Startups Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital

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• Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital
• Discovered a large competitor in my SaaS startup industry - can I even compete with them?
• How important is 3rd party authentication through OAuth providers like Google / Facebook?
• Formalizing an online business
• How can I have a business in future?
• Equity Agreement
• Starting a new blog. Wordpress, Django, or Django-CMS?
• How to achieve explosive startup growth!
• Looking for business model advice.
• How to start with partners outside of the US
• How do I make connections to pitch my idea to large retailers?
• How you can understand that your startup idea has a potential to grow into a $bn company
• Digital NeoBank
• Is there a way to test the payment options when using Stripe in a Wix site?
• The argument for using acquaintances for User Interviews / Idea Validation during COVID
• Approaching B2B Customers
• Feedback & Customer Care Solution for early-stage "Beta" mobile app
• Advice on Interning in a startup
• Lessons/Courses on Financial Statements & Modelling
• It's a good idea to try to build a fitness app with a different business model?

Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital Posted: 04 Jun 2020 06:05 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Fundraising Thursdays Thread. Ask about anything related to fundraising, investors, accelerators, grants, and other sources of capital. That includes how to find these sources, how to work with them, and how to negotiate with them. Don't be shy. The purpose of this is to learn and share ideas and methodologies with one another. Any question is a good question! If you are answering questions, remember to be kind and supportive. Many are just starting out and have no idea what they are doing. That's okay! We all knew nothing before we knew something. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

Discovered a large competitor in my SaaS startup industry - can I even compete with them? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 08:55 PM PDT I have been developing a business plan for a SaaS company over the past few months. Recently, I discovered a massive player in the industry primarily located in a different country. However, they are quickly expanding into the US and have started to partner with major corporations. They have received funding of over 100M. I realize that not all ideas need to be unique, but this company is doing practically what I had envisioned. However, it seems like they are targeting larger corporations rather than the niche I wanted to focus on. It seems like they could easily expand towards smaller businesses, and so I am left feeling upset about that. Do all SaaS need to be unique completely? Is there always room for competition? How can I assess whether or not I can compete with them given that they have so much funding and an already established company? I am already planning on calling smaller businesses and assessing whether or not they would be interested. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/relationhelpthrow122 [link] [comments]

How important is 3rd party authentication through OAuth providers like Google / Facebook? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 02:09 PM PDT I'm working on a PaaS for real estate brokers that will act as their website / mobile apps. Given that my platform is more than a CMS / CRM and may very easily end up warehousing sensitive data, like documents with social security numbers, I've spent a lot of time on authentication. I have a long way to go still, to ensure security, but I'm comfortable with where I am with my local auth workflow. I currently have the bulk of 3rd party authentication written but managing "linking" accounts is still up in the air. I'm not 100% certain how I want to proceed with it. I'm trying to determine if it is worth the timesink or if I should resolve to finishing the core product, commenting out the ability to login with Google / Facebook for now. Is it something that your users rely upon? Do you think you'd lose customers if it weren't available? I can't help but wonder how much my clients, real estate brokers, will care at first. submitted by /u/chance-- [link] [comments]

Formalizing an online business Posted: 04 Jun 2020 01:59 PM PDT Hi, I am currently setting up my business structure as I've recently hit financial proof of concept on my new website. I currently live in California. Los Angeles to be specific. As many of you know California taxes are high. I built a website that sells digital products and is 100% online and remote. There is nothing physical attached to it, no physical goods, or physical location and product delivery takes place via email. Everything is through the computer. I can honestly operate this from anywhere. I would like to set up a Delaware LLC and operate from California. I know Atlas offers this service and am leaning towards using it. I also recently became aware that California does not require sales tax on digital goods (ebooks etc.). So i'm now split. Would it be cheaper to set up as a Delaware LLC or should I do California? I know this is a highly specific question to my current situation but I haven't been able to find anyone who can help. My Uncle is a corporate tax lawyer and he doesn't know. I've also asked some other people in my life who are unsure. The goal is to do this as affordably as possible and keep as much money down the road for profit as possible. Does anyone have any ideas, advice or thoughts into the legality and/or practicality of doing this? Ryan submitted by /u/RyanOskey229 [link] [comments]

