Startups Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week |
- Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week
- How do you get over the stress and anxiety that this path can cause?
- be wary if granting preferred stock to investors
- Has anyone looked as to why mobile internet is more expensive than land internet?
- How do you recover from a bad business call/meeting?
- A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 3
- We've found paying customers months before any possible MVP; where to next?
- [Opinion] I have NO money, a few hundred € invested in P2P Lending with HIGH annual return and a crazy idea about a web dev startup. What would you do if you where me?
- How do I colaborate with a popular Youtuber with no marketing budget?
- What barriers have you faced when starting or scaling your business ?
- Can a person with Non-Tech Background and little Experience get accepted in accelerators ?
- Passive Investors
- LLC or Delaware Corporation
- where do I find developers to pitch them my startup?
- Should start up costs be split 50/50 between partners even if the equity split is different?
- Getting an app made
- Seeking Advice in Dealing with Customer Who Break Policy and Threaten to Call Credit Card Company
- The Big Idea
- [UK - Social Tech App]
- Being officially a Co-Founder...
- What should the company founding date be?
- Any websites that write honest reviews for the value of the review article itself (e.g. without affiliate commissions)?
- How do you find SaaS related active blogs that accept Guest Posts?
- Need a tool to track link clicks that will be sent through slack and sms
- For each client I give you up to 20% of the project. Is this a win win situation?
- Which tools do you use to keep track of your leads and sales without too much manual process?
| Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week Posted: 24 Jun 2020 06:06 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Social Club thread.Share what events and meetups you are going to so we can discover new ways to be social together offline and help grow your local community. Focus on sharing events that are happening within the next 7 days of this date of this submission. Anything that falls outside of 10 days will be removed, no exceptions. No duplicate posts. If you happen to be attending an event that is already posted, leave a comment to inform the community that you will also be there. If you are hoping to organize something on your own, outside of an existing event, feel free to use this thread to rally some people together to meet up. Please use the following format to share an event: Event Name and URL: Location: Event Date: Event Time: Event Description: Event Cost: Discount Code: [if applicable] Please use the following format to organize people to meet up together: Location: Purpose of getting together: Suggested Places to meet up: You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you get over the stress and anxiety that this path can cause? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 07:54 PM PDT I'm generally a very positive, easygoing person, but as the launch date for my startup nears I just feel like I'm turning into a monster. I'm either working, thinking about working, worrying, or snapping at my boyfriend. I bounce between loving my startup and feeling so confident about its future, to being ready to just pull the plug and go get an office job. Ugh! I try to think about the positive things. Such as I'm only 22, I KNOW there's a great market for our idea, I have great family support, and even if we fail we will be under 10k in debt. But still it's just so crushing sometimes! I'm scared that my startup will fail, but I'm more scared that we will fail and then somebody else will succeed with the same idea. Sorry, I just needed a minute to rant. I love this work, I love being an entrepreneur and I feel strongly that I'm doing a lot of things right. But damn, this sucks sometimes right? [link] [comments]  |
| be wary if granting preferred stock to investors Posted: 24 Jun 2020 07:28 PM PDT hi. A client told me that a small preferred investor wants to invest $XX into the startup. In addition, the investor runs an accelerator type of operation and in exchange for services, the investor is requiring X% of the company on a fully diluted basis, to be given as a grant of the same preferred stock to be acquired. I am not a fan of grants for some obvious reasons. The most obvious is that you, as the startup, don't get cash in the door. The second is that in most cases the "services" you get aren't really worth the price you pay in terms of giving up equity. There is one additional concern if you ever run into this situation. As you may know, preferred stock has a liquidation preference, so a grant of preferred just means free liquidation preference to the investor, which means they get first money before founders get paid. With a grant of stock, that just further exacerbates the situation. If the startup goes IPO in a billion dollar deal, maybe it doesn't matter. But most startups that exit (which is rare in and of itself) do so in "edge" cases -- for amounts that might barely get the founders some cash. In these cases, that extra grant of preferred just took away some of your cash. I just thought I'd mention it in case someone offered you this deal. [link] [comments]  |
| Has anyone looked as to why mobile internet is more expensive than land internet? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 07:18 PM PDT Now that the world is going WFH, the only thing keeping me from spending most of my time grinding + tanning outdoors is the fact that mobile internet is so damn expensive (i'm in Canada). We are now at a point where satellite bandwidth should not be 10X more expensive than running fibre, maybe it's slower but I don't care. This sounds to me like ISP are up-charging the convenience of mobile. Has anyone looked into the economics? Maybe the process of what it takes to sign up as a mobile ISP? Cheers. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you recover from a bad business call/meeting? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 03:02 AM PDT I'm a 30 y/o CEO and recently got introduced to a large potential partner from one of our investors. During our call, there were many times where I felt like I just couldn't quite keep up and didn't handle the call as well as I should've. I keep thinking to myself things like "I should've said this" or "I shouldn't have said this" and it seemed my nerves were getting to me. Anyone else have calls or meetings like this? How do you recover from these meetings when you feel like you've let others down? [link] [comments]  |
| A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 3 Posted: 24 Jun 2020 09:59 AM PDT I was shooting for every week, but that proved harder than anticipated, I'll try to wrap this up in the next few weeks though. This is part 3 of 5.
