Startups Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital |
- Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital
- 10 most underrated pieces of advice for Startup founders
- Should I register my app as a company?
- How to tackle the “dead zone” Peter Thiel was talking about in Chapter 11 of this book?
- Getting First Customers
- Question regarding copyright
- Getting acquired while in college. Dropout?
- Is he gonna be a good co-founder?
- How does the sales pay structure look like in your startup?
- How can I create a login-in on my application so that subscribers of networks like ESPN and Fox can stream their content through my application?
- How much churn is normal for a bootstrapped SaaS product in the first 6-12 months?
- Looking for help with my start-up.
- Has anyone able to register a startup in Switzerland as an outsider?
- Newbie in need of guidance.
- Comp levels of 1st, 2nd,... so forth employees.
- Reliable source / website for freelance writers?
- Marketing and promotion with 0$/small budget for free apps.
- Resources on fundraising for non-exponential-growth startups?
- Do generic Terms of Service templates exist for SaaS software?
- Nonprofit or for-profit? Healthtech startup - Not any bleeding edge technology, but potentially high margin?
| Posted: 30 Jul 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. [link] [comments]  |
| 10 most underrated pieces of advice for Startup founders Posted: 30 Jul 2020 11:57 AM PDT 1. Consistency is key. Being consistent with how you show up every day and move the needle is half the battle. Whether you are marketing your business or you are iterating on your product/service offering, keep showing up each day and push to improve 1% from the day before. It all adds up and compounds over time. 2. When things feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill all the time, I think it's fair to assume something fundamental needs to be changed. 3. If you want a chat feature on your product. Don't build it. Just pay for a service that lets you add that feature to your product. This is especially good advice when you are still trying to get product-market fit. 4. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. 5. Just launch. So simple, so true. And relaunch often by reiterating base on customer feedback. 6. Delegate. When businesses grow and mature, you can't handle everything, and more importantly: you can't do it as well as an expert. Then think of all the tasks you really don't like doing or aren't the best at, and start hiring to meet those needs. 7. Learn to enjoy the process, not the outcome. 8. Delayed gratification vs instant gratification. It is quite easy to do things for there's an instant reward/impact, but to do anything worthwhile, it will require focus and belief in delayed gratification (ex. icecream vs exercise). And things compounds - both bad and good.
10. Do the right thing always when you have to choose between right & easy. [link] [comments]  |
| Should I register my app as a company? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 07:35 PM PDT I have been developing an app. It is meant for small businesses needs. I can't go into too much detail but I wanted to know if that would constitute a start-up or a monetary side project? At what point does it become s startup? I have a lot of plans to expand the project and add features for future releases but are there any legal definitions I should clear up? [link] [comments]  |
| How to tackle the “dead zone” Peter Thiel was talking about in Chapter 11 of this book? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 02:12 AM PDT In Zero To One Peter Thiel said: "There's a dead zone between the expensive products that call for personal sales strategies and inexpensive products that can do fine with traditional advertising. A product selling for, say, $1,000 isn't really worth the expense of paying sales staff. The ideal customer for the product is probably the small business owner; mass marketing is a very inefficient way to reach this market." I am in that situation. This particular type of deal falls into an unfortunate bracket, where the size of the deal doesn't justify sending a salesperson to close it. On the other hand, because my target audience is a small businesses rather than an individual, conventional forms of advertisement is hard to exploit. E.g: My potential SME clients are spread over many industries. There is no radio show which is listened by majority of these SME owners. The target audience is small, about 5000 persons per year, too small for Ads on Google or Facebook. I can't do email marketing without having the email address in the first place and I could just guess the email, but then I shell out spam. Thiel doesn't offer advice on how to escape the dead zone, so I need to get creative with my distribution channel. I would love any advice you may have for alternatives. Thank you for your insights and ideas! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 10:06 AM PDT Hi everyone, i'm here for some advice... I launched my startup almost 2 weeks ago locally and have been doing the marketing solo ever since. I've done anything you can think of.. Social media ads, promoting social media communities, google ads, postcards, visiting leasing offices and leaving flyers ( since my startup revolves around residential cleaning), and more. My social media ads have been getting lots of engagements and over 100 link clicks to our download app page, but no one has went through with downloading and signing up.. is there anything else i should try? Would love to hear what you guys have to say. I am aware that during these times, people are hesitant to have their residences cleaned by strangers so i do take that into consideration. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 08:15 PM PDT I have done some research regarding copyright/intellectual property but I am having a hard time finding an answer. I was hoping to get some insight from someone knowledgeable in this field. I have some ideas for t-shirts that I would like to sell, but I would like to use quotes from certain podcasts. Could there be legal issues if I were to sell t-shirts with quotes from a podcast? Now none of these quotes are catchphrases, or specific to these people. They are jut small sentences that I think are funny. How would anyone be able to say that I stole this sentence, and didn't think of it myself. Thanks for your help! [link] [comments]  |
| Getting acquired while in college. Dropout? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 03:21 PM PDT I've been developing some educational software for the past year and a half, and it's been in beta for the past 3 months, just barely cash flow positive at this time. I was planning to do a full launch this September, and realistically aimed to earn around 100k/yr at worst and 270k/yr at best off software sales, based on my university's estimates. Recently, one of my old bosses (runs a private school) has told me he's interested in buying me out completely for 500k. Obviously as a college student on student loans, this is more many than I could conceive having. With that much money, I'm seriously considering leaving school, using some of the money to build more software and try to sell it, and invest the rest. I'm currently in my second year (major in finance, minor in CS). While I know this offer was incredibly lucky and school is a safe bet, I really think this money could be enough for me to make more meaningful products. I also don't really enjoy university, but who does. Thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| Is he gonna be a good co-founder? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 08:40 AM PDT Hello everyone! I'm a programmer with a strong tech background. Today I met a guy with an idea for an app. The idea was really good, especially because it was related to his area of expertise and what he was doing day to day, he knows the industry well and has the right network of people. When I asked him when did he think of the idea his answer was "a couple of years ago". I also asked him if he was trying to do anything in these 2 years in order to elevate it and the answer was "no". My biggest concern is - if he had such a good idea for such a long time, why couldn't he possibly try and do something about it? Find someone who can help him implement that idea and bring it to life. I want to point out that we got introduced to each other through related friends, he didn't actively approach me or anything. According to him - if only he had this kind of app in his hands he could absolutely make it blow up, but so far the impression that I got that he hasn't been actively doing anything. Are my expectations from a co-founder with a non-tech background too demanding? Is it up to me to initiate things as a tech co-founder? So far anytime I had an idea I would promote it from day 1, regardless if my efforts were a success or not, I would expect from other people to do the same thing and not wait for the perfect moment. [link] [comments]  |
| How does the sales pay structure look like in your startup? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 05:47 PM PDT Hello, We were talking about bringing some sales people in, was wandering how does your sales base pay + commission looks like? What is process bringing new sales people in, do you bring them full salary or you have some period to see if they are good? Regards [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 11:36 AM PDT I'm wondering if this is possible for a startup? I know that services like Apple TV, for example, allow a user to sign in to their ESPN account and to watch sports. Do I have to be a massive company with immense infrastructure for them to allow my users to sign in to services like ESPN, Fox, NBC, and CBS? Thanks in advance for any help. [link] [comments]  |
