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
- How do investors "cut off" funding? How does a CEO look for new investors when their old ones walked away?
- 5% Equity $0 Comp in Pre-Money Startup To Lead Development On MVP Vested Over 3 Years. Is this good?
- Looking to split with my cofounder, wondering if I own the IP I created
- Partner refuse pay project demands sales first
- Hypothetical—What if a company raises money on SAFEs and then never raises again?
- A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 2.5
- Anyone have a good template for an acquisition counter offer?
- Do you hire a consultant or company to help with launching a new app?
- social media and e commerce startup
- Escaping feature hell
- ELI5: Put owner's cash into a Delaware C Corporation
- Help with Company Website
- Developer / Entrepreneurs, how did you launch? Or - I got a product to MVP... Now what?
- Best way to find a startup to join?
- Lead Generation List
- How does a liquidation preference work in a stock + cash acquisition?
- What are some of the ways your startup has successfully used services such as Fiverr or Upwork to complete work?
- What are videos on startup work environment and culture ?
- Closed beta, then open beta? Or open beta right from the start?
- What is the best way to encourage folks to join my Facebook group?
- Asked to be a Co-Founder
| Posted: 09 Jun 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]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 05:07 PM PDT I'm a foot soldier engineer at a post series-A startup that's gone through very tough times, posting on this subreddit hoping to get some insight on what my company is going through. When COVID hit in March, our salaries vanished and management furloughed the vast majority of employees. The CEO's excuse was that the investors were behind schedule in wiring funds for payroll to the company, which I thought was very strange. Recently, I've heard that the real explanation was that investors were displeased with our company's progress and used corona as an excuse to renege on term sheets and pull funding. Our furlough was supposed to be only 3 months, but now we've been told that furlough will be extended to 6 months. Management tells us that they're working very hard to secure funding, but I'm unsure. Before Corona, company executives traveled to some Arab Gulf countries to look for investors, despite being a California based startup. I heard this was because the company had exhausted its Silicon Valley contact list Is it a normal thing for unhappy investors to pull funding without warning? How likely will the CEO find new investors during current economic conditions? [link] [comments]  |
| 5% Equity $0 Comp in Pre-Money Startup To Lead Development On MVP Vested Over 3 Years. Is this good? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 08:36 AM PDT I work for a company that is starting a NEW company separate from the one I currently work for. They have asked me to work after-hours for sweat equity. It's a good idea, and we have VERY interested companies that could potentially sign up (after the product is built) for 30,000 users. I've been on the calls. I know it's a real thing. Our new CEO is the one who landed these clients. He's great at closing deals and coming up with ideas. He has 0 technical skills. Unfortunately, the IP comes from the existing company that includes a few extra partners. They are entitled to a certain % of this new company because of this, but they seem like they're going to do almost nothing and get a large %. I guess there's nothing that can be done about this. Fine. I was originally offered 1.75% and $0 compensation to work 25-40 hours a week IN ADDITION to my normal day job with them. I argued that this wasn't worth it. They upped their offer to 5% vested over 3 years, with quarterly distributions. CEO seems to be struggling with the fact that he has to give me 5%, and seems to think that because he pays my salary in an entirely different company that I'm not "working for free." He also seems to frame everything like "I'm not worth $5 million" (he is appraising every deal in what he thinks the company will be worth in 3 years from now). So the full run-down is:
Is this a fair deal? Too hard to tell? Edit: Just to elaborate: The founders will have big roles in the development of this product. One is a product designer, another is IT, and the founder is the one landing us initial customers that will take us from 0-50,000 active users within a year. I'm the only "major" equity/options holder that will not be investing money. I don't know if that changes anyone's opinion here. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking to split with my cofounder, wondering if I own the IP I created Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:52 PM PDT I partnered with one other person to build a marketplace. The equity split is 51% him, 49% me. I, being the technical founder, spent the past 9 months developing the software and it's in a very good spot for an MVP. My cofounder and "sales guy" has created 0 value, never taken meetings, as far as I can tell the only marketing he's done is write a few blog posts. I have never been compensated for my efforts other than equity, but we also haven't made any sales. Long story short, this person is not at all doing what we agreed upon and is in general very lazy and not a self motivated person. I'm just looking to leave and take all of my input with me. What are my options here? [link] [comments]  |
| Partner refuse pay project demands sales first Posted: 09 Jun 2020 06:02 PM PDT A business owner ask me to be partners. He supplies expensive products to resellers around the world. They don't sell fast but are expensive. 2k-20k. I make ecommerce stores and know about marketing etc so We agree I make an store for him for a low amount and I get 10% for all sales. including ebay amazon stores. I have access to his ebay, amazon and facebook, instagram. Many months of work later the store is ready, but now he say he want to see sales before paying final deposit (less than $2000). He say he could had paid anyone $500 and would have done the same thing. he say if I were making sales I would had made a lot more than what he owes me... He doesnt want to pay for PPC. I mean he drop me all that right when the site is done. I mean, should I start trying to get sales for this business and forget the final deposit or I wasted my time. There is no contract. We are in USA. [link] [comments]  |
| Hypothetical—What if a company raises money on SAFEs and then never raises again? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:02 PM PDT Say a company raised a pre-seed round using a standard Y Comb Simple Agreement for Future Equity that converts when the company raises an equitied round. Could the company find a sustainable business model and elect not to raise again? Would this totally lock out the early investors? What could they (the investors) do in this scenario? [link] [comments]  |
| A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 2.5 Posted: 09 Jun 2020 02:14 PM PDT LET'S DO THIS! This is part 2.5 of 5 for those keeping track at home.