2.5 - Process, process, process - Start one, refine it, continually improve it - Part 2.5
Work on road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships (cheapest distribution) What exactly does this mean? All platforms that you integrate with usually do one or two things really really well, then there are features they have to have in order to connect the dots, arguably though, these features don't get a lot of love and well, they are MVPs in the traditional sense. This is what we're looking for. This is the sweet spot. Side notes: This was actually just exposed with the latest Microsoft 365 update which is taking the Notion approach to collaboration - I wouldn't be too surprised to see Google do something similar to this in the very near future. Zoom built an entire business on this, video conferencing wasn't new but the ease of getting started without an account or software to download combined with free time allowances made them a massive success. They also integrated very quickly with partner tools like slack. This usually comes in a few flavors - something that checks a box and something that just wasn't thought out workflow wise. Slack did this to both google and microsoft quite successfully. If at any time microsoft or google wanted to compete they could have during the last 7 years it's been a known entity, in fact it took a solid 5 before microsoft even hinted at teams. Slack gets to play nice with everyone while microsoft and google have the tough time of wanting to keep everyone in their ecosystem. It's a tough call for them to allow outside access. Because these companies don't focus on these things as much as other parts of their platforms, room for improvements will start to crop up quickly. Remember that list of customers using competitors, it's time to talk to some of them. You can only accomplish the above if you have an established approach for your internal workings - aka alignment across the organization. The road map process will differ based on your individual products, so instead of the products we're going to focus on a repeatable framework that you can adapt. Understanding how your product fits into a workflow. Partners aren't just tech partners, partners are often your first few clients. Pay attention to their workflows and how you can add value and become integral to their success. Product development - the internal fight between engineers, product managers, sales, executives, and everyone else. Oh and customers, they'll always tell you how you can make things better - it would be a modern day miracle if we listened to them more often. Product, like marketing, is something everyone has an opinion about. We're going to go over how you should position your product in the market. Specifically how your solution impacts the workflow of your potential customers. When we change our approach from what features our product has and move the conversation to how our product improves, adds data, or simplifies a clients workflow success follows. True innovation comes from understanding that all companies are looking for more data, recommendations, and automation. Hint: all these lead to reduced resources and increased revenue. You want to know how bad this really is? Just look at common things we deal with, phone trees, spam emails, even how people organize their inbox or don't. Inefficiency is really all around you, when you put a magnifying glass up to it. Sidenote here - if you ever find yourself looking for a problem or trying to better understand a workflow, write down every step you take for an entire day while working with a program. You'd be amazed by all the little things that you do and the massive room for improvement. What is a product? Let's take a step back and look at the different kind of products that exist generally -
We'll take these one at a time with this framework - What are they? Why do they exist? Is it right for me? What is the workflow play? Add On What is an add on? An add on, plugin, app, etc they go by many names is essentially a piece of software built on top of another piece of software. It relies on the backbone of another service to deliver value. Usually using the platform's API or existing architecture. The program or software exists within the ecosystem of another product. Why do they exist? The companies that allow add-ons are "Platforms" they have a core that they maintain and spend time developing communities to build on their flexible architecture. If we were doing a timeline of how most companies grow it usually goes: Addon / Stand Alone → Platform → Suite We see this more and more as the sheer quantity of software options has increased. Is it right for me? I'd say in 2020 it should play a large role in your initial launch and outreach. There are millions of people using existing platforms to create lots of things, for B2B it's really easy to build targeted lists of clients of those that are using these platforms. Small purpose built apps that solve for very real problems are all around us and a lot of the small ones serve very specific purposes with built in use cases. They require people to be niche by default. Remember the zoom example from above - remove friction and you can win market share. Literally, everyone has an add on these days. Usually a small part of their larger product. They also make for a great marketing play as well, they are relatively simple to build, especially in the case of something like a chrome extension and allow a company to rapidly test new features and release them in small parts to existing customers to gauge interest. What is the workflow play? For most B2B software outside of software that is used to run the business daily, getting users to continually find value in it can be difficult. For a lot of it, it's set it and forget it. Add-ons allow you to better incorporate your product into the customer's workflow. If you're looking to improve a workflow for an existing internal process, at the very least an add on is a great way to embed your product where your customers are spending time. Big takeaway: When you build on top of an existing platform, you get clout, you can align yourself with that platform