How can I have a business in future? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 02:32 AM PDT My friends, I (19M) currently pursuing Bachelor of commerce. I am a sophomore. I'm currently on my health and social skills. I'm trying to get in shape and improve my diet. I have joined some speaking skill courses online to improve public speaking. I'm also learning Spanish at the same time. I want to build a business in future. I have nothing particular in my mind. I just want to do something for the society and lead a peaceful minimalistic life. I just want to ask what should I be doing as of now? submitted by /u/Ritik0109 [link] [comments]

Equity Agreement Posted: 04 Jun 2020 11:57 AM PDT Hi, Im working with a new company that is a C corp, 100% owned by one person. There are 3 others that he wants to give equity to and looking for overview/template that we could refer to before we bring to a lawyer/professional. Any suggestions? Thanks submitted by /u/spicesled [link] [comments]

Starting a new blog. Wordpress, Django, or Django-CMS? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 01:16 PM PDT Hi all, I'm an experienced Django developer and I want to launch a blog to run a small business online. I was looking at prices, and thought, WordPress is the probably the easiest and cheapest to set up out of the box... But I see that over time, I may end up getting charged for services (PLUGINS) that I could write myself in Django/Django-CMS. Kind of like MailChimp, but really, insert here any kind of plugin that I would be able to apply to a WordPress site. Even though it will be a simple blog, should I still choose WordPress? Or just build everything manually with Django? Thank you. submitted by /u/torre2019 [link] [comments]