2.5 - Process, process, process - Start one, refine it, continually improve it
Brief recap - In Part 1 we found our basics on what to look for in terms of monetization. In Part 2 we backed this up by drilling down deeper to understand how to hyperfocus and identify potential partners in the space as well as do some deep competitive analysis. So at this point you should have -
For Part 3 we were going to look at road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships. I wanted to jump into this, but I've realized more as I write these posts that we need to address a bit of the basics first about internal organization. We've spent a lot of time on processes without actively addressing how important they really are. This is a good place to stop for a second and get our house in order before we continue with part 3. Let's get alignment. My Personal Approach: Whenever I am engaged with a client I only focus on three things. Process, resource allocation, and accountability. To me nothing else matters. The goal is to build a streamlined repeatable process that is optimized to add transparency and clarity, which informs how an individual can best allocate their resources or source the resources necessary to accomplish the goals, and lastly a process for holding people accountable for deadlines and results. See how many times "process" was listed there - you have to establish good ones, record everything, and optimize along the way. Note here, results will not always be positive, but a good post mortem and learning are sometimes more valuable. Be accountable for the outcome and the insights. Don't sugar coat or blame bad results, take accountability for failure and learn from it. This is so important and applies to literally all parts of your life. Ironically, in some of my conversations with newer clients, they are looking for me to provide advice on how I can make an immediate impact. Things don't work that way. During the first month, I'm just going to be asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of background research to understand what your business is currently doing, then I'm going to look for a few quick wins followed by building out a process to automate that part of the business to boost your bottom line. But like all good processes, it has to be followed. (more on this later) Top secret advice - some people do daily standups - I prefer weekly post mortems. Yeah I said weekly. Focus on what went wrong during the week and how you can improve for next week. We like to hop everyone up on morale of all the good and we tend not to talk about the bad, but the bad is where you learn the most. No one has all the right answers and absolutely no one should be ashamed for making a mistake. The best people are always learning. I'll provide the exact steps that I take with clients that you can do internally. Let's go through these steps one at a time. Step 1: Process How do you organize ideas, communications, and create one source of truth that allows people to easily follow along with repeatable processes? Here's my framework for going through this -
Let's dig in. What is the current process? You don't know where you're going unless you can clearly articulate how you do things today. If there is someone on your team that does something in a unique way that isn't written down. Time for immediate change. Don't know how your sales team is pitching the product? Don't know how marketing decides who to target and why? The list goes on. The quickest way to figure out if the process sucks is to look at a past meeting and the notes (if they exist) along with the agenda. This will tell you how disorganized a company is. Then go team by team and look at their meeting notes. You'll start to see some interesting things. I pick meetings, because everyone has them and rarely is there a template used or meeting notes that is able to stay organized. Someone could have an entire career critiquing meetings. This is also a great place to start - understand how people are spending their time when together and collaborating. Write down all the current processes that you have, there should be one for Sales, Marketing, Social Media, R&D, Product, Research, you name it there should be a process. Map them out as best you can so you understand how things flow, if you don't have an org chart attached to the process add one immediately, I've come to find out that not having a clear org chart leads to massive discrepancies in progress. We'll get to this more with accountability. What tools are involved? I don't really care what tools you use, as long as you're using them. And by you, I really mean your whole company or team. We're looking to prevent information silos. I usually just survey the different teams and it becomes really clear in a lot of companies that people are using too many tools and information is everywhere and usually not shared across teams. This is a huge red flag - siloed access on purpose is rampant as well. Your employees want to be informed because they want to buy into what is being created and built. They don't need to see everything, but they should have access to the basics so they feel invested. Automate everything. Keep all your sheets up to date, spend time to make sure that everything is automated. More on this under resource allocation. Personally when it comes to products to keep me organized, Trello, Google Docs, a good form program and I'm all set. I like standardizing information. There are a lot of great tools out there, pick ones that get the job done and that your team is comfortable using. The upfront time associated with nailing these things down saves days down the road. Take the productivity hit always to refine your processes. Real life experience - implementing a process that took a solid 4 days to create and lost about 48 hours of "working" time to get done, resulted in a team reduction of 4 hours per person per day within a week of rolling it out. With a small team of 4 that equated to 16 hours per day in optimization. The investment