| How much churn is normal for a bootstrapped SaaS product in the first 6-12 months? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 08:10 AM PDT Hey Everyone! We launched a B2B SaaS product on Feb 1. We sell to individual users and teams at enterprise companies. We spent about 6-8 weeks on customer research before we started building and quickly got our version 1 out into the market. It was rough but got the job done. A week later we had paying customers. Selling it was fairly easy pre-COVID but no surprise it became more challenging in a post-COVID environment. With that said, we've been growing at a decent rate for a bootstrapped startup in a stupidly crowded space month over month, but in the last 60 days or so, we're seeing a solid increase in churn and a pilot with *enormous* potential decided not to move forward with licenses (waiting on feedback). The product is a month to month license, fwiw. We've had a mix of feedback ranging from, "I freaking love your product", to people who sign up after a demo because they love the concept and use it on day one then never use it again, to people who are power users who won't pay $40 a month out of their own pocket after their company cuts backs on expense reimbursement. We sell to B2B salespeople who often pay for extra tools bc ROI is easy for them if it helps close one more deal. I know we can improve the UI/UX, I know we can improve the onboarding, we're not sending enough content to users to help keep them engaged, and we have some ideas on how to make the product stickier. We def have more product and experience improvements we can make to try to reduce churn but how can we figure out that the core concept is shit or the problem is too hard to solve or it's a legit problem to solve but it's not a priority to solve. tl;dr -- How can you tell if you're on the right track when you are churning users (not a huge surprise given how quickly we got the product out and how resource constrained we are but it's def telling us something)? How much churn is "normal" for a SaaS tool that is following a lean methodology and looking to find product market fit or get closer to product market fit? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for help with my start-up. Posted: 30 Jul 2020 02:52 PM PDT I wanted to know if their is a website or subreddit where I could find people interested in working for a start up and will take shares has payment for work. I have a developer and Designer what I need is more of a business manager or someone for marketing. [link] [comments]  |
| Has anyone able to register a startup in Switzerland as an outsider? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 10:44 AM PDT As I read in order to register a business in Switzerland one of startup directors need to have citizenship in Switzerland. Assigning Swiss citizen that you hardly know a director is a risk. So I am asking Is there anyone who had successfully registered an startup in Switzerland as an foreigner? Any other way to register a business in Switzerland? Why Switzerland? Strong data privacy rules [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 10:14 AM PDT Hi! Made this throwaway because I don't want this traced to my actual life atm, particularly in the event that this crashes and burns. I'm an attorney with a full-time day job and am interested in tinkering with the development of an app/system. I'd prefer not to divulge the details here, so nobody poaches my idea and beats me to it. For conflict-of-interest purposes, the premise has no relationship to my day job. The perk of being an attorney would be that I can probably sort out all the legal aspects of developing an app/biz. This, plus the idea (which I believe has the potential to thrive further during current times) makes me think that the plan could be feasible. The downside is that I have little-to-no idea of where to begin. I would assume, start with a market research study independently and figure out if this thing actually has potential? I listen to a healthy amount of How I Built This, and I noticed a lot of founders seem to have solid networks to begin with. I don't believe that I would. I don't know how app development or software development works, and I sure don't know how it would gain traction. I just have had this idea in my head for years, and it seems more relevant than ever in covid times and I'd like to take at least a stab at putting it out there. When running a basic search, it doesn't seem the idea is out there in concrete form yet. Someone help a novice! Please! Any resources, books, podcasts, etc to help me wrap my head around how to proceed would be much appreciated. Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Comp levels of 1st, 2nd,... so forth employees. Posted: 30 Jul 2020 10:02 AM PDT As a scaling tech company, we're gonna be making some hires sooner rather than later. We want to hire top talent since one good employee can do the job of five bad ones. What are the levels of comp (equity and salary) that these types of employees require? Should I expect to pay 150k-250k for devs or is it much higher than that? It's obviously less for sales, and usually, commission based on that side as well. What's the general guidance here? [link] [comments]  |
| Reliable source / website for freelance writers? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 02:23 AM PDT Hey hey. My co founder and I are working on 2 blog posts a week, using the inter webs to learn about what makes a solid blog post etc, We also want to look into a freelance writer as well so we can stick on schedule. Any websites that you have used? Thanks🚀 [link] [comments]  |