How to achieve explosive startup growth! Posted: 04 Jun 2020 06:10 AM PDT Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth. I hope that you find it useful! ​ Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing. If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions. Traction trumps everything. How to think about Traction? Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have is enough customers. You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it's hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You're probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don't. Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits: You get knowledge from traction efforts, so you'll build the right product for your customers. You get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly. Before trying to get traction, you'll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle. Your startup has 3 phases: Phase I: Make something people want In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn't hold water. You shouldn't scale up your efforts now, but it's important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don't scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers. ​ Some founders believe that startups either take off or don't. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off! – Paul Graham Phase II: Market something people want Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages. Phase III: Scale your business As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you'll start to scale. In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you're focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit. Traction for funding When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you're working on. The better your investors understand what you're doing, the less traction they'll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they're investing in you personally. To pivot or not to pivot Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it's only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base. How to get traction? The Bullseye framework The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don't nail one, you're finished. You're aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps: Find what's possible: The outer-ring The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It's important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space. Find what's probable: The middle-ring Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions: What's the cost of acquiring customers? How many customers are available? Are they the right type of customers for you now? You want to design small scale tests that don't require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40. Find what's working: The inner-ring The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you're focusing on and optimizing. Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels. If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it. If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky. How to test traction? Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be. Inner ring tests: You're doing two things: Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel. There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages. A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test. You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce. Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they're still in their infancy. Tools To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You'll need to answer these questions: How many people landed on the website? What are the demographics of my best and worst customers? Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay? A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy. How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework Define your traction goal You should always have an explicit traction goal you're working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company's outcome. Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter. The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don't help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path. Avoid traction biases Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn't. That's why it's critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming. Targetting blogs Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers. Mint's initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an "I want mint" badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with "Can I send you $500" as the subject and told them a bit about the product. To find smaller blogs in your niche: Google "top blogs for x" or "best x blogs." Search for your product keywords on YouTube. Use tools like FollowerWonk and Klout to find top twitter accounts in your industry. Use social mention to find sites with the most frequent mentions for your keywords. Talk to people to figure out what your target audience is really reading online. You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News. Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site. Publicity Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you. It's easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It's easier to get a smaller blog's attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch! What gets a reporter's attention? Milestones like raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier. A PR stunt. A big partnership. A special industry report. A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it's not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don't have a story worth pitching. A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they're working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries. You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you'd be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content. Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can: Submit the story to link-sharing sites like Reddit and HackerNews Share it on social networks Email it to influencers in your industry for comment. Ping blogs in your space and tell them you have a story that's getting buzz. Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start "How We Did This" follow-up interviews. As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant. Unconventional PR Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz. The publicity stunt Half.com renamed (Halfway, Oregon) to Half.com and launched it on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon. Richard Branson made his press conferences as outlandish as possible (dressing like a woman, driving a tank through the streets) to get the media talking about whatever Virgin was launching. WePay (a PayPal competitor) placed a 600-pound block of ice at PayPal's conference entrance. DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google's backyard highlighting its privacy focus. Blendtec created a series of videos called "Will It Blend?" where they blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone. When Grasshopper did a rebrand, they sent chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential people. Customer Appreciation Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter. Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition. Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they're likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It's sometimes called "pay-per-click" because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad. SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You're capturing people who are actively searching for solutions. Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site. Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad. Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10. CPA = CPC / conversion percentage SEM to get early customer data You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don't expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value. Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want. SEM strategy Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results. Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages. Keyword research Use Google's keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using. You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They're less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers. SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you'll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates. You shouldn't expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on. Writing ads Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you've paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like "Check out discounted Nike sneakers!" Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5% Tactics Consider expanding your ads to the content network of non-Google sites. Consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. These ads often convert better as they're aimed at prospects who have already visited your site. (Be warned that it may feel creepy to certain people) Consider using Google's Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust your ads to perform better. Use negative keywords to prevent ads from showing for certain keywords you don't want to target. Consider using programming scripts to manage your ads. Social and Display Ads Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product. Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they're used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers. Display ads The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics. To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors' ads. Social ads Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads. An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it. Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others. Offline Ads Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit. Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards. You can save money by signing longer ad contracts. Look for remnant ads which are ad space that's unused; publications accept almost any price when selling empty ads near print deadlines. You could track ad effectiveness by using unique web addresses and promo codes. You could also try adding "How did you hear about us" to your sign up process. Magazine ads A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product's benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book. Direct mail You could also try direct mail by searching for "direct mail lists" and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy) Provide a self-addressed envelope. Use handwritten envelopes and cards. Have a clear call to action. Investigate bulk mail to get reduced pricing. Local print You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area. Outdoor advertising If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren't effective for people to take immediate action, but it's extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences. DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google's backyard and it got big attention and press coverage. Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads. Radio and TV Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station's listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you've bought. TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You'll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper. Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they're always direct-response. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site. The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you're using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings. There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail. Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like "Dishwashers," and "Facebook." They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called. Long-tail: These are longer searches that don't get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches. "Wooden toys" is fat-head. "Wood puzzles for 3-year-olds" is long-tail. When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page. Fat-head strategy To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful. The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them. Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth. Next, orient your site around the terms you've chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost. Long-Tail strategy Because it's difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers. Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you're naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it's a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search. If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you'll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can't invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target. Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner. How to get links? Don't buy links, you'll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do: Publicity - Get covered by a publication. Product - Produce shareable web pages. Content marketing - Create strong shareable content. Content that's highly shareable include infographics, slideshows, images, and original research. Widgets - Give site owners useful things to add to their sites which link back to yours. Content Marketing Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition. Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don't scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own. OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like "How your race affects the messages you get" to generate traffic and conversation. Tactics Overcome writer's block by writing about the problems facing your target customers. Use infographics because they are shared 20x more. Show your readers that they have a problem they didn't know about. Engage in online forums where your target customers are, and try to contribute. Do guest posting on other popular blogs. Keep a regular content schedule. Email Marketing Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That's why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have. Email marketing to Find customers Build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts. At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address. Create a short free course related to your area. Consider advertising on email newsletters. Email marketing to Engage customers If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others? Determine the steps necessary for customers to get value from your product Create targeted emails to make sure people complete these steps. You can use tools like Vero and Customer.io to automate these messages. Send an automated personal email 30 minutes after they signup to ask they if they need help. Email marketing to Retain customers Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications. More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you're getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week. You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago. Email marketing to Drive revenue You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers. WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service. If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart. You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way. Email marketing to get referrals Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts. Tactics Use an email marketing provider that helps ensure deliverability like MailChimp. Use A/B tests for every aspect including subjects, formats, images, timing, and more. Send emails between 9 AM and 12 PM in your customers' time zone or schedule them at the time they registered for your email list. Learn copywriting techniques by checking resources like copy hackers. Viral Marketing Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. It's so powerful that even if you can't achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you'll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing. The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth. Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs. Some embed virality like adding "Get a free email account with Hotmail" or "Sent from iPhone" to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers' emails. Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends. Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube. Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content. The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite) K = i * conversion percentage Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably. You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields. Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops. Tactics Measure your viral coefficient and cycle time from the start Run as many A/B tests as you can. Focus on big changes that would result in a 5-10x improvement in a key metric, like a new email autoresponder or website design or onboarding flow. Then optimize smaller stuff. You need a constant stream of new customers entering the viral loop. This is called "seeding." You could use SEO and online ads for that. Copy those who have done it before. Engineering as Marketing You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers. HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It's free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect. Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They've driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz. WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site's speed. Provide something of true value. Make the offering extremely relevant to your core business. Put microsites and tools on their own domains. It makes it easier to share and does well with SEO when people search for your tool. Business Development With business development, you're partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties. Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches. Business development can take the form of: Standard partnership, like Apple and Nike producing Nike+ shoe that communicates with the iPhone. Joint ventures: Two companies working together to produce a new product. Like bottled Starbucks Frappuccino produced by Pepsi. Licencing: Spotify licensing music from record labels. Distribution deals: Groupon works with a restaurant to offer a discount to Groupon's mailing list. Supply partnership: Deals between suppliers and Walmart. You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn't accept any partnership that doesn't align with it. Many startups waste resources because it's tempting to make deals with bigger companies. Create an exhaustive list of all your possible partners. Send it to your investors and friends for warm introductions. Approach potential customers with a value-focused proposition that outlines why they should work with you. Make sure to find out who is in charge of the metric you've targeted, and contact them directly. Make the negotiation and term sheet as simple as possible Sales Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It's particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products. Structuring the sales conversation Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they're going to close. How many employees do you have? How is your organization structured Problem questions. Use sparingly. Are you happy with your current solution? What problems do you face with it? Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem. Does this problem hurt your productivity? How many people does it impact? What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of it? Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem. How do you feel this solution would help you? Cold calls Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you're calling a very small business. Try to get answers about: Process: How does the company buy a solution like this? Need: How badly does the company need a solution for this? Authority: Which individuals can make the purchase happen? Money: Do they have the funds? How much not solving the problem cost them? Timing: What are budget and decision timelines for purchase? Tactics It's better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you've qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they're going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process. A checklist that can help you with sales: Remove the need for IT installs Free trials Channel partners FAQs Demo videos or Webinars Testimonials or case studies Email campaigns Low introductory price (less than $250/mo for SMB, $10,000 for enterprises) I removed the last sections because of the post character limit. Here are two: submitted by /u/alollou [link] [comments]