to plan development around features that benefit the users of that platform. It's much easier to say I build [something specific] for people that use [plugin or CMS framework] built on top of [platform]. To be less abstract… I build background effects packages for people using Elementor built on top of Wordpress. Broken down - We're now looking for people using Elementor on wordpress that are looking for background effects to add a little extra to their website. It's all about narrowing down who your champion partners will be - those that find the most value in these things. We're always looking for our advantage and positioning ourselves to grow - we do this by targeting areas that need a little more attention or things that are currently cumbersome but need a little more love. Stand Alone What is a stand alone product? A stand alone product is one that provides a singular function with limited integrations that allows users to create and manage a workflow or a process from within the application. Something like a Help Desk is a good example of a stand alone product. These are purpose built products that don't require any other integrations to provide value. Why do they exist? This is what most people think of when they say they are building a SaaS company. They are building something that solves a specific problem for other companies. Most companies fall under this category, nearly all start in this category. Most companies also stop at this point, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Build something solid and purpose built that provides value, then expand via add ons to cater to different existing platforms and you've got a solid business model. Is it right for me? It should be, it's pretty much required most of the time. Your app should be able to function on it's own to provide value. Does it have to be, no. There are plenty of businesses that stay just as add ons built on top of large platforms like Salesforce. This is a call you're going to have to make for yourself, however these are definitely the predominant leaders. What is the workflow play? How does your app work with an existing business workflow? This is really the question. If you're a stand alone app, do you work for everyone in a business? A team? Most of the time, a product focuses on an internal team that requires them as part of their workflow. There are different entry points within a team as well. Are you targeting executives? Directors? Managers? Lower level staff? How your product works with each of those levels will be different because the expectations and needs of customers at these levels are all different. Remember, you're not selling into a company, you're selling into a role at the company. When we start thinking about partners as some of your first few clients, really what we're looking for is a group of true believers that see promise in what we're creating. This promise has to work towards providing them more data (less guessing), make decision making easier (more clarity), and lead towards automation (no one likes doing the same things over and over). Big takeaway - When you're a stand alone product you have to nail workflow. The UX/UI has to be intuitive, easy to pickup and easier to get a team behind. It just has to work. Not only that it should have a feature that is 10x better than the competition. If you don't have a 10x feature, it's time to take a closer look at the workflow because it's obviously you're missing something. Remember to start with data collection, move to recommendations based on the data collection, and finish with automating a task over time based on the workflow. Platform What is a platform product? A product that allows people to build on top of it, Shopify, Wordpress, Slack, Salesforce (not the other parts of the suite) these are all examples of a platform product. They started as stand alone products but then opened up their ecosystem to allow people to build on top of them. If you have a passionate tech forward audience and customer base this is a great position to head towards, typically this moves you from being SaaS to almost a PaaS play where you charge for the ability for people to build on top of you. These guys are also heavy weights, getting a company to move away from one of them is next to impossible. There's just a lot of friction that goes into it. I've watched this from the front lines numerous times, in most cases, the effort needed to move from one platform to another isn't worth it in the short term. It adds complexity to an existing workflow and is immediately met with pushback the farther down the process it goes. Why do they exist? They exist to enable people to have a platform to build on top of - they also exist to give new companies a really focused way to find their target market. The platform is the stepping stone towards a larger land grab towards a full suite of products. You can start to see this happening with some of the larger players as their market share for a specific focus moves them to expand into a full suite of products. Hubspot, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc. they have all moved towards the suite play. But they all graduated from stand alone to platform to suite - it's incredibly rare to see someone go after a platform or suite play from the start. