Startups Tuesday Operational Roundtable - A Forum to Ask About Legal, Accounting, Project Management, or How to Get Started |
- Tuesday Operational Roundtable - A Forum to Ask About Legal, Accounting, Project Management, or How to Get Started
- A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 2
- Will the impending recession during and post the current pandemic result in a new crop of startups, like the ones post 2008?
- Should one go Local or Global in the Beginning Stages of a Startup?
- how long should you track MVP landing page sign ups to better understand product fit?
- Connecting with the right founders/developer
- What should I do?
- A quick guide to selling services in a crowded market.
- Impersonator on Social media
- Offered position as CIO... equity only... is it a good idea?
- Some help needed with logistics on an idea
- Should we drop an idea in an industry I have to experience in?
- Thoughts - Building a One-Off Landing Page for a Conference Presence?
- What do you do with a failed startup?
- I can't pay my employees.
- Always looking positively, always keep on keeping on
- How to validate startup ideas? No really how?
- Startup Funding Hacks
- Where to find marketing/sales talent for SaaS B2B company
- Which are the best bang-for-buck marketing campaigns you've seen?
- Is everything already invented? Is there something new to create?
- Thoughts on launching a SaaS as an open source product and then charging for a fully managed version later?
| Posted: 26 May 2020 06:05 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Operational Roundtable Thread. Ask about anything related to legal, accounting, project management, or how to get started. 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]  |
| A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 2 Posted: 26 May 2020 09:21 AM PDT This is part 2 of 5. LET'S DO THIS! Big thank you to everyone that upvoted and commented on the last post. I'm pumped, this is part 2 of 5 for those keeping track at home.
Early traction, everyone wants it, very few people know how to do it effectively. Hell I've seen it all, run all the experiments, all the tests and I can tell you from experience if you have the patience, slow, steady, and surgical is the way to grow. Especially in the beginning. In part one we spent a lot of time asking some basic fundamental business questions. Including, an exercise in the importance of being able to niche down. We're going to expand on the niching down because it's how you gain clarity and find people to align yourself with early on. The goal of this will be to understand:
I've chosen to outline these in all our steps for niching down. You're going to see these steps move from research to market evaluation to list building stopping just short of outreach. We'll touch on this in part 3. Last week I took a call where someone told me their target market is males 25-45 that like sports. This is the most important part of your entire business. I'm serious. Let's rock through this together so we can get you super focused and know where and how to spend your time and money. (The below was laid out in part 1 and was the layered niching exercise) LEVEL 1: We're a helpdesk product. How to niche down The big question is "for who"? So you've picked the type of product you are building and a use case, the problem is there are lots of people like you out there and this doesn't tell me much about your market, it's too broad. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity Because this is so broad, it's impossible to actually target a market and without being able to do that, it's not possible to recognize opportunities, there's just too many of them. How to position within that market Competition is good and bad, but it's always better to be a big fish in a little pond, the best way to reduce the size of your pond is to niche down as much as possible while still understanding a large enough TAM (total addressable market). How to give yourself the biggest chance of success No wasted effort. Every idea, concept, must have a small goal attached to it. It's too expensive to try to be everything for everyone and when you take this approach you end up failing at doing any one thing well enough for people to switch. Let's build on this. LEVEL 2: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies. How to niche down Pick an industry or trend that is on the rise - look towards a shift or something that relates to changes people are making in their daily routine. In this case we picked eCommerce because it's on track to hit over $7 Trillion worldwide this year and has steadily been increasing across all brands. So we have an industry with a large enough economic driver to let us start niching down. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity We now buy things online that we never would have thought to do so even just a few years ago. Amazon is selling Tiny Homes now, seriously, if you can buy it, odds are you can do it online. There are massive opportunities to bring goods and services to people through convenient online shopping. And with that increase they will all need a help desk platform to provide the best experience for their customers. Customers today don't want to speak with people, they want answers quickly and easily. It's all about reducing friction. How to position within that market Narrow down within the market. eCommerce is a good starting point, there are different industries, subsets, and categories. Go narrower. Start thinking about where the friction exists in the industry and for what subsets. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success In the beginning, it's going to be an uphill battle, picking the right trending industry will give you the best chance of success. Something that is rising up to the right in popularity is way easier to sell into than a trend that is declining. Know your competitive landscape. Everyone has a competitor, whether direct, partial, or mildly related. Spend a lot of time on understanding this and knowing that your product is part of a very large landscape or landscape of potential competitors. Any one of the existing partial or mildly related competitors may be building something to more directly compete with you down the road. Practical advice Most companies stop here and hope for the best. Unfortunately, this isn't a go to market plan or a sustainable business model. There's an important bit worth mentioning here as it will become a theme of this entire post. Great products enhance workflows through features, the focus isn't on the product but what the product enables people to do. Success in the software business is all about understanding existing workflows and simplifying the experience. As you do this exercise to niche down ask yourself: What does the current workflow look like? What are they currently using? How are they currently using it? Where are the gaps? What are the best practices for creating workflows? Always seek to understand how your product works in a workflow - what role it plays, how it best optimizes - this is the data play referred to in Part 1. What are the things that matter most to people in the eCommerce space? That's a lot of questions with even more answers, when you peel everything back it becomes very clear that it's not possible to answer all of them without going deeper. Too many people to talk to, too many industries, too much everything. Let's take a different approach - how I got to Shopify in the next niche down. No successful new SaaS company today launches without an integration. So let's find an eCommerce platform to integrate with. We have to look for a stable player that has an app store and is a market leader. As a starting point, my goal is to be a help desk for ecommerce companies.
