Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products |
- Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products
- Legal help - The problem of a young business with no money to pay lawyers
- Help! Team of experienced founders who just received an A term sheet but I’ve realized my co-founder is an idiot
- How did you use customer discovery or other testing methods to determine when to quit?
- Reached out by a Co-founder of an AI startup for a position
- How should I approach an equity negotiation (as the recipient) when there is not a clear valuation and the company is likely to be a fast acquisition target?
- Best Email List site to use for a new startup?
- What are the ABCs I need to learn about startups and launching one?
- Bank Account Advice -- Who should have access to bank accounts?
- How do I find the right balance between learning and working on a startup?
- Advice on how best to remove my app from the Apple Store and Google Play
- My startup is nearly killed because of COVID, what should I do next?
- Anyone familiar with China & their startup scene?
- How much money do you really need for a startup?
- I like to ask your advice on something. Should I focus on product creation or sales and marketing at this moment?
- What Privacy Policy, Cookie Consent, and Terms Generator do you recommend for an EU SaaS?
- Account Managers No Salary?
- I've identified the industry, what's next?
- What forms do (my company and) equity-compensated employees need to fill out?
- How do I promote the closed beta and the open beta of my new app?
| Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products Posted: 15 May 2020 06:07 AM PDT 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]  |
| Legal help - The problem of a young business with no money to pay lawyers Posted: 15 May 2020 03:57 PM PDT First off thanks to everyone reading this. I've been able to get tremendous value from this subreddit. I'm working on an app that offers a reward program and I'd like to build out an affiliate program. In terms of this specific feature, I don't have a problem building it but before I start I was thinking of seeking legal counsel so that I know what my limitations are and how to go about structuring the different programs. Examples are affiliates earning more than $600 and what I need to do in terms of tax reporting. Where can I find credible sources for this legal advice that I can either read and research myself or legal services that aren't going to break the business before it even begins? I realize that the problems I'm looking to solve aren't going to happen in the near future but I want to have my bases covered sooner rather than later. Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2020 11:25 PM PDT *Some background: * There are 3 founders (Sam, John, Me) and 4 employees. All of us are from senior leadership of $100m+- Unicorn startups. I've spent the last 8 months building out the strategy and I am the CEO. About 3.5 months ago a friend introduced me to "Sam" who was working on something similar. We hit it off, Sam is a nice guy and is extremely passive and guide-able . Sam brought in our third co-founder "John" who I'm starting to think has the similar feelings towards Sam Sam has paper experience that balances mine. John and myself had non-competes we were waiting to expire before incorporating the company so up to this point equity terms have been on a handshake basis. We have seeded the company personally each having pitched in about $50k, however, Sam put in another $100k the two years he spent trying to build his company before we joined forces. I've brought in an industry leading board, assets, and employees along with an 8 digit series A that we've received a term sheet for To sams credit, I don't have the best patience and given how passive he is can handle me at my worst *The issue: * it's become apparent over the past 3 months as we've begun to build the rest of the team that Sam is an absolute idiot. I'm actually not writing this out of anger and this has been an ongoing realization. Sam wants to basically be a thought leader and go on the festival circuit which I was originally confident in, however, I'm becoming increasingly more concerned about Sam's ability to carry our strategy. There have been multiple instances in the past 2 months of painfully dumb conversations with Sam and some of the employees have started to refer to him as Mr Peanut Butter as a reference to bojack horseman. I had a conversation with Sam a few weeks ago sharing my concern with him being a team leader and ultimately we agreed on most major decisions he makes needing to be ran by me (before anyone says I'm power hungry John has been completely deputized and I'm very hands off and Sam whole heartedly agreed that he needed oversite) to help ensure there's strategy and balance. As a gesture of goodwill I threw Sam an extra 3% equity to acknowledge the time and money he spent before us, however, I'm also second guessing that. I'm worried if I try to split away from Sam that the funding offer we've received and the general company structure will fall apart. At the same time I struggle for someone who isn't going to be contributing having almost 20% equity after our series A. If Sam isn't helpful internally and I can't trust him externally I feel like I'm left either hiding him in the closet or kicking him out. We have a verbal vest schedule and are for finalizing agreement terms, however, I feel like an asshole to put in a hole in the agreements that I know I'm going to push Sam in. Ultimately I think there's an opportunity to strip Sam of some equity for new hires in the coming year diplomatically, however, I feel so manipulative doing that. I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place as I would really like to accept the term sheet and close out our A and start fully ramping up but I'm seriously contemplating walking away. . [link] [comments]  |