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Slack going platform very soon after starting to roll out. Is it right for me? Depends. Platforms for two sided marketplaces seem to be the only reason that you would want to be a platform or if you built a new product from scratch. It's ambitious, but let's face it, there are tons of opportunities that still remain in this sector. I think we're just starting the process of enabling marketplaces through technology, I'd love one marketplace to search them all. Want a good example - second hand marketplaces - no two descriptions are the same. Which makes things a nightmare to search - I'm looking at you ebay. If I was looking for something used, I might even pay a one time fee to know the trending price, the frequency of the items posted with the preferred specs I'm looking for etc. The used market is ripe for disruption. Imagine you were looking for a certain color combination for a used vehicle and you wanted to search across all marketplaces to find the color combo and also get data on how often one of those comes up for purchase - I think you can see where data aggregation, recommendations, and an automated process would make things easier. Sidenote on this example - some credit unions will actually pay someone to search for your car - there's a built in marketplace for this HUMAN driven activity already. What is the workflow play? To the workflow - look at complicated steps that involve multiple pieces of software where no one is doing an amazing job and you might be onto something. There was a move back in the day to get everything in one place, then APIs happened and now you can connect just about all the tools together. There are companies that specifically focus on niche workflows though, they take longer to get started and don't always go the platform route - you need a lot of users to make this viable - but they do exist. So back to this workflow - look at the number of tools, their age, their representative structure - back to the car example go try doing a search for a used car on Hertz.com - actually do a search on any car site - it sucks. Imagine combining more natural language search like Algolia to that experience - I'm betting someone could build a better data heavy engine to tackle that beast. With anything though - clean data in makes it easier to create searches, but making sure that data is clean is tough. So the workflow is built around two sides for a platform - how the customer - in this case the business can use the software to provide better service to the end customer. What is the internal workflow most often done that requires the most amount of human effort? Focus on simplifying that - does your software streamline this - if yes you're on the way to becoming a platform that others would be willing to build upon all you have to do is keep the architecture up to date to handle the increased load. Big Takeaway - You won't start this way, or you might not start this way, but if you do, the workflow and ease of creation is going to be the one thing that wins out, focus entirely on UX/UI and create something that is quicker, easier, better than what other people have and you'll find success. Platforms however are great places to look for partners. They are usually always open to partners that help expand or can introduce people to their offerings. Suite What is a suite product? The granddaddy of all software plays where you build/acquire/grow individual parts of a business to integrate natively and own the entire experience in your own controlled walled garden. G Suite, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. These guys buy smaller platforms and stand alone products and integrate them. Or they just build their own. Why do they exist? With single products like standalone and platforms eventually you run out of rapid market expansion, the quickest way to increase revenue is to sell additional products to your existing customers. It's also a lot cheaper. Cross selling and upselling are the leading drivers of increased revenue once you have product market fit. Add on services like advanced reporting, automation, or additional features can often unlock better functionality of existing products. A suite makes it easy to cross sell and upsell, it goes beyond MVPs in certain areas and actually builds tools that are full fledged and integrate seamlessly and more deeply than someone building an integration from outside the system. Is it right for me? Never say never, but not likely. It's aspirational but financially often doesn't make a lot of sense. In the startup world of today, where growth is at a premium, I would never suggest any of my clients have this as an immediate goal. You need a bank account that is deeper than deep and you're competing against incumbents that have warchests to outspend you at every turn. The only company I can think of that has dented some of this is NextCloud. But their path to doing it was going open source and playing hard on the privacy angle pitting themselves as a google docs alternative. What is the workflow play? A place where you can do everything in one space. This is actually the holy grail, but it's also the reason I'm writing this right now in a google doc before cutting and pasting it over to reddit. Even though there are lots of options with new ones coming out daily, once you're in an ecosystem, going outside of it usually leads to reduced efficiency. When tools are built to work together, a magical thing happens, you don't want to try other things. Don't get me wrong, there are tools for literally everything out there. But as a go to list of tools that I use everyday - Google docs Gmail Trello Slack Most everything else is use to setup then just monitor - which is fine for normal business things, but when you strip back and look at your core of active software that you use daily there's a 99% chance that it falls into an ecosystem and you'd likely move to a system if they offered a competitor - Microsoft Teams comes to mind. Slack is great, don't get me wrong, but I already pay for storage for my Google Account and it's really really cheap on a business plan to upgrade to unlimited storage - I'm also willing to bet Google could do a better job of searching through a Slack like interface to also suggest items from other places. It's not an if, it's a when. Take Away Suites sometimes are just a combination of tools that people offer, usually parts of a platform that are built on one another - when you're going after market share you always want to think of a core product then build things that compliment it. The answer is not to build them all upfront, but to build them over time. Remember again - data, recommendations, then automation. If you have a roadmap make sure that it's headed in this direction - it's amazing how many companies don't emphasize data collection and reporting early on. This is how you build trust with an audience - show them what's working and what's not and make it easy to grab insights. What does all this mean for