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    Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products

    Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products


    Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products

    Posted: 12 Jun 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.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    Lost stock certificate

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 09:32 PM PDT

    I cofounded a company that is doing relatively well.

    Years ago when I started it, I was given a certificate for 100 shares. Now I can't find that certificate.

    Is the startup bound to honor my holdings and re issue the certificate? Or is it just like I lost $100 bill -- if I drop a bill on the street, it's gone forever.

    I'm no longer involved with the company, and haven't been for years. But I'm hoping I still have a claim to some equity that I can liquidate one day. The equity is private, the company has not IPO'd.

    submitted by /u/dnh234589
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    Which company/companies have the best Seed Round pitch deck?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 09:23 AM PDT

    I'm at the stage where my company is seeking investment to scale and I need to come up with a pitch deck.

    I'm aware that decks change as you enter different rounds of funding. I'm curious what company has the most successful seed round deck so I can learn from it and create a great deck. Any other tips on creating a good seed round deck are appreciated.

    Thanks for your help everyone.

    submitted by /u/trying2selfhost
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    How do you find an alternative funding/angel/mezzanine/"rich uncle" type of investor?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 07:19 PM PDT

    Hello!

    I have been on a bit of journey for the past few months seeking information and advice on how to go about finding some special funding for a business I would like to start.

    I'm trying to get into Commercial Lending. Essentially become a broker for commercial loans for anything from small businesses needing capital to expand, cover payroll, purchase inventory to commercial real estate investors going after their next big acquisition. The commercial capital market is far from saturated and with over 20 million small businesses in the U.S. combined with the economic impact this whole COVID epidemic has had, demand for capital for small businesses is everywhere!

    Anyway, I've stumbled across a company that provides effectively a "business in a box" training program that helps entrepreneurs get their own LLC started and trained to become their own Commercial Finance company. The training has a hefty tuition but this type of business can easily make back the cost of tuition fairly quickly. In fact, professionals who have been operating in this industry for a couple of years make well into 6-figures.

    My proposition is simple. If I can find an investor who will cover the tuition cost for me, I will double that investment in one year (or less). Basically, you get to help a young entrepreneur kickstart his dream career while doubling your money in one year! Its a win-win!

    I have been networking on LinkedIn like crazy and those who actually entertain the idea tend to tell me its not within their wheelhouse or they do the typical investor move and just fall off the face of the earth and stop responding to me. And I am not going to chase after them. I know this is an attractive enough opportunity to the right investor. However, I just don't know how to source someone who entertains the more angel/mezzanine/"rich uncle" type of investments.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks for your time!

    submitted by /u/BH1222
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    Ads-Mining StartUp

    Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:46 AM PDT

    Welcome to Ads-Mining, on recent years cryptocurrencies had become a very interesting field of time investing. But what about of all this Ads popping out everywhere, and what if we could mine Ads like cryptocurrencies ?

    Help us grow !

    bit.ly/Ad-Mining

    submitted by /u/orlandox683x
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    My wife and I are starting a business and she wants to support the marketing function. What's the optimal way to approach her role and career development?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 10:00 PM PDT

    Hi, r/startups! My wife and I are starting a business developing and selling cybersecurity education and training programs. If we want to create a role for her to support our marketing efforts, how should we approach this?

    The initial thought is to identify a marketing role that would be a force multiplier for this particular use case, create a learning plan on a training platform like Skillsoft/Percipio that's relevant to said role, and then she can learn and grow into that role on her own time, adding value along the way.

    Please let me know if there's additional information I can provide. Also, if this question would be best asked in another sub, I'd greatly appreciate the lead. Thank you for your time.

    submitted by /u/anonRFI
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    Business Address without revealing your address in Public record within states Foreign Qualification filing?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 02:56 PM PDT

    For those of you who have formed startups working out of your home, how have you dealt with the need to provide your business address within the state Foreign Qualification filings?

    Many US states do not accept PO Boxes, and require a physical address of the company officer (for service of process), and publish this within the public record of the filing.

    submitted by /u/chebrashka
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    Website broker recommendations for real estate site with sizable traffic & profit in the US market?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 10:46 AM PDT

    A few years ago I created a real estate site and treated my 9-5 job as it's VC funding. It eventually generated more income than my 9-5 so I transitioned to it full-time even though it doesn't require full-time focus. I'm still interested in growing the site further, but I recently acquired a domain name (unrelated to real estate) that I'd like to build a new company around. Obviously, I could put the real estate site on auto-pilot, but I'm not sure that's the best move.