was paid back within 3 days total. This is why processes are so important. The results multiply over time. Is it clear for anyone to jump in and follow the information without needing help? Is information easy to find? Is it easy to understand? Legit, most people don't need to know everything, but they do need two versions, the summary version and the detailed version that gives them the ability to drill down into things if they need to learn or understand more about things. I'm a big fan of things that are organized and templated where possible around this. If you can link everything from a visual dashboard to more details you're winning. If every team has their own dashboards and not everyone has access, you've lost. This has happened to me multiple times working with companies. Different information, not shared and not aggregated. BAD. Anyone should be able to give you a status update from the dashboard that is live checking all the various stats and data. Along with trend reports over various periods of time correlated with any process changes. This last bit is a killer, far too often people change processes and don't actively track not only the changes but the results from making the changes. If you change processes, you need to timestamp that stuff. Side note: A lot of clients I work with cannot point to changes in process and directly see a change in performance, most of the time they have to dig through emails and contracts and data sheets to figure out when things happened and what the trends show. Don't be these people. Is there one source of truth? As mentioned in the last section a bit. This is all I'm looking for. One dashboard or document that someone can share with me that live updates to tell me exactly where your business is - costs, expenses, revenue, the revenue broken down against costs. Current product roadmaps and current partnership progress. All of these things are a disaster most of the time, almost always without any real process in place. CRMs, shared docs, trello boards, no idea about current status prioritization etc. Please sit down and make sure that there is one place where you can quickly link out to different products if necessary but that provides a good overview of what all these statuses are. Always have a process. Is the goal crystal clear throughout every step of the process? Goal statements. Do they exist? If something is part of a process, what is the goal behind that part of the process? Let's take a common thing that all companies have - meetings. All meeting invites should come with a detailed agenda and preferably a goal list from both sides. When I run an established meeting everything is broken down. Goal of the meeting Agenda Updates, blocked items Items that need action - decisions made Takeaway action items assigned with hard deadlines If you notice this is really just process, resource allocation, and accountability. Agenda is process, Updates and blocked items along with items that need action is resource allocation and action items assigned becomes accountability. A meeting without a goal statement isn't a meeting worth having. Reread that sentence out loud one more time. Now think of all the meetings you've gone to and sat in where there was no goal statement. Hours of your life have been lost. A meeting shouldn't be reading updates or from slides or a document. Does this process allow building on itself? What's next in the process. If people are happy with how a process is going, this isn't a process. A process should always be evolving and as stated above there should be an evolution of the process that results in more clarity, better understanding, better information sharing, and a better allocation of resources. There should be data on the length of meeting, the effectiveness of the meetings or the process being used and I would argue that in the early days there should be post mortems done on all processes every week. What worked well, what didn't, where are there gaps, what we're going to try next week. And repeat. To the last bit that relates for process - Is the entire process more than 6 months old? I'm all about if it's not broke don't fix it, but we're in business. Things are constantly changing and if you're not looking to change with them you're leaving money on the table. The processes that you're using today shouldn't look exactly the same 6 months from now. It should be better, more refined and it should be constantly being tracked against data points to show improvement. No exceptions. Step 2: Resource Allocation Here's my framework for going through this -
Where are the bulk of your resources allocated? This is always an interesting one. Most of the answers I get for SaaS are engineering and sales. Always light in product management, light in customer success, and very light in marketing in the beginning. I would be looking for product, engineering, and customer success. I think that we over hire in some areas because of poor process which leads to poor resource allocation. In the early days you're not selling, you're learning, you're aligning, you're partnering. Sales isn't sales anymore either, it's conversations to understand workflow and early partnerships to improve the lives of customers. When we change our approach to sales we focus more on relationship building and less on closing deals we set ourselves up for long term success. This doesn't mean you don't have a sales process, it just means that it should feel more like a conversation than a pitch. Which doesn't require someone in sales, often it's better that they don't have a sales background. A different topic for a different day. Value tends to sell itself. You're just telling the story. I like to see how all resources are allocated to better see if they match with the goal lists which we'll get to I promise. Ideally, you have an engineering team that is also the customer support team in the beginning, allocating the proper amount of time to building and helping to better empathize with the customer's experience. You're