| How did you use customer discovery or other testing methods to determine when to quit? Posted: 15 May 2020 07:25 PM PDT This question is for people who practice any kind of customer discovery process, market validation, business idea testing — those early steps in the lean startup methodology. I'm hoping to uncover some interesting stories here. I'm not looking for generic advice about Customer Discovery. There are 100 articles on the topic and plenty of startup success stories. There are even plenty of startup failure stories. But I'm looking for a very specific type of failure/learning... I want to hear about people disproving their hypotheses and successfully saving themselves the frustration and heartache of building things nobody wants. When did you become confident that a business idea — your assumptions about a problem or your concept for a solution — were essentially invalid? How did you prove something wrong? What test did you use and what type of assumption did you disprove? Did you find a way to pivot or did you abandon the idea and move on to your next one? How could you have tested and disproven your riskiest assumptions even earlier and saved yourself even more time and resources? Note: I'm NOT looking for stories about things like:
I'm hoping to find some interesting stories by people who genuinely used customer discovery methods to determine definitively that an opportunity was bad, that there was no market/product fit — enough to move on. Bonus Round: How did you quit? I mean that both logistically and psychologically. [link] [comments]  |
| Reached out by a Co-founder of an AI startup for a position Posted: 16 May 2020 12:12 AM PDT So, I was reached out by one of the co-founders of a seed stage AI startup in the US a few days back. I didn't immediately reply. I took my time to research on several things including the company, the founders team, idea, investors, career, potential to hit Series A etc. It is backed by a major accelerator (among the top 3) in the US and have raised close to $2M a few months back. They are expanding their team in India and this position will be based in India. It's a dev/lead engineer role which involves full stack development, the back-end of the AI platform etc. Currently there are around 25 employees including the founders. I am the first lead developer being hired. The role looked promising to me, I'll get to work on several different tech stacks. I am ready to give my 100% since the AI and Machine learning has always fascinated me. So I was convinced and then I responded back, and they agreed to have an initial call which will take place within a couple of days. So my questions are –
Happy to answer any questions you may have. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2020 03:20 PM PDT I'm in discussions to take on a CIO role in a very early stage startup that is thriving due to the pandemic environment. It's been running for about a month and is already profitable, gaining substantial coverage in the media, and there are some big name investors expressing interest. I've been working as a consultant but the need for my involvement on an ongoing basis has become pretty clear to all. So we're starting to talk what a package would look like and we're all scratching our heads on best way to approach it. Founders are working on putting together some sort of pool for early stage employees to earn some equity, but there will probably be some special carve out for me. The problem is I have no idea how to approach that discussion. It looks like 4 year vesting with 1 year cliff is very standard for equity grants. However, I think it's highly likely the company could be acquired within its first year, or gain a significant proportion of its value during that time due to its relationship to COVID-19. It seems like 1 year cliff offers me very little if in 10 months there's a buyout. In these circumstances, what's the best way to negotiate that protects me in the event of this faster growth? Is it common to do some sort of outright grant when I join, or to have equity vest immediately in the event of an acquisition? [link] [comments]  |
| Best Email List site to use for a new startup? Posted: 15 May 2020 05:24 PM PDT To say I'm overwhelmed by the options is an understatement! I'm looking to drive traffic to content that I create, put out a consistent newsletter, and sell courses and/or subscriptions to music courses that I teach. Which email service would you pick? I will be starting out with below 200 subscribers. [link] [comments]  |
| What are the ABCs I need to learn about startups and launching one? Posted: 15 May 2020 11:15 PM PDT I plan on launching my own startup when I finish school but till then, I want to use the time to learn as much as possible in theory to be as prepared as possible. I have a great idea I believe it will serve my community but I still have to finish school in order to be fully committed. *What are your advice to someone who is just starting? *What did you wish you knew when you were just starting out? *Can you suggest a practical guide to found a startup? I'm also worried that by the time I start taking action someone else would've already beat me to it. Would that be a problem? I'm new to this and would appreciate any help or advice. [link] [comments]  |
| Bank Account Advice -- Who should have access to bank accounts? Posted: 15 May 2020 11:14 PM PDT I just launched a startup with three other co-founders. We just received a sizable check from an Angel Investment group, but we don't have a corporate bank account yet. Who should be on the bank account? I'm the CEO, the other co-founders are: CTO, COO, and CRO. Do all of us need to be on the bank account? Does anybody know what the norm is? Would it be unreasonable for just me to be on the bank account, while the other founders just have view-only access? I imagine if four people had unlimited access to accounts that may frequently have I'd appreciate any advice on this. [link] [comments]  |
