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    Home Unlabelled Startups Peer Support and Self Management Saturday’s - A Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant

    Startups Peer Support and Self Management Saturday’s - A Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant

    September 06, 2020

    Startups Peer Support and Self Management Saturday’s - A Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant

    Peer Support and Self Management Saturday’s - A Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 06:05 AM PDT

    Welcome to this week's Peer Support and Self Management Thread.

    This is a Safe Place to Vent, Seek Emotional Support, Share Self Management Techniques and Experiences, or Just Rant.

    The goal for this thread is to help one another manage mental and physical health so we can more easily find success.

    We all struggle sometimes and it is important to recognize that the struggle is part of the journey. The important thing is to learn how to overcome that adversity to grow and succeed.

    Be tactful and classy in how you vent your feelings and share your frustrations. Act in a mature manner.

    Ask questions, share experiences, and be there for one another. Practice empathy in giving advice and remember that what worked for you isn't guaranteed to work for others. Make suggestions, not demands of others.

    #Because this is meant to be a safe place to support emotional and physical health there is a zero tolerance policy in effect. Be KIND. Be sure to report any conduct that is in violation of that key tenet.

    You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord.

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    How to Sell to the Enterprise: Avoid Saying No

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 01:02 PM PDT

    One of the hardest parts of building an enterprise SaaS company is figuring out how to crack large accounts – $100k-$10m annual contracts. I've been thinking and writing on this topic recently, and wanted to share some of those thoughts below (original post here):

    ****************

    To sell your product to enterprise buyers, minimize the times when you need to say "No" during the sales cycle.

    Enterprise software purchasing is a complex process with potentially innumerable stakeholders and procedural hurdles to cross. Even if you have a badass product that will perfectly fit your customer's needs, you still need to wade through a complex buying process.

    The decision to buy a product like Netflix is simple: I want to watch a once-in-a-generation classic like "Selling Sunset," so I pay for Netflix to stream it into my greedy eyeballs. As an individual, I make the purchasing decision and enjoy the rewards alone (thankfully).

    Contrast this to a buyer like the US Air Force deciding to use Slack – even just calculating the number of users that they'll have is a non-trivial task, and that's for a relatively straightforward, consumer-friendly SaaS product. Transformational changes – say, moving to the cloud – can be exponentially more complex. The number of stakeholder approvals and compliance hurdles that must be vanquished on the way to this sort of purchase boggles the mind, but this is exactly where you make your bones as an enterprise SaaS business.

    Detractors Want You to Say "No"

    Innumerable potential blockers can arise during a sales cycle: you'll have to say "No" to a particular use-case provided by the product that you'll be replacing, or explain why you lack a feature that a buyer was expecting from a previous job. In most cases these gaps are unimportant… but these blockers can really throw a wrench into the sales process.

    Adversaries who oppose a new software vendor will latch onto any time when you don't say "Yes" like a lamprey – poking holes in the case to buy your product. Blocking stakeholders are typically incentivized to either preserve the status quo or explicitly harm your case, and include:

    • Teams who are incentivized to minimize risk, such as Compliance, Legal, IT, and (in some cases) Security.
    • Teams who are frequently blamed if a poor buying decision is made, such as Procurement. Some companies also just have risk-averse, blame-heavy cultures in general.
    • Champions of incumbent solutions – for example, an executive who originally purchased the product that you're replacing.
    • People who don't want to do the work of changing to a new vendor.
    • Competitors.
    • (Rarely, but occasionally) people who are just nihilistic or obstructionist jerks.

    One of the biggest enemies when selling to a complex organization is time. Buyers get discouraged if it's taking too long to sign a new vendor, and there's often a small window when a company is ready for change and the stars have aligned for them to drop some serious coin for it. Detractors will latch onto any "Nos" that they hear and use it to delay or kill a sales cycle. This is especially common when replacing a strong incumbent – you had better believe that Oracle knows every trick in the book to make it seem that your product is untrustworthy or incomplete.