Looking for business model advice. Posted: 04 Jun 2020 04:19 AM PDT Hi! We are grinding away on our extension and trying to get an idea of how to make money, and I would love some feedback. I made one of these a few months ago and it was quite helpful. So we are making a browser extension that highlights products on Amazon based on where they are made. Our initial version is US specific, so if someone wanted to only purchase things from the USA, or give some priority to those, we make that easy. Doing this requires a ton of research, most manufacturers don't bother saying where they manufacture, or they mislead that it is made in the USA even when it's not. We've been researching and building the extension for just shy of 6 months, as a 4 person team. We have a few hundred users currently, and get half a dozen more every day, which we are content with given that the extension doesn't work very well yet. What the point of this post is, is to get some feedback on the ways we've thought about getting some revenue, which we are looking to start doing in the next few months. The most obvious source of revenue is affiliates, but it's not easy. Amazon doesn't allow extensions to be a part of the affiliate program, so we would only be able to collect revenue from users who went to our site, which we haven't even built yet. On top of that Amazon doesn't want sites overlaying their site like we do, so they wouldn't allow us in the affiliate program until we made some large changes to make our extension quite a bit worse. Even then we might not be allowed in, reviewmeta.com which is a generally similar project to us was removed from the affiliate program, and now sends their traffic through a middleman. I've spoken to a bunch of similar extensions and the amount they make from the Amazon affiliate program, even with millions of users, appears to be shockingly low. In an AMA on Reddit the owner of review meta said he has only just managed to overcome his monthly server costs a few months ago, after 3 years in operations, despite having 5 figure daily site visits and hundreds of thousands of extension and app users. What we have found is most Made in the USA products aren't on Amazon, so in the distant future we would love to have separate affiliate deals with a multitude of sites, like donegood.co has done in their extension, however that would be very expensive because of the huge variety of searches we get. We might have 10,000 users and only get 200 searches for shoes in a week, so it would be very hard to convince online shops to set up an affiliate program with us when the estimated monthly traffic is that low (with 10 sites sharing 200 searches). We would need an enormous user base to make that feasible, it wouldn't help us for years. We can't go that long term when Amazon could implement a filter of their own at any time. That train of thought has brought us to our current decision, subscription. We are going to offer a premium version of the extension for 2$ a month or 10$ a year. The good thing is that we can do it quickly, and I have a lot of experience in digital marketing. It will be relatively easy to figure out the worth of a sign up, and if we can get it above our CAC we will quickly be able to get breakeven. There are a lot of problems with it though. I currently only sign up for Netflix, some of the other founders have Spotify and Amazon prime subscriptions, but in general we are trying to charge for this service in a way people aren't used to, and that we aren't sure if we would sign up for ourselves. Also asking people to take their credit card out of their pocket for just 2$ isn't traditionally advisable. At these very low levels of charges I imagine people are pretty insensitive to similar amounts. For example are we getting 50% less users at 3$ a month? Another issue is how different it is from other freemium experiences. When I think of mobile games I believe they get all their revenue from a tiny % of their users. 95% of people don't pay, 1% of people pay 90% of the total revenue, so going for a very broad low cost model seems quite different from those experiences. Freemium makes more sense than a hard paywall because if we do get significant free version signups we could invest into setting up a proper affiliate program. There is also an ad based model, but I don't think it would be feasible to keep the advertisers specific to the country of our users, at least without being a ton of work and getting way less revenue. (For example if someone from the US was browsing and got shown a made in China pair of shoes, that would ruin the experience.) I would love to hear any thoughts on this! submitted by /u/BuyLocalized [link] [comments]