    So my question is, can anyone recommend a website broker that has experience selling sites for $1M+?

    submitted by /u/GondolaPoint
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    My favorite Business Books from the past 10 years. Tell me yours.

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 04:36 AM PDT

    I've been reading business books for the past 10 years. The list huge But I have listed my Top 10 favorite business books that really guided me in my entrepreneur journey.

    • "The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the way you do business" - Clayton M. Christensen
    • "The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success" - William N. Thorndike
    • "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" - Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling.
    • "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou.
    • "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" by Simon Sinek.
    • "The Lean Startup" - Eric Ries.
    • "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't" - Jim Collins.
    • "First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently" - Jim Harter.
    • "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution" - Michael Hammer and James A. Champy.
    • "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" by Roger Lowenstein.

    So which one will you be including in your list???

    Also curious to know your choices...

    submitted by /u/GregoryS125
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    Failure: Picking Up the Pieces

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 05:45 PM PDT

    Please visit the original article: https://sunpeece.com/failure-picking-up-the-pieces/

    The category of this article is all about failure: "Learn from my Failures"

    I am a person that puts a flurry of passion into a new project only to suffer from burnout. Some of these projects include organizing people into a gaming guild, a writing cooperation, a network of friends, and many other kinds of organizations. For the examples in this article, I will use a Guild Wars 2 gaming guild that I created in the past.

    I Know What I Needed

    I needed to figure out a way to be in it for the long-haul. I needed to stop getting myself into situations that overwhelm me and incentivize me to quit everything altogether. The biggest thing that gets me into trouble is creating daily obligations. In the Guild Wars 2 gaming guild, I decided to create daily discussions based on quick research I've done. It's simple, yet still a commitment. If I was having a bad day, I couldn't just skip my daily obligation. Or at least that was my perception.

    I wanted perfection when I had the energy to achieve it. It starts as simple techniques, but the simplicity is entirely dependent on my energy level. Once my energy level drops, that's when the problems arise. After many failures in many organizations and projects, I eventually wanted to learn how to be successful over a long period of time.

    The Search

    This led me to be even more of a perfectionist. I tried to do all the hard work up front so I wouldn't need to stress about it later. This didn't produce the intended effect. I set up systems to carry me into the future, but this work still tired me out. In the Guild Wars 2 gaming guild, I thought that a guild with only a few members would end in failure. I thought that once the guild reaches a certain amount of members, it would be self-sustainable and I wouldn't need to put in as much effort later on. Or at least that was the idea.

    So I recruited like crazy right away. I would spend hours and hours messaging on the different chat channels in the game to recruit people. I set a precedent for myself that I would devote a great amount of energy each and every day.

    The Price of Failure

    There is so much you have to do in order to be successful. If you fail to commit, you lose followers. That is to be avoided at all costs. But what if you incorporated it into your daily efforts? What if you lost followers on purpose? What if you set a precedent for yourself, one of accepting failure?

    So you had a bad day and failed. You had a bad week, or a month. Maybe it's about how you conduct yourself after failure. Maybe it's about how you continue. The final conclusion is that it takes skill to pick up the pieces after failure and move on. Perhaps you can even intentionally fail early on to set an expectation for yourself to fail more in the future.

    Yes, you will lose a lot of progress and reputation. You will lose:

    An audience Credibility Professionalism Money Time Self-esteem Business partnerships and more

    Procrastinating on failing in my Guild Wars 2 gaming guild impacted the moment when I finally failed, and I failed hard. I had to give up leadership to a semi-random member and leave the community in shame in order to protect my mental health.

    Conclusion

    In this blog, I already failed. I created an obligation to others to finish a big article, and I had to set it aside. I created an expectation for myself to make one social media post a day, and after the first post, I immediately failed. A normal person's perspective would see all of this as bad, or maybe they would just console me and say failure is okay. But it's more than okay, it's desirable, and I succeeded in failing. I have already reached the conclusion of picking up the pieces, this is simply a prime example of me putting it into action.

    Now I incorporate failure into my daily operations. I let my work turn away potential followers, I see who doesn't mind, and I see who wants to stay.