There are lots of sources for this and even more articles, google and read. If you're looking for numbers though and data, use BuiltWith and run a search on the platforms after you have your list to figure out which is the most popular. Ok so we have our list of eCommerce platforms, we've analyzed the data, made sure they tick all the boxes and we've run our reports and found that Shopify powers 1.2 million stores. Let's lock it in as our next step in niching down. LEVEL 3: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify. How to niche down It's more than just market size. Going with a market leader is always a safe bet but it also provides the most competition. Sometimes going with a smaller platform that doesn't get all the attention is a worthwhile research project. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity There are two sides of the opportunity and this is something that I didn't touch on in the original niching down. Shopify and BuiltWith categorize the types of stores that are on the platform, so you can niche down to a certain type of store, for example just cosmetics or just apparel. The other side of the opportunity is putting together your list of companies currently operating in the ecosystem. How to position within that market Smart people are really good at collecting data and interpreting it. Let's get some data.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success So take a look above, we went from a bunch of questions to being able to do a ton of market research to do product research and understand the current market offerings and where we might be able to gain some ground and offer something people might be interested in and ARE PAYING FOR. How do you stand out? You need to have a workflow that is 10x better than a current competitor in the market with a strong roadmap that lays out how you intend on optimizing this workflow. Features are built to augment the workflow and simplify the work of your clients employees, less work, more data, better understanding. Ok so we've narrowed it down to eCommerce and Shopify and we have a list of other products that are currently playing in the space. We're now looking at workflow - let's figure this bit out. LEVEL 4: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation. How to niche down Add another variable - it doesn't have to be Shipstation, but it's a good example as for eCommerce you're likely shipping products places. By adding another variable, we're shrinking our population to target. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity The biggest problem for all companies these days is combining different one off services and getting them to play nicely together. Stand alone products usually outclass all in one products as stated above because the focus is better. This is generally always going to be where you can find a gap in the market as the integrating of products is an afterthought rather than something contemplated in the very beginning. How do you decide on the technologies you want to work with? How to position within that market Don't guess. Understand the workflow of an eCommerce company and how it relates to support. For instance, most support tickets relate to order status, tracking, and returns. These all involve the store, transaction, the service desk, and the shipping carrier. Look for ways to streamline the experience for the service rep - for instance if refunds require approval, build a system that allows for all those tickets to be queued up with an easy interface for approvals or different color tagging to allow for them to be easily sorted by type. By focusing on two technologies you can start by creating a better visual collaboration between tools to improve overall experience. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success Stack the deck in your favor. Focus on where you can drive early alignment between your product offering and the audiences of your now two products. When you reach out to both companies especially the smaller ones like a Shipstation, you can collect more information about who they are catering to, volumes etc. Most companies have a partner program - look into connecting with the lead. When the time is right you might even get a shoutout on their social or blog or you can decide to co-publish some research report together. Lots of options. Let's double down on what being niche allows us to do:
This whole topic is about alignment, alignment with partners, customers, and your product. We have a list of potential customers now, but we need to segment them down further. LEVEL 5: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus. How to niche down Why less than 100 skus? This means they are small enough to try a new product. It also means you can see what works and what doesn't work on a potentially smaller store. When you're managing a store with more than 100 skus, things get a little complicated, it's an arbitrary number but changing internal processes and workflows when you get to that level means that your staff is coming from a place of having used a system before that could handle the volume and trying out something newer or unproven is a tall order. This process can be applied to anything, if your product does better project management look for people that run less than 20 projects at a time or projects that are less than 6 months, whatever it may be. We're starting small. Always default to the path of least resistance. Work smarter, not harder. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity I'm sure this could be automated, but in lieu of it being automated, you should start by manually figuring this out for yourself. That list you have from BuiltWith that has urls, yeah we're going to use that one. Put the websites in the spreadsheet you downloaded, then create a new column and add "products" to the url - so you have the website in cell A, the word "products" in cell B then in blank cell C write "=CONCATENATE(A:B)" congratulations now you have cell C that will take you straight to the product page to see how many skus they have. Update this hack doesn't work on all shopify websites like I had hoped and after some research it seems like this is a bit of a struggle point for others as well. I'm sure someone could write a script to scrape this information. Go find an intern or hire someone to do all the lookups for you or find someone to write a script to automate the results - remember always work smart. Run this and you'll come up with your go to target list. How to position within that market The best helpdesk for stores on Shopify using shipstation with less than 100 skus - all of a sudden this starts to sound like something someone would almost search for. That's the point. We're working our way down where it becomes a simple checklist if someone was searching for things. Shopify - check Shipstation - check Built for smaller stores - check How to give yourself the biggest chance of success Remember you're not building a product for everyone yet, your goal is to dominate a niche. You can always expand from there. So we're about half way through and we have figured out our potential partners and now we're working on narrowing down this customer list. Before we dive in and start reaching out we need to really understand who we're targeting and we need to start small. Let's narrow this down even further. LEVEL 6: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue. How to niche down Why the less than $10 million in annual revenue? The only reason I would say this in the beginning is that they won't have as much traffic and ticket volume, they make for better early clients, you can learn a lot more from their use cases and improve the product without worrying about something going wrong and a larger client really getting mad and churning. You also usually have greater access to work with their staff to improve your product. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity Unless you're currently on the front lines, you need to find some early providers of feedback that are on the front lines. In essence, this is the starting point of a community and information play. There aren't a lot of data points available about companies in the early stages. People always have questions and there are limited resources in the early days, even across similar companies. (Just look at reddit there are tons of repeat answers and questions.) Someone answering tickets all day is the last person that wants to provide feedback, as much as they would like their job made easier, they don't have the time. How to position within that market "But I need a big logo to let people know that I'm real." You don't, not in the beginning. All you need is a few good customers that are open to lending you the feedback you need to get better. A lot of smaller brands do a good job of branding, play the long game, find brands that are growing and try to get in early - grow with them. Logo hunting has its place but you need to find product market fit before you can really make that happen. By now you have probably figured out that whenever possible you should automate things. The way you do this is through data collection. Using logic, math, and a spreadsheet you can do enough to be dangerous. Use a service to figure out what their unique traffic is, take a look at their products and assume that their cart value is around 2-4 products per order then take the conversion rates by industry - you can find these online they are openly listed. Your sheet will look something like this: Company, Traffic, Conversion Percentage, Order Value, Sales Percentage, Revenue eCommerce blended average is 2.2% - go use a spreadsheet and some formulas and bam you now have the revenue numbers. We're not looking for exacts here, but more generally a good estimate. I've actually run these numbers, if the products are sold through other channels, Amazon, retail, etc, then a rough estimate would be around ~33% of the revenue will come from the ecommerce store. Factor in a range based on the size of the brand and it's channels this should give you a rough estimate of the revenue even if they don't publish it. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success Provide value - the most overhyped phrase but still true - the question then becomes, with something as subjective as "value" rather than just create, instead ask and create. This part is coming up, we're almost ready to turn this on. We've started to move from who are partners are to who are our potential customers. This is on purpose - my stance is that your first customers are really your partners and you should work on aligning yourself with those that are the best fit for your product. You want your first clients to buy into your vision and invest the time to help shape it. Ok on to the next - LEVEL 7: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people. How to niche down So now we're getting into the easier stuff - this is just a simple LinkedIn Search - small teams are usually before the real deep process point, they are also really good at providing feedback on tools that can actually help them out. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity If you have less than 5 people on a team, it's a small enough number to target the entire team - multi prong approach to product awareness. For customer support they are often the least paid and they have the most stressful jobs - it's an all around shitty position to be in, so if you can provide them joy, you're going to make fans quick. Also, they aren't usually sold into, they are rarely asked their opinion, etc. How to position within that market Give them a voice. The same goes for any lower level positions as well by the way. When people are getting started in their careers they are looking to hear about the jobs people have even at the lower levels but the resources just aren't there. Even for more senior roles, it's hard to get a beat on what the current status is of their projects, people don't like sharing - I still don't know why. We're seeing communities around Sales popup SalesHacker, r/sales, Bravado etc. We don't see as many for other roles, there is a wide open space in this. I don't see any places for people to better understand customer support/success which is THE ONLY INBOUND TOUCHPOINT WITH CUSTOMERS POST SALE. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success This is part of the philosophy and psychology of understanding human dynamics. Find a persona that you can relate to immediately and build your product around fixing their problems, be obsessed with this. They get paid nothing, but they'd like less tickets, how do you reduce that ticket count, how do you bring other parts of the business that they may need to have access to more prominently in your support system so they don't have to have multiple windows open. How do you build something to maximize their efficiency? Better yet, how do you tag someone in the CRM and flag it over to the sales system to see if they purchase more product as a result of a good interaction with support - this is how you turn a cost center into a revenue generator. This is a killer feature that I'm not aware of out of the box. This could unlock a commission structure and reward system for what is arguably becoming a dealbreaker for most companies. Which is a great segway to the next drill down - you should be starting to see how this all really blends together if done correctly. LEVEL 8: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes. How to niche down They have to be looking to automate their process or improve their workflow. When people find a tech stack that works, oftentimes new technology doesn't stick around very long, we're all creatures of habit. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity You're only looking for people that are talking about processes or a company that has something related to the pride they take with their process - you can check out BuiltWith and see a list of products they have tried over the last 18 months. When a company is testing a bunch of different products it means they are looking for a better process. This is your sweet spot. How to position within that market You've seen me sprinkle "workflow" into this post. This is pretty much a preview of Part 3 and the importance of product design. Your product must improve someone's existing workflow. If it doesn't it's not a viable product. There are two parts to this, does your product improve an existing workflow AND how easy can your product be inserted into that workflow? Remember, this is their business and they need to make a transition as smoothly as possible with as little disruption as possible. This goes for any product you're selling. Change is hard. Understanding a company's process really is everything. If people aren't looking to automate or improve their process, there's a good chance you should change your approach immediately and work towards more of an education campaign and double down on what it would take to let people quickly switch over from an existing platform. Focus on reducing friction. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success Looking for people that are interested, not those we need to educate early on. Data migration and implementation is one of the main reasons people don't want to switch or entertain new products. There is always a fear of lost productivity. Everyone is looking to automate right now, but the price has to be right, and that includes not the subscription amount, but the training, the migration, the new workflows, the time to adopt, the willingness to adopt, etc. During almost any transition, the company will be paying for two systems at the same time during that handoff. This is rough, not enough companies actually address this in a meaningful way. The argument is that a pure SaaS play doesn't exist or shouldn't exist for an early stage company, there should always be a service and consulting component. Hold everyone's hand, understand their problems and make them feel like you're building a product just for them. Ok we're almost there - LEVEL 9: We're a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes who are currently using Zendesk. How to niche down Let's spearfish. Zendesk - great platform - but has its limits that only show up based on workflows. Zendesk will work great until you have a workflow that incorporates other tools - then it starts to struggle. This is true of most large legacy platforms. As legacy platforms moved up market to Enterprise for revenue reasons, they usually forget about smaller teams. Instead relying on dev house partners to do customizations. This is where industry experience really comes into play - knowing the goals of a company or team, their workflows, and where you can create a better solution for those with those workflows for things that the legacy platforms prefer to source out to their dev house partners. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity Your calls can now go from generic to focused with questions that can hone in on workflows and gaps. For example, Zendesk's UX/UI sucks for partner integrations, we've seen companies like Kustomer, Gorgias, and others become more popular because of a better UX/UI that supports the whole customer experience and journey. This is a fundamental switch in approach. From one of our earlier research steps we found 87 companies that people were using for support with shopify, we have them in a spreadsheet, we then could take those and put all the competitors in builtwith to run some reports to understand market penetration (you can do this with number of reviews as well by the way if you're lazy - don't be lazy). Download your list - populate your CRM - you now know what people are using, how long they've been using them. Narrow down your list to the top 20 clients - yes only 20. Even if you have 100 clients or a thousand clients at this point, this process works for every single Sales rep you have - and I'm going on a 95% chance none of them are doing this stuff. And if you tell me they are, I know from the amount of generic ass emails I get regularly spewed out to me they aren't doing it well and I guarantee you money is being left on the table. (Topic for another day) How to position within that market You know what software they are using, you know their tech stack, your goal is to figure out their workflow. If you don't know, ask. You should understand the general business workflows for the industry - again industry knowledge is required. Engage them with conversation and find out. Base your questions on conversations you've had with other people in the space and be a source of information about how other people are doing it. The above is completely able to be put into a human measurable process, one based on quality over quantity, relationships over transactions, and geared towards long term growth. Be about the things that other platforms are not. Focus on changing the narrative from cost center to revenue generator. The helpdesk for Shopify and Shipstation customers looking to streamline their processes and free up their support teams to become revenue generators in an organic and measurable fashion. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success It's all about workflows, data, and automation. Niche down, learn from the inside out, follow the trends and work on being able to tie back data to creating more revenue no matter what your product does and you'll be able to start conversations with people actively looking to create more optimized workflows. Focusing on a legacy product and small businesses usually allows you to find a sweet spot, they don't find value in all the features because they won't use them all. But they do want the more advanced features like automation and workflow help. These are usually cost prohibitive in the platform. This is why you focus on workflow over features, you'll never catch up with the big guys in terms of features, but there are always ways to compete on workflows, because everyone has their own independent goals around them. There aren't standards, only best practices. Side note - there are entire companies that are hired to implement systems like Zendesk and build integrations on top of it and it's a market leader. The same goes for any market leader. LEVEL 10ish: You can add location to the end of our narrowing down. A company physically local to you (at least this was the case prior to COVID-19) can allow for an in person visit which has been massive in building trust with early clients. Makes it easier to have a conversation as well. That's it. Go through this process, substitute your values, keep drilling down and recognize opportunity along the way. When you do it correctly you'll see massive improvements for your initial outreach. Emails go from: We're a new helpdesk company. To: We're a new helpdesk company for customers that use Shopify and Shipstation. We help agile support teams that are looking to better automate their workflows. Our integrations also allows your support team's interactions to be directly tied into future revenue generation. ___________ I can tell you from experience I'm visiting the url for the second email even if I'm not looking to make a change. This is a good place to stop, we hit question 2 of 5 and we're almost at the halfway point. If you have more specific questions about this part just drop them in the comments and I'll respond to them. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 04:41 AM PDT It seems that post a recession a new crop of startups displaces the current players, as in the case of 2001, 2008. Would you expect to see a new crop of startups that would dominate the scene in the next 5 years that would start during/post recession due to the pandemic? [link] [comments]  |
| Should one go Local or Global in the Beginning Stages of a Startup? Posted: 26 May 2020 06:17 PM PDT When building a social network is it best to start locally in the beginning, or should one immediately target the global market? I was initially planning on going global from the start, but now I am thinking it might be a huge bite for me. I am considering going a bit local or maybe picking a few areas to target and then scale from there. I am looking at how Facebook started - they started locally and then scaled up pretty fast. They probably had time to spread the word a bit, gather some traction, look good for potential investors (user count and activity) and get their back-end ready for scaling. If they immediately went global I am not sure how that would have looked. [link] [comments]  |
| how long should you track MVP landing page sign ups to better understand product fit? Posted: 26 May 2020 09:20 PM PDT I've just launched my MVP landing page this evening but no prototype yet. I just wanted to get a feel of the product/market fit and measure demand. I know I could've sent out surveys but I feel I wanted to convey more on the features. My question now is, how long should you track MVP landing page sign ups to better understand product fit? i.e. X signups over X months [link] [comments]  |
| Connecting with the right founders/developer Posted: 26 May 2020 11:03 PM PDT I have a business plan, short and long term objectives, a prelaunch website, a roadmap. I have a functioning MVP that I made using python and raspPi. It works, but it prob an absolute abomination to anyone else but myself. It does not represent a final product, needs many iterations. Has limited functionality, security flaws etc. I am not a tech engineer or devoloper. I can piece things together and understand how to read/wrote some syntax but only python. I don't know the tech stacks my product will be using once launched. I mean I can tell someone what to use and make it work but I can't be certain it's the correct path because of my limited knowledge. I know exactly what it needs to do, look like, the core features and hardware required but I don't kno how to code it all into a bundle. I'm conflicted on whether I should: -scout a "tech founder" and face potential >30% equity loss. -Pay a consultant to review tech. Determine proper stack moving forward and hire devolopers to complete -Take what I have now, source additional funding and hire an in house team would be ideal but i need more time and resources for this option. anyone have a good story to share? Like how you met a random cofounder at the dog park and you started oracle? Or how your awesome cofounder faked his credentials and blackmailed you 20k for his shares? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 07:28 PM PDT Okay so I started off by wanting to create a social networking site for car enthusiasts, because I see tons of Facebook groups and Instagram accounts with hundreds and thousands of members and followers. Even r/cars has 1.8 million members. So I started working on the site and even got my friend along to work with me. We're still in a VERY early stage; we just finished making the landing page, loging in and creating an account functionality. For the last couple of days I started wondering how I'm going to get users on the site. Long story short I found tons of websites and apps that failed trying to do the same and the main reason is that they just couldn't gain enough traction or sustain it. I figured out that people don't want to use "another app" or go to "another site" just for one aspect of their life. They want to stay on one app and enjoy it all, even if the other site might have a slightly better feature that allows them to have a slightly better experience. At the end of the day people just don't wanna get out of their comfort zone. Now I'm wondering if I should pivot and change it to a marketplace for cars and car parts. My country already has one of those sites but it has terrible load times and bad UI and is filled with Google ads. I was thinking I can probably charge sellers a really low fee and make the case that the ads on the other site might drive potential buyers away from buying their cars. [link] [comments]  |
| A quick guide to selling services in a crowded market. Posted: 27 May 2020 01:18 AM PDT I work mainly for marketing agencies. Agencies from across the marketing spectrum are pretty bad at selling themselves. I don't want any of them to become salesy, pushy "Wolf of Wall Street" types, employing hideous tricks and tactics. There are ways to be more compelling – more interesting to the decision-maker who has too many options. Agency decision-makers get dozens of approaches a month. Many get dozens a week. They receive endless creds documents. The nice ones read most of them. The less patient ones filter them out based on a few simple criteria. Some don't read them at all. Many of the things that agencies talk about are things that a decision-maker would use to exclude them as an option. Location, size, years in business. These can all be positives, but not very impressive ones. They can more easily be reasons to exclude. Marketing bods at companies can choose from many agencies. In our experience (and we've been doing this for 15 years*), they choose based on two things: the outcomes you can cause for your clients and the company you keep (your client list). If you're at a big outdoor event and there are 25 food stalls, you don't look at all 25 and choose the one you will eat at. You exclude some first: "Well, I don't fancy a burger, I don't want to eat fish and chips while I'm walking around and I hate hot dogs". Before you know it, you're left with a few options. These are the ones that you now consider on merit. This is how marketing people whittle lists of agencies down. They exclude first. Often arbitrarily. The opening chunk of your creds, website or proposal is crucial. It sets up the way the prospective client views the rest of the presentation. An incredible number of our clients started out with creds that opened with something like, "Based in Hexham, our team of 22 amazing people have worked on the most brilliant design projects for 18 years!". Or maybe bullet points that illustrate the same thing: About us - 22 People - Office and studio in Hexham - Founded in 1998 - Fluent in Design and branding Four boring facts that tell a potential client almost nothing. Imagine for a moment that your prospect last used an agency with 8 people, founded just three years ago, based in London. It went well. The outcomes were pretty good. Suddenly you've got nothing in common with this decent agency they quite liked. Now, everything you say is through the lens of someone who sees you as rather unlike the last guys. Maybe they liked that their agency was in London. Maybe they liked their small team. Maybe they liked that they were fresh and full off new ideas. Or maybe they liked them for a more important reason: It went well. The outcomes were pretty good. This is what you should lead out with. If you're the agency that increased shirt sales for Fullofit Shirts by 23% online, then that's page one. If you're the agency that raised staff retention for Slipless Gripmats plc by over 40%, then say so, early on. If you're the agency that created a brand that staff and customers genuinely loved for Landwell Airways then make that the lead story. Your location, years in business and number of staff can go to the last page. Imagine blowing a potential client's mind with your incredible results, then at the very end leaving them thinking, "All this from an agency way out in Hexham! Wow!". It's remarkably powerful to confound expectation. And now all you have to do is make the rest of your story readable. A simple truth about sending out a creds PDF is that people are savvy to the size. They look at the file size. Above 5MB and they're already planning to ditch it early. They'll glance at the page count. 23 pages? No chance. This is a prospect in the cold-channel. They don't care about your creative prowess. They don't want to read a book about you. They don't want to spend more than a couple of minutes on this. We've found that a page count of fewer than 10 pages is important. Single digits = readable. You are not trying to secure the deal remotely, just to create the next step. Tailor it. Make the filename refer to the prospective client if you're sending it. Mention their name on the title page. People like this as much as they hate receiving something generic. In cold-channel business development, you're going to fail more than you succeed. 75%+ of wins go to a referral, or the incumbent. This doesn't mean you shouldn't have a strong cold-channel campaign. It does mean you shouldn't have a poor one. Make every word, picture and page of your creds count. Make it about the prospect, not about you. Focus on their commercial goals. Leave aside your patented processes. Don't crow too loudly about awards. If someone hires you for twelve months, the thing they're buying – the thing you should be selling – it whatever it is that they'll have in month thirteen that they didn't have in month one. \See, you don't care how long we've been in business. That didn't make you want to hire us. But if it DID, call Steve now on 01708 451311. Just don't tell him that was your reason.