How to start with partners outside of the US Posted: 04 Jun 2020 04:51 PM PDT I am starting a company- retail/droppshipping- I am a US citizen, I have partners in Europe. I've had a couple of terrible experiences, really want to prevent anything bad from happening once the business starts doing well. Should I open an S-corp with them as partners? Or an overseas company? Not really sure the best way to do this in terms of taxes and protecting myself. Thanks submitted by /u/iopit [link] [comments]

How do I make connections to pitch my idea to large retailers? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 04:09 PM PDT Let's say my start-up was a plug in to their e-commerce site which examined the buyers purchase and preferences to suggest additional items/alternatives based on trends, returns, etc. (not the real idea but an example). How do I go from idea to having an opportunity to pitch? How to I find the right folks? Website emails? Linked in? If so do I go to ceo? Other positions? Is there a resource im missing?(keeping covid in mind and I'm in an area under lockdown). submitted by /u/3fffingawesome [link] [comments]

How you can understand that your startup idea has a potential to grow into a $bn company Posted: 04 Jun 2020 03:34 PM PDT Startup is a company that is designed and created to grow quickly. If you don't grow fast it is a small business. ​ Startup idea is a hypothesis. The challenge is the way startups construct this hypothesis. This would be a pitch to the investor. ​ The pitch consists of Problem, Solution, Insight (why your experiment is going to be successful) ​ Problems should be popular (many people would have it), growing (people suffer from it more and more), urgent (solution should be found asap), expensive (current ways to resolve the problem are costly), mandatory (you cannot just avoid this problem), frequent (it occurs regularly). ​ Ideal picture of the problem: more than a million people have this problem; the market has 20%+ annual growth; you can resolve the problem right now; right now this problem costs a lot of money; possibly this problem was caused by a change of regulation; people need to find solution to the problem several times per day. ​ Solution: be careful, and do not try to start with solution and then move on to a problem. It is called: "Solution in search for a problem" (SISP) - and this won't work in the long-term. ​ Insight: explain why this solution is going to work. Focus on unfair advantages. ​ Unfair advantages: founders, market, product, acquisition, monopoly. Do you have one or more of them? ​ Now try to analyse your project based on these criteria: Problem, Solution, Insight. ​ Based on the lecture "How to Evaluate Startup Idea" by Kevin Hale submitted by /u/Crazy_startup [link] [comments]

Digital NeoBank Posted: 04 Jun 2020 03:04 PM PDT Is there is a cheap and easy way to launch a neobank for my niche market? I know there are services for it but are they easy to manage, use, create debit cards, etc. Ideally, I would love a cheap implementation fee initially and per every user, and then for them to take a percentage of interest earned and interchange fees. Would love them to have an API that I use to connect to their products and make accounts, etc. ​ Does anyone have any experience with this or know the "inside scoop"? submitted by /u/KingKush8 [link] [comments]