    I build relationships with those who stay I progress slower than I would have if I didn't embrace failure I am free to write whatever I want, yet still chasing the most successful topics I focus on the best business practices to achieve as much success as possible. It forces me to improve my strategies, which is fun

    I feel much more holistic, happy, and ironically more productive.

    submitted by /u/SunpeeceStudios
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    Patenting your startup idea?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 10:04 AM PDT

    Good day everyone!

    I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask a question like this but I feel like it's time I got serious about my startup idea which seems really promising but is also at risk of getting into the wrong hands easily.

    I need to file an international patent for sort of a device, cost and time are my main barriers at the moment. So the question, is there a way I can get my idea patented for free or cheap, and fast so I can start presenting it everywhere without the risk of it getting stolen? I'd like to know the procedure as I haven't done much research on this subject.

    Thanks a bunch!

    submitted by /u/MalikKillzIt
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    How to implement this?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 05:26 PM PDT

    How can I implement this?

    What is needed to take a % off bookings?

    For example, someone books a service for $100 and gets charged $10 (10%) for booking through the platform.

    What is this fee usually called? How can this be implemented as simply and as cheaply as possible?

    And if possible, is there a way to have this work with a Wordpress site? I don't have anyone on the tech side and don't have the budget. A pre built solution would be ideal...

    submitted by /u/zcopyconsulting
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    Tools to automate email sending with an attachment, given a list of emails and contact names and a message?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 09:02 AM PDT

    Hello, I am doing cold outreach to a very long list of contacts, where I have the email address and name of each individual, and I have a message to send in the body of the email, and a deck as the PDF attachment to send.

    I would like to be able to send bunches of emails at a time, with each email addressed to the recipient (e.g. Good morning James,), with the same text in the body, and the same deck attached to each email.

    I've been doing this manually but it is such a pain. Would anyone know of any tools I can use to automate the sending of these emails?

    Thanks!

    submitted by /u/friendlylearner
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    How would you build an audience for a product which will give you the top 10 People, Companies, and Location every day in any industry or field you're interested in?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 10:51 AM PDT

    We built a product for a B2B use-case but then realized there's a potential opportunity in going B2C too.

    For example, if you're interested in getting daily notifications for the top people, companies, or locations for "bitcoin" for the last week, you can get that. We will fetch all news articles on the internet which are related to "Bitcoin" for the past week, and extract the most interesting people, companies, and locations from that along with the news, and we can do that for any keyword and any keyword and industry on the internet.

    I was thinking maybe setting up a weekly newsletter with the top 10s for some selected keywords like "bitcoin", "COVID-19", "twitch" and stuff like that, and the user could come and subscribe to top 10s for Bitcoin weekly. Would it work? I'm open to all kinds of ideas. Thanks. :)

    Crossposted from r/entrepreneur

    submitted by /u/roonishpower
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    How do you “find people” to test if your idea is good?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 05:17 AM PDT

    I'll be the first to say it: I'm a "build it and they will come" type of guy - my market research is minimal, and it's totally my fault. I'm a software engineer by trade, building mobile and web applications from ground up. I think of an idea, spend 3-4 months building it, and then watch it fail. My last 2 ideas were like this.

    I keep falling into the hole of "My product is going to be so good they'll HAVE to use it" so I spent hours polishing a fantastic UI and UX, using the fastest languages for the snappiest experiences. I make a living building systems that scale, so that's not the issue for me.

    Obviously, that's not sustainable. Spending 3-4 months on an idea with no validation isn't the way to go, but HOW do I find people to talk to?

    My last idea was a shopping app that is a unique UX. I didn't validate it, I just built it. My question (tuned to my situation so I can learn better) is this: If you had that same idea, how would YOU validate it? Can someone walk through those steps for me?

    Thanks for your guys time.

    Tl;dr: if your idea was a shopping app, how would you validate it to make sure it has a market need?

    submitted by /u/anthOlei
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    The Artist Who Wants to Do It All.