our topic? Today, right now in 2020, I'd focus initially on an add-on or standalone product play. Pick a strong partner or integration in the space - find a way to compliment what they offer that will help them earn more clients or make more money. If your product can do that, a larger company will jump at the opportunity to help you out. Trust, I know this from partnering with the big ones in consumer - Amazon, Google, Apple etc. if your product plays into or assists in their narrative there is almost always a co-marketing deal to be struck. The only caveat is you have to ensure that there is no direct conflict with the main partner. If something isn't part of their core business you'll be ok for a while. In B2B this becomes even easier - everyone is looking for growth - know how the companies measure growth - hint for certain sectors it's adding data either quantity or amount. They get paid more the more they manage or the more records. If you can help their platforms grow you'll win. Your product should make your partners look great. Figure out things that can add more value or unlock more data within your partners. Most all of them allow for you to sync and move data in, use this to your advantage. [link] [comments]  |
| We've found paying customers months before any possible MVP; where to next? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 10:39 PM PDT I'm the head founder of a deeptech B2B hardware startup. I come from a mixed business/technical background, and currently lead a team of three non-technical and technical co-founders on a full-time basis. Our market feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive and we already have a pilot program set in stone for next year with around a dozen paid users and several dozen more customers sending in letters of intent. We're also securing partnerships with massive corporations who've been interested in a product like ours for some time. However, we've run into some big problems.
Right now, we've been actively meeting with angels for the past 2-3 weeks. Many angels in our area (Midwest) simply aren't interested in hardware or are dumb money, but thanks to luck and cold emails I've built my own network with angels & VCs in Silicon Valley/NYC who've been far more receptive to us We're also applying to accelerators like Alchemist and Techstars as well, but I'm curious to see if there's other options for us - most of the advice I've seen so far is based either on having a MVP and no customers, or for a B2C model that's easier to bootstrap. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2020 01:38 AM PDT It's probably gonna take me months to save those a few hundreds i need to start the business. But one the other hand i got already enough in my P2P lending portfolio and I'm seriously thinking of withdrawing them to start. I've been waiting a loong time to complete my studies and start working with web development and i just can't hold it now. What would you do if you where me? Would you withdraw money from your nicely managed portfolio to start your business OR wait and wait until you find the money from another source (by slowly slowly saving for ex.) ?? I'd appreciate any advice. Have a nice day friends! [link] [comments]  |
| How do I colaborate with a popular Youtuber with no marketing budget? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 11:47 PM PDT I have a product platform with a huge potential of growing. We have almost 80% retention rate and the graph has only gone up since its launch a few days ago. The daily active users are also growing at a very good rate. The only problem right now is, I need a huge marketing push by a Youtuber or influencer and I am ready to share a profit % for some duration with that person. How do I reach out to one? I have tried cold mailing but no replies yet. [link] [comments]  |
| What barriers have you faced when starting or scaling your business ? Posted: 25 Jun 2020 03:17 AM PDT Are there specific services you wish you had revieved to make things easier? Maybe services you never knew you needed ? And if you did find the services you needed, was pricing the issue or the quality of work being provided in relation to pricing ? HR, marketing, graphic design etc ? What were the major barriers you had faced from highest importance to least? Last and but not least, if a survey was posted in this subreddit, would you actually answer the survey or ignore it? [link] [comments]  |
| Can a person with Non-Tech Background and little Experience get accepted in accelerators ? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 11:18 AM PDT I dont have a team. i am paying a company to develop my product. I wrote down the features & worked on market research , competitor analysis , product requirements overview , business plan and etc with a development company. Response so far has been enthusiastic and exciting from other because the idea itself is unique and has got a clear market opportunity. I am building the mvp but i dont have enough funds to cover the operation costs which are now rising from server side , sdk & managing the app. What should i do ? shall i get the prototype of the app first and then submit it in some accelerators to get investments ? Tbh i would love to be mentored and educated by the mentors as well. Shall i try with small accelerators ? My product doesnt needs a major investment but marketing & building it will sure cost above 50kusd. I am based in Abu Dhabi (Stuck in the pandemic) Please Help [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2020 01:16 AM PDT Is there a norm when it comes to investor/vc participation? We met a vc, they call themselves an 'incubator' type of vc where you are 'absorbed' into their organization using their talents (admin, devs, etc.) and resources (also paying for these talents). I raised a few questions about IP, customer data, etc., and they insist that this is their 'style'. What do you think? Am I just not ready to let go of my project or is this common? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2020 12:30 PM PDT So I've been working on this project for a few months now, and the time to get incorporated has come, my doubt is should I incorporate a Delaware Corp or an LLC, I understand that an LLC is easier to incorporate and better for small startups, but I'm very ambitious about this project and I believe some day we will go public, that's why I'm debating over a c Corp in Delaware or an LLC. C corps make it easier to get funding and external investment. What do you guys think ? PS: the state is California btw [link] [comments]  |