* [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 07:10 PM PDT Title pretty much sums it up but someone claimed twitter / IG handles that we use in our marketing and are using our name. We've confirmed that it's the same person running all of the fake accounts (twitter shows u the first few letters of the email). We're an early stage startup, doing customer discovery and product market fit and developing our mvp. Certainly not big enough for it to be a huge pain but kind of irked about the whole situation. Also putting this out there Bc others might have similar experiences. Any help / insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Offered position as CIO... equity only... is it a good idea? Posted: 26 May 2020 02:01 PM PDT Hi guys! I am looking for advice as I cannot find good information/suggestion via search results/internet articles/friends. I am currently working a 40hr/week job in IT and was approached by a young startup to become their new CIO. Old CIO (one of the earlier founders) is not interested anymore and wants to leave. Basically I knew one of the founders and he wants me to be their new CIO. He asked if I am interested to work with them. I said yes... we are now in some sort of negotiation phase. What I know: In their view this is a "low maintenance" startup that might require 4/5 hours/week of my time. I doubt this might be the case but this is what they are assuring me. The startup is barely able to sustain itself, they had a money influx of 60K for a 6% of equity from another Company. They are currently paying a developer and another member of the staff with that money and what they had previously. Facts: I am interested in the position as I have nothing to lose (main job supports the family and is quite stable at the moment) and I would really like to test myself as CIO. I have zero experience in negotiating this soft of things... I understand is their "first time" as well as they were never in the position of replacing a role in the startup. Founders put money into the startup old CIO has shares as well. I don't have real figures but I think he was in the range of 10%. My understanding is that they are not offering me a salary, they would like to understand what I expect. They want to contact me in the coming days. I could not find information/cases of remuneration based on equity-only. I think the standard 1 year cliff + vesting can apply (although with some acquisition clauses as it looks like they might be acquired by this company). I have zero idea what percentage to ask... I barely understand shares dilution and not sure what to do to prevent that all my stakes in the company go down the drain. Do you have any sources that might help me? Any suggestions you might have so I can sound less stupid? I have been a freelancer for years, I hopped many jobs but I have literally zero experience in dealing with shares and equity. I feel totally unprepared for this, but it's a great way for me to experience a bit of the startup life and learning to think as a CIO. A big thank you to all the kind strangers that would spend a couple of minutes to help. :) [link] [comments]  |
| Some help needed with logistics on an idea Posted: 26 May 2020 06:16 PM PDT Hey guys, so I have an idea for a micro donation platforms for people who stream on twitch and or youtube. (content creators). So basically, everytime you made a purchase and you can change the setting to once a month, once a week, or even once a day. Everytime you make a purchase according to your setting, it would round up the change and donate it to a content creator. So what platform would I use to get this money to to the creators? [link] [comments]  |
| Should we drop an idea in an industry I have to experience in? Posted: 26 May 2020 05:40 PM PDT So a little bit of backstory. Earlier this year my team (that is 4 of my college friends, lol) went for a tech competition which was sorta AI centric/themed. We went in with a medical chatbot built with Dialogflow and won 3rd place. The idea was so good that we later had on decided to make it into a real app, potentially, an actual startup. So we're still developing it, not even done with an MVP yet and I have one problem. I strongly feel like we're unqualified to build this product in the sense that we know nothing about health, medicine or healthtech and this would also be our very first startup or business endeavor ever, we're all just a bunch of college kids. I'm having doubts about going forward and would like to know if we should drop it and potentially try another vertical. [link] [comments]  |
| Thoughts - Building a One-Off Landing Page for a Conference Presence? Posted: 26 May 2020 08:41 PM PDT Last year we presented at Collision Conference in Toronto. It was our first show-and-tell and we went in pretty green. More of a fact finding mission, stealth run to figure out the landscape and come back the following year fully prepped. Of course, this year is different. Collision is a remote conference and we won't have the benefit of the casual booth walk by unfortunately. Any thoughts or suggestions or experiences in building a one-off landing page specifically for an event or tech startup conference? Thinking through the goal - we want to attract the attention of media, investors and influencers in our space and rise above the clutter of startups to build brand, showcase our product and make connections. Showcase metrics? Turn our landing page into a half demo, half pitch deck? Emulate our current landing page value proposition (knowing that we are speaking to a paying customer as opposed to media, investors and potential partnerships) or go completely custom? Any thoughts welcome. Pointers on how to succeed in a virtual conference as an early stage startup? [link] [comments]  |