head of product is really just customer support along with everyone really. It all starts with understanding problems and having a good process for documenting them. What is the rationale for allocating the resources? This is the followup to the first question. We're trying to understand the why behind the decision making process. Oftentimes priorities are a mess in the beginning stages, as we've seen from part 1 and part 2 of these posts, it pays dividends to niche down and hyperfocus on delivering value to that small subset. The same goes for allocating your limited resources including your time. Know where it's going to me most impactful and constantly go through the goals of your actions to ensure that you're moving the needle in the right way as you allocate and decide where and how to allocate. Protip - you want your entire team to have customer contact in the beginning. As soon as people lose contact with the customer or refuse to connect with customers you're in trouble. Watch out for things like "that's not my job" everyone's job is support and sales. It's how your company pays you and can afford to continue doing so. How do your current processes impact your resource allocation? This is a key question, are there things you are doing that aren't the most impactful to your business? If there's a process that you can train someone or a machine to do for you, will it free up your time aka your resource and allow you to allocate that time towards doing something that is more impactful for the business at its current stage. This is sort of like delegation but delegation only works if there are established processes in place that are likely to lead to continued success. Do not delegate too early on. Tim Ferris would disagree, but it's imperative that you have a very good understanding of the role that you're delegating before you do it. What is the org chart for making allocation decisions? This one gets me every time. Everyone thinks early on that all decisions have to come from the CEO. A good boss would put in a structure to determine how to allow autonomy into situations. Remember the whole meeting thing about action items. Yeah so depending on the decision, internal teams should be able to make decisions without the input of the top brass. Decisions should be tiered and categorized (sounds like process right?) so that all the approvals start the same way and are routed to the appropriate people. So many times a clear org chart doesn't exist or it looks like a tree with just lots of roots. This isn't good. The irony is most of the time leaders hire people to get shit done. Conversation is great and consideration is swell, but at the end of the day, a lot of time can be wasted for things that didn't need approval. Give people under you a leash to execute and the freedom to not be micromanaged. It should look more like a family tree and less like blades of grass. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the flow of decision making. Without it we create data silos and people acting completely on their own. This commonly happens between sales and marketing and marketing and product. Where are their deficiencies in resourcing? What would you do with additional resources? Why? Self awareness, where do you need help? What would you do with that help? Oftentimes we get confused and think that we need to do things but we are rushing to make decisions rather than properly thinking through the impact. I've worked with a lot of founders that like shiny things and chase cats. I call this lack of an established framework or process of decision making. If there isn't a clear understanding through process, you can't actually answer any of these questions with any accuracy. This also forces you to sit down and organize, prioritize, and hypothesize the impact of what's to come. Step 3: Accountability We'll keep this short and sweet. Assign a lead actor to every goal, instill a hierarchy for who is responsible to assist with that goal and to what capacity and ensure that everything is tracked so that anyone at any time can see the progress towards that goal. Bonus points for being able to shift resources accordingly when you recognize you need some more help. All of this comes from the ability to prioritize correctly based on goals. OK that's it for Part 2.5 set up this framework or something similar to properly assess your decision making and good things will happen. You have something to lean on moving forward and probably use back with Parts 1 and 2. [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone have a good template for an acquisition counter offer? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:58 PM PDT We have received an initial offer to purchase our company, and are planning on sending a counter offer back (valuation and upfront cash changes) but I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the "proper" way to do it. I don't really want to redline their offer, that seems kinda douchy. Should I mirror their offer letter with our revised terms? Is there a "proper" format? Or should I just plop the response in an email and call it a day? Any help is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Do you hire a consultant or company to help with launching a new app? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:58 PM PDT Like the title says how do you launch a new app without any experience? Is the next step to spend money on advertising after launch? How do you know what the best advertising platforms are and for how long? Are there companies out there that you can hire to take care of all this? Thanks in advance Side note: If you have this skill set and you're interested in some sort of equity partnership then let me know. [link] [comments]  |