| where do I find developers to pitch them my startup? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 03:25 PM PDT I'm a developer myself, and I feel like developers are the scariest group of people to show off any tech idea. probably because they understand the technicalities so they are more real with you, so I guess the feedback is super useful. I'm making an app for developers and developer teams, and I'm wondering who i should target within the field - developers, or managers? Mostly for idea validation stage, though my MVP is mostly built ( built for fun as well) where do I find people? [link] [comments]  |
| Should start up costs be split 50/50 between partners even if the equity split is different? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 01:40 PM PDT My partner and I have an equity split of 66/33 but he is asking me to cover 50% of start up costs. Is this normally how this works or should start up costs be split in accordance to equity ownership? Pretty straight forward question but I will add on to this to hit my 250 character minimum per the rules. If there are an additional resources out there that I can reference I would greatly appreciate it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2020 01:41 AM PDT I have a business idea and I would like to run this idea through an app. I understand code etc but I have no intention of making the app myself. I would like to pay someone to get the app made and start the business up myself. Has anyone gone through this in the UK? Is there any advice available? Thanks in advance! Advice from other experienced people would also be most welcomed. EDIT:- Also What is the job title hierarchy in a startup like this? I will be getting back to everyones reply soon. A massive thank you to you all! [link] [comments]  |
| Seeking Advice in Dealing with Customer Who Break Policy and Threaten to Call Credit Card Company Posted: 24 Jun 2020 12:37 PM PDT Hello everyone! I hope I have the format right here; I haven't looked over this subreddit much, so I am hoping this is the right place to post this. I am seeking advice on how to deal with customers who do one, or both, of two things: overtly break our store policies, and threaten to call their credit card company. A bit of background; I run a relatively-small, but successful, startup. We curate and sell antique and vintage accessories. We conduct our sales through our website, where we have publicly-visible policies. We also offer payment plans through Partially; this allows the customer to pay off the item over time; we ship the item to the client once the balance is paid off. This works well for us, and our clients are happy to have this service available to them. Now, we have a semi-regular customer (let's call him Frank). He is interested in buying a rather high-value item we just offered for sale, and already has a high value item on a payment plan with us. This isn't a problem, as we allow customers to have multiple items on payment plans at once, as long as they can pay them regularly. Now, Frank told us, "Hey, so I want to buy this new expensive item, but I don't have the liquid cash to pay the down payment, so I would like to cancel my old payment plan, get that money back, and put it toward this new item." Now, this isn't good. Our policies state that because of the long-term nature of payment plans, we charge a 10-15% restocking fee for cancellations, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, we run the risk of having fickle customers buy stuff, and then, when they need a quick cash inflow, they just cancel their order, and get their money back. We explained to Frank that while we could technically do this for him, we really discouraged customers switching payments like this (this is also in our policies, that while we don't PREVENT this, we try and discourage it, as poor form). A customer who does this regularly wouldn't make him break any policies, but it would make him such a frustrating, unreliable customer, that we would want to exercise our right to refuse service. While customers like this are rare, they do exist, and they essentially run around threatening to call their credit card companies, if they don't get their way, no matter our store policies. Frank is failing on both an objective business-conduct level, and on a subjective, client-seller-trust level (he's purchased a few items from us before, so he's not a random stranger). What is some advice, regarding dealing with customers like these? I have the freedom to make executive decisions in this company, so I want to make sure that we operate in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction, while still maintaining our integrity, and not setting a precedent for customers just stepping on us, and bullying us into getting their way. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2020 12:35 PM PDT Hi, i'm very interested in taking on the challenge of a start up but I am missing the idea that sets me off on my journey of research and ultimately the beginnings of a business. I was wondering how others went about coming up with their ideas and if you had any advice for a capable physicist who can code. Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2020 04:20 PM PDT Hey Startup world! Here is my story... My partner and I have been developing an app to help prevent harassment out in the public... we've presented our idea/concept/wireframe to about 100 people and got really positive feedback and most importantly - constructive criticism! Currently - we're working through the technical kinks and developing our MVP so that we can test on mobile devices. I'm relatively new to the business world (27M) and would love to get some advice from people with some business battle scars aha.