| What do you do with a failed startup? Posted: 26 May 2020 11:09 AM PDT It has happened to almost everyone I know - they had idea, spent hours building a prototype and acquired couple hundreds of user emails and maybe had a small revenue. However after a while they figured that the idea & execution it's not gonna fly for some reason and they decided to step away and dissolve the "startup". But what do you do and where do you go if you have a valuable assets (for example 10k+ of users, good domain name, established traffic on your website)? Is there a service which would evaluate your assets and find buyers? Traditional industries has a process called Asset Stripping, do you know if something similar exists for startups? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 03:51 PM PDT Hello, I am a college student trying to create a mental health startup. I have had several very qualified people interested in some high-level executive positions (CTO, COO) but I have absolutely no funding or money. What do I do? Offer them equity? or do I not hire until I secure funding? [link] [comments]  |
| Always looking positively, always keep on keeping on Posted: 26 May 2020 09:32 AM PDT I just wanted to say this. I've been in a bad mood, I've bee grumpy and negative. I decided to change my mindset and I did it, just like that. From that point on I was going upwards. Everything was going great. My project started to earn money, I got users, my life got better. I did fail few times but I decided not to let me down. This is my message to all startupers, if you feel down or negative, just stop, start with positive thoughts and things will start to get better by themselves. [link] [comments]  |
| How to validate startup ideas? No really how? Posted: 26 May 2020 01:46 PM PDT I have read around the subject fairly extensively, lean startup, running lean, the mom test ect. Set up a landing page, do not focus on the solution, only focus on the problem you are trying to solve. Find out where your audience hangs out online, ask questions like "how do you ......", "do you use any software for ......." Try and redirect them to your email list. Build up a list of 100 interested customers..... launched product. However....... It never really works for me. I usually get banned or my post removed. No self-promotion allowed. And you can't start the post with.... I have an app idea.....Or the users catch on, sounds like you are launching an app? I have tried paid advertising using Facebook lead gen. This just burns through cash. How do you actually do it, has anyone got real examples? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 11:14 AM PDT Hello Everyone! Hope you are well. As per the title, I'd like to open up a discussion on - startup funding hacks - i.e. ways in which you can fund your startup outside of the traditional routes. I'd love to hear from people who have taken an alternative route to getting funding to get their startup off the ground aside from a friends and family round, seed round or crowdfunding sites such as kickstarter. For those who have gone down the crowdfunding route how has your experience been? [link] [comments]  |
| Where to find marketing/sales talent for SaaS B2B company Posted: 26 May 2020 10:51 AM PDT I built a webapp that groups employees at a company in to small groups, invites them to an online meeting, and plays a fun video with question prompts for them to all answer and get to know each other. It's company networking made fun with a focus on remote companies. Obviously, there is a market for this now more than ever. But, I just don't know where to start when it comes to marketing and selling this thing as a SaaS business. Where do I find people that know how to do this? [link] [comments]  |
| Which are the best bang-for-buck marketing campaigns you've seen? Posted: 26 May 2020 06:47 AM PDT As startup founders we often need to be creative and find the best bang-for-buck ways to push are products forward. I'm trying to think of creative ways to do it myself now. Which are some great examples you've seen for that? I'll start: I'm against using balloons for the ecological reasons, but as far as marketing goes it was a great idea. [link] [comments]  |
| Is everything already invented? Is there something new to create? Posted: 26 May 2020 08:14 AM PDT I feel like everything is already there. All I see are "new" products/services upgrading on each other. Like: airplane ticket booking with better search, uber for food and stuff like that. I haven't seen anything like really new or useful for a long time. Everything I think of is already there but in 100 different versions. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 May 2020 02:59 AM PDT I'm currently in the process of building out an MVP for a SaaS idea that I've recently validated and was wondering if anyone had experience on building a business around an open source product from the beginning? Some assumptions I've had on the benefits of open source: - Easier adoption and community building. Since my target audience is software engineers I figured that making the product open source will help me better attract more early adopters given the added transparency. - Faster launch. I'm only one person on this project right now so making it open source means I won't have to spend valuable time creating certain features for on boarding and such. I initially want to make it self hosted and just iterate over it with early users before building out a fully managed version later if it gains traction. Some concerns about going down the open source model: - Someone can monetise it before I do using the same source code or slightly modified version? I know there is an irrational fear in startups where people are too scared of their idea getting stolen but would be curious to know if this has ever happened in the open source space before? - Long term value not viable compared to if it was closed sourced? I know there are a tonne of successful open source businesses out there. For example Red Hat is valued at over a billion dollars. But these are of course the outliers so I wonder if there are any smaller open source businesses out there that are still successfully generating profits? [link] [comments]  |
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