| social media and e commerce startup Posted: 09 Jun 2020 09:45 PM PDT my startup is started as a place where people can make appointments for a service. i added the social media aspect so that it would lead to people staying on the app/site longer. to explain it in a short way, its as if i took the aspect of uber that finds workers around you, the social and shopping aspect of instagram, and the reviews of yelp to make my app a one stop shop. any tips on team development, the best ways to find a co CEO, or business structure? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 04:34 AM PDT I am working on a web based project. I started with the idea of an mvp, but as time passed, the main idea kept changing (hopefully in a better way). I currently encounter the following issues:
What I think I'm doing wrong:
I would say the "mvp" is 40% completed. What suggestions do you have? What can I do now to improve? I feel like if I continue like this, I will eventually loose all my motivation and stop working on it. Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| ELI5: Put owner's cash into a Delaware C Corporation Posted: 09 Jun 2020 10:08 AM PDT My colleagues and I are doing a startup. We issued 10MM shares and paid par value of $0.0001 per share on them, so the bank account has a couple hundred bucks in it from us as founders. We know that we're going to have incidental expenses over the initial weeks and months of doing the startup and we may need to top up the $$ in the business bank account once that runs dry. To solve this, we're each ok to transfer $100/mo into the account when that starts becoming necessary. But I am having some trouble finding evidence of this practice online (maybe I'm just googling wrong?) At the $100/mo order of magnitude, we don't even care to do board actions / series FF / convertible notes and are ok just gifting the company our personal money to allow ourselves to proceed with our business. So could we just put that on our balance sheet at the end of the year as owner's equity and call it a day? Or do we _need_ to do something like debt / investment in order to properly fund the company. We're keeping in mind that we want to keep the company in good standing to be acquireable down the line. If a decision can be made now to make sure that these initial funding moves don't cause unwanted attention by VC's and acquirers, we'd like to make that, while still trying to keep a tight operating budget and not have to spend money on lawyer time to establish a Series FF. If there's a formal way that's almost as easy as just notating the contribution the balance on the sheet and forgetting about it, I'm open for those ideas as well! Thanks, everybody! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 08:41 PM PDT Hi! I'm trying to optimize my company website, and unfortunately, I have zero background in this field. Currently, my website is very slow (5.93 s of loading time according to pingdom). I also heard from several others that the website crashed with 404 errors. At the very least, I need the website to function..., and I also need the product store page. Some nice-to-haves are the contacts page, video demo screen to show how the products work, "our team" page, "our vision" page, etc. I'm evaluating a few options: - Wordpress with BlueHost as hosting site - Wordpress with SiteGround as hosting site - Using static site like SquareSpace and Wix + Shopify - Using "serverless" hosting such as getshifter.io + Shopify - Any additional recommendations I am an early-stage startup without a large budget. Can someone recommend the right approach to developing my website given my needs and wants above? Thank you so much. [link] [comments]  |
| Developer / Entrepreneurs, how did you launch? Or - I got a product to MVP... Now what? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 01:24 PM PDT Hey Fellow Developer Entrepreneurs, How did you pull together a launch / marketing plan? I'm awesome at the first two parts - creating the idea and implementing it to MVP level status, but garnering enough attention to convert into revenue has proven to be challenging. How did you get your software to start making you money instead of just existing and being pretty? [link] [comments]  |
| Best way to find a startup to join? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:46 PM PDT I am going to be a freshman in college start the fall season and i am interested in working as a software developer in a long term and I am trying to find a way of finding a start up to join and im struggling to find any places in which i can find start ups to join any help is appreciated. I write mainly in java and C++ i know a few more languages and willing to learn any i would need! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 09:21 AM PDT Hi all I wanted to get your opinion on the best way to generate a list. I am looking for a list of emails and names of Family Lawyers in New York as an example. What do people recommend? The time to do it manually is too time-consuming and the cost on the other hand seems on the high end and not as good quality. Purchased lists in the past and it was not to so great. [link] [comments]  |
| How does a liquidation preference work in a stock + cash acquisition? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 03:18 PM PDT In the event of a stock + cash acquisition, do VCs usually receive their full liquidiation preference from the cash first or do they receive a prorated amount of the stock as well? An example to explain further (if necessary): A startup CoolStartup Inc is acquired by a large private company for a total value of $50M. They are paid $25M in cash and shares worth $25M of acquirer's private stock. If CoolStartup had raised $25M from a VC with a 1x liquidation preference, how much cash and stock does the VC receive at sale? Assume the VC owned 20% of the company at sale. Do VCs usually have the right to receive all of their liquidiation preferences as cash or do they have to take a pro-rata of both stock and cash from the sale? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 11:28 AM PDT I'm looking for services where I can offload tactical work and research. We have used Fiverr and Upwork in-particular in the following ways, but I'm looking for more as we continue to scale.