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 12:18 PM PDT

    Hi, I just turned 18 and I've been fidgeting with lots of ideas for making money and selling my art online. I don't have a big following yet, but I've sold custom t-shirts and have some requests for prints and commissions. I see people selling their products online, and always think "If they're able to profit from that, there is definitely a huge market for my art". But, the problem is that I've said that about many different things such as custom sneakers, starting a clothing line, selling prints, doing commission portraits, or making Youtube videos, and the list goes on. Often, after fear of not being able to 'do it all' hits me, I just end up being overwhelmed and not starting. I have so many ideas that I'm not sure what to act on! My main setback is branding myself via social media. I have an art account on IG where I plan to stick with my username for a long time (it's just my name with art at the end, super easy) but I don't know whether I should post all my art endeavors on that account, or if it's wiser to branch out into different fields and separate them. I also am planning on getting a website for my portfolio and to sell art, but I'm not even sure if I should keep it all under the same name? It could be confusing if I'm selling different things with slightly different styles all under the same name. This is super hard to explain but I couldn't find any help on the internet elsewhere! Has anyone had this problem? What's your advice?

    submitted by /u/eeybb
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    Rule No X. Discuss your shares' distribution in your startup/company at the earliest. (personal story)

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 11:38 AM PDT

    This post is an advice for the startups at the early stages.

    So the backstory is that i started working on an idea with a colleague of mine, about 8-9 months ago. We were a good match in this startup because i was good at developing software and he was good at doing sales. The idea was a software platform of some sort. In the beginning It the beginning everything was going smoothly. We even found some sort of funding for startups from the government.

    Meanwhile another guy also joined the team as a co-founder of the startup. He was also good at doing the software. Things were going good and the software was on the way to its beta version. While the software was being developed, we found some customers and showed them our software. They really liked it and wanted to have it.

    Therefore, we quickly finished up the mvp so that we could do deal with the customers. And to do that we needed a proper registered company. Till so far we even didn't discuss what would be the structure of shareholders.

    Here it goes...... Two days ago i found out that the other two members quietly registered the company as pvt ltd with a split of 50% each, without even discussing anythinngg with me. Yes.... now the software is almost ready and my other teammates kicked me out.

    I know, a lot of you will say that it is my fault not to discuss these details in the beginning. Yes, It is my fault. Now nothing can be done about it. So i am writing this post to inform all of you who are at the earlier stages of the startup to discuss these details, if not in the beginning but at the early stages.

    p.s.: i have a meeting with the other members related to what they have done. Obviously i am on the weaker side here, but if you guys have any advice for me, do let me know. It would be highly appreciated

    peace....

    submitted by /u/dragon-river
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    How to identify users through their emails?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 11:09 AM PDT

    I created an edtech startup that helps students with their math concepts.

    I've gathered over ~50,000 emails over the past 4 years, but the problem I made was that I didn't differentiate if the users signed up with their parent's email or their own student email.

    I want to be able to identify who is who so that I can start segmenting and targeting the parents for promotions, but how do I approach this without being annoying or intrusive?

    EDIT: I don't mean to ask for methods that'll scrape online data using their email, I meant more in terms of how do I approach asking to update their information with a decent success rate?

    submitted by /u/Jae_Kingsley
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    Any non-tech peeps here who built their MVP completely on their own, before eventually passing onto an actual technical person?

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 08:56 AM PDT

    I read a lot of posts where contributors flat out say that app building should always be done by a tech person.

    I'm curious to see if anyone starting out had gone down a different path. I have a few non-tech friends who got an app idea (seems like everyone does lately?), don't know how to code, and don't have the capital to outsource the whole project. Only part of it. They have the time to learn to build it, and for now generally see the idea as a side project, though with the intention of submitting to Google Play and App Store.

    So for now, they want to build the MVP themselves, and if there's enough interest, get a tech person to maintain the app (bug fixes etc.) while they get more funding to improve the app.

    Thoughts?

    submitted by /u/keepmyheadhigh
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    Trying to help my father out.

    Posted: 12 Jun 2020 08:52 AM PDT

    Hello,

    Fast backstory.

    Father is a good construction worker and sales man and as a result created his own business, selling and placing swimming pools. Currently selling about 120/year and around 10 employees.

    Now he's in his mid-50's and wants to hire somebody to basically do his job. Oversee everything, call with our suppliers, visit costumers, etc. etc.

    What I want to know is basically the following.

    What are we looking for exactly? What studies should they have done? What profile should they have?

    It's an idea he came up with yesterday evening so we're just looking for all the information we can find to do this transition of being the head yourself to letting somebody else run it.

    If this isn't the place for it, if you could advise me where to find this information please share.

    If this isn't meant on this sub, my apologies to the mods. Not a lot of places to find information on this.

    submitted by /u/Orisara
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