Is there a way to test the payment options when using Stripe in a Wix site? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 02:08 PM PDT I've connected my site that I built in Wix to Stripe this afternoon and want to try a test transaction to ensure the flow works for our sales. I've tried the test card numbers offered by stripe, however they don't go through. Is there a way to do this? Thanks!! submitted by /u/sfk2022 [link] [comments]

The argument for using acquaintances for User Interviews / Idea Validation during COVID Posted: 04 Jun 2020 11:06 AM PDT Cold calling for user interviews is hard. I've done e-mail lists, DMs in Instagram and Facebook and cold approach in real life. I would say everyone should do cold approach because it gives you a real life face interaction and forces you to practice selling your idea to a stranger. Right now, COVID and Protests have put a damper on cold approaching. If you need to validate an idea, it might take a while to find users for interviewing unless you provide some sort of incentive. People say don't use family and friends because they might give biased opinions. I agree with that to an extent, but it really depends on the person and if they are within your market segment/customer profile. Having said that, I think ACQUAINTANCES of the 1st degree are a good source of interviews. They're easily accessible, and more importantly, people are currently looking for human connection. Because you have a common friend, it's easier to gain access to them. Also, if you're concerned about bias, I'd argue that they are the next best thing after strangers. Example: Say you want to validate a new app for gamers and a lot of your friends are gamers. You remember meeting friends of your friends at a social gathering who also gamed. I think they are perfect for user interviews ​ "Hey ______, hope all is well in these crazy times. I noticed you just started playing ______. Have you enjoyed it so far? I know this is random, but if you had time I was hoping you could share your experiences with me regarding (insert usage scenario here)" submitted by /u/count3rpart [link] [comments]

Approaching B2B Customers Posted: 04 Jun 2020 02:45 AM PDT Hi, so we launched our Product for Businesses but i still dont know how to approach Customers. The big issue in fscing is that we dont have a real target group. Its every business from 50 Employees and its applable in ever section of the companies. Im planning on going on meetups and pitch events as soon as this pandemie is over... have you any other tipps? submitted by /u/biggrabo [link] [comments]

Feedback & Customer Care Solution for early-stage "Beta" mobile app Posted: 04 Jun 2020 09:57 AM PDT Considering many people have launched mobile products here, I am looking for your suggestions on how to deal with aggregating and engaging with customers under two conditions: 1) Customer feedback. What is the best way you have opened up communication between you and your customers on mobile? Specifically looking for low to medium level solutions, ideally free (E.g. email contact). 2) Bug reporting & app assistance. If someone is having trouble doing some type of operation (E.g. recover their password) or would like to report a bug they are encountering with steps to reproduce it. Given your experiences, how do you think an early-stage B2C (free to use) application should deal with these cases? Again I am looking for LOW to MEDIUM effort and ideally free or close to free. It doesn't make sense to build out a full-fledge solution given the early nature of our product. submitted by /u/niryou [link] [comments]

Advice on Interning in a startup Posted: 04 Jun 2020 03:14 AM PDT I'm a high school student hoping to intern in a biotech startup. I know it's ambitious but I've been trying to learn aspects of computational biology on the side to be somewhat useful. Startup founders, do you have any advice about how send an email to seek an internship, especially since I'm sure you're inbox is flooded with emails. I would also be really grateful for any insight on what areas startups typically need help in (not so much from a professional standpoint, but what small cracks in the system can I attempt to fill in)? Also, any advice about how to be useful/effective in an internship would be great. Thanks! submitted by /u/sarrahrose [link] [comments]

Lessons/Courses on Financial Statements & Modelling Posted: 04 Jun 2020 05:18 AM PDT Hi All Hope everyone is good. Can anyone point me in the right direction of any lessons/courses/checklists for financial statements and financial modelling for startups? I understand the 3 main financial statements and have a basic knowledge of the financial side of things, but have been parsing bits of information together from various sources on the web and was wondering if there was a better, more complete source of information on the topic. Thanks submitted by /u/2020Corp [link] [comments]

It's a good idea to try to build a fitness app with a different business model? Posted: 04 Jun 2020 07:22 AM PDT This question might be obvious, but too many people have told me that I don't need to find the black thread (find the new revolutionary business model) and suggested me to implement the same old subscription method as all the fitness platform does. What do you think about this suggestion? submitted by /u/Joseamica [link] [comments]

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