| Marketing and promotion with 0$/small budget for free apps. Posted: 30 Jul 2020 10:29 AM PDT I am currently creating a free mobile app on productivity (includes music, meditation, breathing exercises) and I am looking for help in marketing an promoting a free app that won't bring any financial profits. My plan was to post very authentic (as I love what I do) posts about my project on threads that include meditation, mindfulness and productivity and redirect people to my YouTube channel (as the app hasn't been published yet, all I wanted to do is pre-promoting and pre-marketing as I thought it was good to start before you publish your app). I created two videos on my project and shared them as an attachment to the posts I posted. I tried posting here on reddit on threads such as r/meditation, r/yoga, r/highscool but I don't want to publish everything mindlessly and look like a spammer. I also tried posting on some Facebook groups related to productivity/meditation, but it didn't bring much. The problem is that I asked many people for feedback and they said that my project has potential and they would use it, but they don't transfer to any social media platforms I attached in the posts. So I am 100% sure that I'm creating something that would find users, but it just doesn't (I know how it sounds) My goal was to gain audience on my YouTube channel, where I'd post videos on productivity & the app (I'm currently preparing those) and after publishing and maintaining the free app with stable updates coming over time, maybe move on to create something for profit (in the long run pretty much). Don't get me wrong - I'm really passionate on the project I am creating and I don't feel discouraged after so few people reacting to my posts. I'm here to ask for some tips from those, who are more experienced as there might be something that I'm missing in my strategy. I'll continue on promoting it - I'm just looking for advice you'd give for someone that has low budget and is creating a free app. Thanks for all the help! I'd love to hear your stories! [link] [comments]  |
| Resources on fundraising for non-exponential-growth startups? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 09:26 AM PDT I know this is a bit off topic, but given that I'm currently physically located in the SF Bay Area I suspect some advice from this crowd might turn out to be germane to the people I can reach. I have a project in mind that might be described as a business with $5M startup costs that would grow linearly and reach maximum profitability around $60k/mo in 2-3 years and then stay at that point indefinitely (plus inflation, of course). Unfortunately it's a weird enough endeavor that getting financing from a bank is almost certainly not going to happen. Are there any good books or articles on trying to find private loans or investors for a project like this? Most of the resources I can find, and obviously most of the discussion in this sub, seem to be around riskier projects with much higher potential payoffs. [link] [comments]  |
| Do generic Terms of Service templates exist for SaaS software? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 09:01 AM PDT I'm trying to write some software (website) to help my brother do his job. He works in a smaller, but not tiny, field that has yet to be transformed by software (lots of spreadsheets, local files, etc) We don't want his company to have any claim to the new product, and we want his company to have confidence uploading confidential files to my servers. What do I need to do? I'd like to avoid paying a lawyer for at least a little while, we're still in the POC stages. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 01:47 AM PDT Hey! So I've been working on this health tech "startup". It should be a relatively efficient system once built and its not a terribly complex system by any means either. Basically, all we will be doing is storing user profiles (2 different types) and reviews with some videos and pictures on them, similar to amazon reviews and many others. Nothing new, but I also am not super familiar with running and maintaining something like this. For example, I have a Wordpress 2 page site that all I do is pay $5 a month for the host to keep it up and the same for a square space but $16. So like I said, I'm not entirely 100% sure of the scope of this, but it doesn't seem too wild to manage. I imagine revenue could end up, super ball park, could super exceed this or never take off, but say between 8k-50k a month if its successful, maybe more if im really lucky or way down the line. So yeah, I have no idea what it might cost to maintain this type of website once built. But lets just say that once its set up, I'm able to maintain it myself or with one other person part time...... my question is: if only 10-20% of my revenue is needed to maintain and keep running, would a nonprofit be a bad idea, cause I think you have to put a certain amount back into the business? To be clear - this would work great as a nonprofit as it is going to be a tool to a niche community and other reasons, but I just have this potential hang up of a high margin once set up, being inefficient for a nonprofit structure based on my current assumption/knowledge. Any thoughts or input? Maybe im completely off base with my assumptions here. [link] [comments]  |
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