| How do I find the right balance between learning and working on a startup? Posted: 15 May 2020 08:52 AM PDT I'm just wondering how do I find the right balance between learning about more in the field and starting a startup. If i start a startup too early (most probably tech startup) I'm afraid that I'll lack the necessary experience to build/improve the product. But on the other hand if i spend too much time learning new things I might lose opportunities? So for example I could have a choice between starting a web app right now (just an example) or spending the next 2 years learning about machine learning. How would I decide which one to pursue? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on how best to remove my app from the Apple Store and Google Play Posted: 15 May 2020 10:30 AM PDT Unfortunately our journey is coming to its end and we've decided that we can't continue supporting our apps. We do have users that regularly use our apps and want to give them advance notice before we take it offline and we aren't really sure how to go about this. Also should we remove them from Apple/Google stores? What happens if when we remove an app, does it automatically uninstall for our users? Any advice on this is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| My startup is nearly killed because of COVID, what should I do next? Posted: 15 May 2020 07:36 AM PDT I am international student who just graduated with MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from a top university. Alongside my advisor and another masters student, I started a company in December of last year. We are into diagnostics and are commercializing research in our lab (Signed an IP license with the university as well). We had a gentleman's agreement with the Vice President of the university and several other head of departments about a sizeable seed investment which would have easily taken us till the end of the year. We still wanted to seek external funding, but advisor was reluctant because of this promise. Last month, they bailed because of COVID, and didn't give us any warning of course. We have been trying to get something to keep us going. Investors that we have met have not shown too much interest, with some of them even saying that diagnostics is not an area that many people would invest in because it has low RoI. We also were rejected by YC. Currently, angel funding is as good as not there and we are seeking whatever grants that we can (we are waiting to hear back from some, and will apply to couple more by the end of the month), putting a COVID spin on things. We need to hire and start paying ourselves in order to stay in the US after a month and half. We are not eligible for SBIR afaik. We still haven't discussed this with the professor, (he lets us take the most important decisions, but provides his opinions) but my partner and I are thinking that we need to arrive at a go/no-go by August. There are ways to slow our progress and do something else to survive, but I am not sure if that setback (which will be six months or more) is worth it, given that our competitors are very near to market and one of them got FDA cleared in January. Do you guys think it's a good idea to let this go in case we don't get funding soon? If I don't go ahead, I have three options: I need to find a job (most likely in my home country), or I can start working on another idea (I have one, but needs a lot of validation) or I can ask the same professor for a PhD position in the lab (80% yes). I like research enough that I can survive a PhD. But frankly, I cannot see myself doing anything but working on a company and in the startup world in the long term. So what do you think I should do? I guess what I am looking for are the metrics that this decision should based on, things that I should be looking out for or those that I might completely miss. Sorry for the long post, and thanks a lot in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone familiar with China & their startup scene? Posted: 15 May 2020 01:16 PM PDT I'm having trouble finding websites that revolve around Chinese startups. Tech in Asia doesn't provide a list of all the companies in the country (also paywalled) and crunchbase is really "American" if you catch my drift. All I'm asking is, if you're familiar with China & their startup scene, are there any sites that list all or at least almost all of the Startups and companies in China? All I need is a database of them similar to what crunchsse does, but for China [link] [comments]  |
| How much money do you really need for a startup? Posted: 15 May 2020 03:24 AM PDT I know this is a very ambiguous question, but with no job and so much time. I figured right now would be the best time to work on my start up project. It's based on a software service, I believe Saas is what you call it. I would be the programmer to building the program itself from the ground up. I don't know how to code, so I have been pushing myself to learn how to code over the past month. I know this is really vague, but would employment benefits as long with 10,000 in savings do any good? I am in college, and I have low expenses and roughly 10,000 in my savings. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2020 10:47 AM PDT I had this idea, a video game about learning physics, originally I started building the system for myself, I'm a physics student and the game serves like a productivity app for studying. I interviewed some students and asked them what they are trying to accomplish, their challenges, problems, pains, biggest worries, so that I kinda have a general idea of where they are coming from. I made a demo of the game and posted it on the physics subreddit, and I got like 800+ likes in the post. Also before that while I was working on the demo and talking to people on the internet for feedback I had 2 people becoming supporters on patreon just spontaneously (one dropped and one is still donating). My first question: is this enough validation for the idea? Making the game is going to take a lot of time, should I just do it? I will try to divide the development into as many milestones as possible so I can get feedback at each step, but even then each step will take a lot of time. I'm not sure if the fact that people became patrons is enough to tell that I will be able to get money from this. Also I'm not totally sure of what my business plan is, a short term objective could be this: getting 50 patreon supporters, that would give enough confidence and support for me to work full time on this game, I would like that because I believe this could be a big contribution to education and science. But there are other options like launching a kickstarter, or selling courses in the game. A possible plan could be posting something like this in a physic students subreddit: "I'm making a game about learning physics, I'm looking for playtesters, post a comment and I will DM you beta keys", then the people that participate I DM them a link to a registration page, they give me their email, then they get a video that is a trailer for the game explaining how it works, and I ask them to help build the game by becoming patreons. Right now I have the small demo that people can play, is not perfect it could be improved, also I have the beginning of the real game, you can't do much right now just walk around. So my question is: should I put my work on making the game? So there is actually something fun to play. Or should I put my work on talking to potential customers, creating the trailer for the game, trying to get patreons, etc? Or something else? Also if I get patreons and a month passes and there is no progress on the game because I'm working on getting patreons I could lose some of them… But also I don't want to work on the game and waste a lot of time on an untested idea that ends up not working. I have a limited capacity of doing things, so where should I invest it? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| What Privacy Policy, Cookie Consent, and Terms Generator do you recommend for an EU SaaS? Posted: 15 May 2020 10:11 AM PDT I have come across a few online, and they all seem pretty solid. I know that best practice says to consult an attorney and have terms drafted on your needs, however we are bootstrapped and just got started. No budget for a lawyer. We offer software customization services (e.g. Shopify) and charge a monthly retainer for the service, and offer a little dashboard that integrates with Shopify itself. So we don't really have a great deal of proprietary technology. Thank you all for your help. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2020 08:32 AM PDT So I recently opened my second business. My first business (ad agency) is still profitable and running but we aren't as busy as we normally are so I had some time. My new business is a startup (obviously). We've done 250k over the last 2 months. Selling products to dentist/doctors offices. I want to scale fast and I'm confident I can do it. However, a bit cash poor as all money I make goes right back into the business. Is it inappropriate to offer commission only sales jobs? Even if there's is a generous commission structure? I've built out a really smooth process both marketing and internally. The job is honestly just answer inbound emails, drafting quotes, and making sure the items make it to the client. That said, as easy as it is, I still don't have money to pay salary. Curious what others thoughts are on this and how they've approached hiring sales people early on. [link] [comments]  |
| I've identified the industry, what's next? Posted: 15 May 2020 06:57 AM PDT For back story, a good friend of mine is always commenting on inefficiency and problems that him and his company are having. I am not sure if these are industry-wide or specific to his company but his company is fairly big and the industry is generally perceived as old school. I have a background in tech so Im thinking of ways to use tech to help with the inefficiencies/ painpoints. I am assuming the next step is to reach out to multiple companies in the industry and listen to them to see if they have similar problems but I wanted to check in with all of you:
Thank you so much! Any feedback is welcome. [link] [comments]  |
| What forms do (my company and) equity-compensated employees need to fill out? Posted: 15 May 2020 05:33 AM PDT I've found some developers and interns to help with the development of my company's apps. We don't have an EIN yet but have mailed in the form (got a similar name error in the online application) and should be getting one within the next couple of weeks. I'm wondering since the employees and interns aren't working for salary/wages yet (they're being compensated with equity until we secure funding), what forms do I need to fill out for them? [link] [comments]  |
| How do I promote the closed beta and the open beta of my new app? Posted: 15 May 2020 03:26 AM PDT So basically I started my first startup [blah blah blah] - I don't want this post to be deleted so I wont go any further with that - Recenty we released the closed beta of our app, we sent it to some people we know and that could possibly do some propaganda about the app. But the open beta is coming and I don't know the best way of promoting it to the public. The app is totally free. I've been posting about it on instagram and twitter and I've been getting some good amounts of likes etc.. but that doesn't mean people will download it and try it out. If we don't get some revenue until the end of this year, the startup might die. Even though it's only my first startup, I wanted it to last a little longer ahah. ( I didn't talk about the app because it could make this post be deleted, so if you want to know more about the app to know what type of promotion/propaganda would be good just let me know ). Any idea you guys might have is appreciated. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
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