 2020 03:24 AM PST Just wondering if anyone has been through a similar situation. For some context I am a 29 year old lawyer with enough savings built up to live at my parents for 2 years without a job. That said I really don't want to burn through all my savings- plus I'd like to put some in the business to accelerate its growth. I've done some research into the start-up area I want to go into and it generally takes 12-18 months to build up a self sustainable business. The main issue I have is I'm burning out with being a lawyer and trying to start up my business. It's not just the long hours as a lawyer, but it's hugely competitive and if you're not putting in extra hours you fall behind pretty quickly and it becomes very obvious to management. For example every 6 minutes of my time needs to be recorded, every single day... We have to record roughly 6 hours of chargeable time every day, on top of the admin side of things, non-chargeable tasks, training, networking etc. Last week on one day I recorded 5 hours 48 minutes and my boss was immediately on my back the next day, commenting how such and such who's a similar level to me regularly exceeds his targets etc. It's a dog eat dog world being a lawyer. This is contributing to major burnout and mental fatigue, meaning my business on the side really isn't progressing as it should. On the flip side, it would be a huge hit to my ego moving back in with my parents even though I'd be working on my business, I'd feel like a bum and a failure. Plus it's probably a stupid consideration but I'm single guy who enjoys female company etc, so this would hit that as well. I'm currently living a nice lifestyle with a bachelor pad in the city centre, which I enjoy even if I do hate my job. I'm just wondering if anyone can relate and how did it work out? [link] [comments]  |
| LLC vs C-Corp conversion (tax bills) Posted: 30 Jan 2020 12:43 PM PST Hi All - long time reader, first time poster. Need some help. I was recently at a workshop through my accelerator where we heard a tax attorney speak about entity structures. As far as I understood prior to this workshop, operating as an LLC was fine until it was time to raise institutional capital (at which point, we would need to convert to a C-Corp). For clarification, we have a Delaware LLC with three members, however the business itself has five partners total (two partners are in the partner agreement and not on the LLC operating agreement). Now, what I heard during the workshop scared the shit out of me. The attorney started talking about massive tax bills partners in LLC were hit with once the company converted to a C-Corp. Whether it was transferring assets from one entity to the other, or "buying" their equity through a capital contribution (unclear on this example), there was a slew of cases where partners were blindsided by the IRS. Has anyone else experienced a situation whereby they converted a single- or multi-member (preferably multi-member) LLC into a corporation and were surprised by the tax man? Any advice on how to avoid the unexpected? For context, we don't have any assets per se, however, our MVP is expected to go live in two weeks (worth ~$30K). Appreciate the help! [link] [comments]  |
| How in the world do you get ahead? Posted: 30 Jan 2020 08:00 PM PST Sometimes it feels really easy to have a big idea but figuring out where to start and finding the time to actually develop and create is really hard when my team is always putting out fires/trying to keep our heads above water. What are your main challenges keeping you or you team from getting to complete your big idea? How did you guys "get ahead"? [link] [comments]  |
| Epic Fail: The Story of Our Product Hunt Launch Posted: 30 Jan 2020 12:41 PM PST So the plan was simple. We would do all the research and preparation work there is to do, launch on product hunt, get few hundred thousand new customers, become the #1 product of the day and then spend the rest of the year taking in-bound investor calls and dealing with the hoard of new customers. Surprisingly, things didn't go accordingly to plan. Our preparation was good. We had done Product Hunt launches before and knew what to expect. On top of all the general "best practices" according to the internet, here are a few "extra" things we did to get an edge -We started drumming up the Product hunt launch within our community through our "clan email" weeks ahead. We also had an email ready for the launch-day to get everyone in our community to review/comment on our Product Hunt page. -We talked to almost all of our users about reviewing us on launch day. Due to the nature of our business, customer interactions were regular occurrences and we made sure all our users knew that we were launching on PH. -We reached out to a bunch of "Power Users" on Product Hunt and asked them to advise us on our PH launch. We got people like Nick Abouzeid (ex-Product Hunt, Currently Shrug.vc) who gave us solid advice. -We joined a ton of relevant Slack, Facebook and LinkedIn groups and started posting on them. We knew that posting randomly on these groups asking for support during our launch would not work out. So we were playing the long con. -For launch day, we had spreadsheets ready with one-on-one reach out lists and social media copy. -We even updated our website to welcome ProductHunt visitors (apparently they like that) We were ready!. Our launch was pre-scheduled for 12:01 AM PT so we launched exactly on time. We quickly realized that our submission wasn't featured but didn't lose hope — maybe it's their weird algorithm at play. For those who don't know, if your submission isn't featured, pretty much no one on Product Hunt gets to see it. We stayed patient. We started executing our launch day plan. A few hours passed but we were still nowhere to be found on the front page. By then, we had gotten tons of reviews and comments from our own community but none from the product hunt community since it wasn't featured. We ended up messaging PH Support. Their response was pretty heartbreaking. Here it is in verbatim "Hi The post looks great but schools and bootcamps are no longer eligible for the homepage based on community feedback. Feel free to continue to share the post tho. " So yeah. We were not eligible to be featured. In the end, we decided to encourage our users to continue to review us on Product Hunt. We ended up with a bunch of great reviews. The reviews were so good that we decided to link our Product Hunt page from our website for added credibility. So I guess the lesson here is — keep launching over and over again because some of your launches are going to suck. PH launch is only one of the hundreds of distribution/marketing efforts you'll end up taking. Since then, we've found success in other distribution methods like organizing webinars and online paid marketing (FB, Google, Instagram, Twitter). But that's a story for another time. Good luck on your upcoming launch! P.S Background on the Startup: We're an online programming and job hunting Bootcamp offering ISA to international students and new immigrants in North America. [link] [comments]  |
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