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| What are videos on startup work environment and culture ? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 10:01 AM PDT I want videos of startups work environment and culture, I have never been in one all I know about it from what I read in Google that culture is set of values, beliefes and vision, I want to see that in a real world startup, so can you please suggest for me videos ? [link] [comments]  |
| Closed beta, then open beta? Or open beta right from the start? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 07:02 AM PDT Hi guys! I have an Android app built and waiting on launch but I'm debating between a closed beta or an open beta at beginning. My app requires multiple people for it to work, which is why I'm more inclined to do an open beta. However, I know that a closed beta gives a feeling of "exclusivity" to users (right?) and that would be able to have a tighter knit group of people to give me feedback. I do not think I know nearly enough people to properly test this app on a scale. If I did a closed beta I would essentially be giving a key to anybody who asked. Any feedback on which route to go is greatly appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| What is the best way to encourage folks to join my Facebook group? Posted: 09 Jun 2020 12:49 PM PDT Hello all. I'm in the process of getting a property business off the ground. I've just finished my website. Now I'm focusing on attracting traffic to it through means of SEO and content marketing, and I heard that creating and cultivating a Facebook group is a great way to create an audience I can promote my content to. My group members will ideally be the target market for my website, so I've been joining a few relevant Facebook groups to get into places where they hang out. Now I'm thinking about how I can promote my own group within these spaces. I know it's no good to spam - most groups prohibit self promotion so I'm trying not to get booted. Plus, my own group has practically no members so as you can imagine I don't have sufficient social proof to get people on board. It's kind of a catch 22 scenario. Then I decided I would encourage people to join by providing some genuine value. I'm putting together a "cheatsheet" with helpful tips and solutions for a common pain point my ideal customer would deal with. I'm going to promote it in other groups as a free, helpful resource, but make it exclusive to members of my group so you have to join first in order to access it. I'm fairly confident in this strategy, but I wonder if group moderators would see right through it as a blatant attempt at self promotion. So I'm wondering what I should do first, should I share some free value without asking for anything first, build rapport and trust, and then drop the exclusive content? Or should I just jump right in with the exclusive content and potentially get shot down by moderators? I know it's always best to build rapport by giving first, but there's a risk of wasting time giving away what could have been exclusive content, and ending up getting punished regardless if I try to promote my group down the line. On the other hand, if I jump in cold I could create a bad impression and get myself kicked from the group, reducing my reach. There are only a handful of established groups for my niche so I have to play my cards carefully to avoid burning bridges. Very conflicted on the matter. What do you think and what has your experience been? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jun 2020 12:20 PM PDT Hi, Im asked to be a Co-Founder for a software (already launched with first customers) After a few Phone Calls we will meet each other next week to see how we funtion together (lives 3,5 Hours away) He dont have any issues with giving me equity but he wantd to wait a little bit until i have proven myself a little bit (what i fully understand) but whazs the best and securest way for us both? I dont want to spend so all my freetime in this startup ans than as soon as it gers big he maybe kicks me out or i dont know... He already said he wants to do it with equity over a fixe time span Maybe lime after 2 Months 15% after 4 minths 30% and after 6 Months 50% Is this the most common way? Thank you for your advise [link] [comments]  |
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