Thanks for reading this far - I like to try and put my heart into it! I hope to hear from ya'll! [link] [comments]  |
| Being officially a Co-Founder... Posted: 24 Jun 2020 07:15 AM PDT So... in now in an Startup and everything going pretty well for now. But there is one issue. The Startup opened up with 2 Founders after this Corona Crisis one Founder left and the other Founder was alone. So im here and he wants me to be the Co-Founder. It is in my interest to have some shares/holdings but the other Founder (who is officially out of the startup at the end of the year) Thats just a FYI. Now the Founder asked me how we wanna do it. Because hes a software engeneer and he dont really know anything about this stuff. Is a Vesting Contract the best thing for both of us? Ita not that important for me to have from the beginning holdings of the startup i just want to be the OFFICIAL Co-Founder. Thank you for helping me out! [link] [comments]  |
| What should the company founding date be? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 03:35 PM PDT I own a company where we started working on a new product/business back in 2017. We got some early traction, but found that we were going to need to invest significantly more resources into the product to get it done.... so we temporarily shelved it. Fast forward to 2020, and we're weeks away from launch and are ready to make some noise on social media, put it on our LinkedIn accounts etc. What we're not sure of is when to say the product/new company was founded. Technically it was in beta in 2017. Do we say the company was founded in 2017? Or do we say the company began when we launch in a few weeks? Would greatly love feedback!! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2020 03:35 PM PDT For startups, getting their product compared to established alternatives in large and trusted consumer oriented magazines / websites in the industry can give a massive boost. However, I'm having a hard time locating such. It seems most "reviews" are really recommendations written to compel users to buy products via affiliate links. Some look more serious than others, but the aim of getting that commission seems to always be there. Startups can have great products, but are often not established enough to be allowed into the "reviewable" category. Their brands are often practically unknown, they may not have a marketing department that can help them get reviewed etc. They may never be able to get in front of a large audience. I hope I'm just misinformed. Where do you guys submit your products for reviews? [link] [comments]  |
| How do you find SaaS related active blogs that accept Guest Posts? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 03:22 PM PDT We are building a SaaS product as a team of 2. My co-founder is busy with product development and meanwhile, I am trying to generate more content and getting the word out. I am sharing content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and forums like IndieHacker. Now I wanted to explore the route of Guest Posts but I am facing difficulties in finding blogs that are still active and accept guest posts. How do you find quality blogs with a good amount of traffic which accepts Guest Posts? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Need a tool to track link clicks that will be sent through slack and sms Posted: 24 Jun 2020 08:54 AM PDT Hi guys we are going to send out some messages through slack communities and SMS. They will include a link to our app store page. Are there any tools that allow you to track the numbers of clicks? Obviously we use GA for the website but since we are going to be sending them just to our app store page we were wondering how to track that Thanks a lot [link] [comments]  |
| For each client I give you up to 20% of the project. Is this a win win situation? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 05:55 AM PDT I have a startup that builds different types of websites, and I am the developer. I am looking for a partner who can help me with the marketing mostly and I want to propose that deal? Is this a good strategy, a good win win situation? Is anyone using this strategy? [link] [comments]  |
| Which tools do you use to keep track of your leads and sales without too much manual process? Posted: 24 Jun 2020 10:28 AM PDT I'm starting my process to collect feedback and make cold email/calls to potential clients/partners and I wonder what tools do you use to keep track of all the contacts and status for each potential lead. I'm thinking of using Google Sheet, but I'm stuck with the idea that I would have to use the Sheet, create emails, then review replies and then go back and update my Google Sheet. Is there anything that can decrease that amount of back and forth? Or that's Sales People life? [link] [comments]  |
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