    In order to overcome this, allow your sales team to say "Yes" as often as possible. The client is worried about some niche use-case? We have a partner who will make it happen. The client wants a particular security feature? We can make sure that the particular risk the Security team flagged will be handled. The client needs to format their data just right for board meetings? With a little bit of elbow grease on the customer's part, we can support it.

    Ways to say Yes more:

    1. Make your product as flexible as possible - eg make everything programmable via API or expose webhook callbacks for all major business actions. This helps customers, consultants, or your implementation teams extend your product's capabilities for use-cases that are unique to them, which you'll never directly build yourself.
    2. Identify major gaps that will be a pain to build for, and find quality partners who can fill in these capabilities. Similar to the above, this allows you to cover niche functionality that only a few customers will need.
    3. Make it easy to transfer raw data into or out of your platform. For example, virtually every enterprise product requires some amount of internal executive level reporting, which is typically both critical and highly team-specific. By furnishing raw data exports you can check the box of helping to provide these reports. Being able to ingest or output large volumes of data also helps check the box of whether it'll be easy to migrate to your product.
    4. Building common no-regrets enterprise features. For example, the areas of governance (SAML, RBAC), security (password controls, 2FA, internal endpoint protection), compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA), and audit logs are all areas where it's easy to have a gap that will scare the shit out of a conservative buyer. By building for lots of use-cases in this area, you can ensure that you won't get ruled out for missing features that are peripheral to your core value proposition.
    5. Find the right customers. If you're constantly finding yourself saying No during the sales cycle, you're probably selling to the wrong folks. This is common for early-stage startups or when your sales & marketing teams aren't generating enough pipeline (forcing you to sell to weak leads). Having a very strong perspective on why your product is special, and who it's special for, can help you to avoid this trap. So can having discipline – you're often better off doubling down on making your core customer deliriously happy than stretching for a flashy new logo.

    Note that the strongest form of #1 and #2 is turning yourself into a platform that others can build on top of.

    Case Study: Salesforce

    Salesforce has a decent product. It's by far the dominant player in the CRM industry, but it's hardly a loveable product like (say) Zoom, Uber, Datadog, the iPhone, or even Excel. However, Salesforce has used this product to become the #1 in their industry, in part because their team can sell the hell out of it.

    If you look at Salesforce, you'll see that they use all of the techniques described above to ensure that they always have a story for how they can deliver, even if it requires extra integration work. Combined with their ferocious marketing, it's little surprise that they're approaching a $200B market cap as of this writing:

    • They're well instrumented with open APIs, and use ampscript to build custom functionality.
    • They have an app marketplace built on these APIs that's filled with niche solutions, creating a platform ecosystem, and will also acquire companies to fill product holes.
    • They have a robust set of reporting and data import/export functionality, allowing complex organizations to onboard rapidly with services (if necessary).
    • Salesforce has a metric ton of enterprise features, and also aggressively moves to support new platform expansions that enterprises might want, such as migrating to Microsoft Azure for their hosting.
    • Salesforce's target customer is well-defined and obvious – it's literally in the name.

    Case Study: Slack

    Slack got its start by selling to smaller organizations and startups, but has since extended their reach into the enterprise. As time has gone on and they've begun to see real competitors, they've used all of the this post's enterprise sales tactics to continue to move up-market:

    • They have a web of Slash /commands, webhooks, and APIs that allow for easy integration.
    • They used these tools to build a successful app marketplace, completing the platform strategy.
    • They once made it dead simple to migrate from their once-largest competitor, Hipchat (they've since killed Hipchat in their sleep like Washington crossing the Delaware). They still provide this for Microsoft Teams.
    • Slack is now packed with enterprise-grade security and compliance features.
    • As a horizontal SaaS product, Slack is a good fit for many organizations and relatively unlikely to find a particularly bad-fit customer.

    Takeaways

    Saying Yes often (or saying No infrequently) is important in enterprise sales cycles. To find more ways to say Yes:

    • Build a flexible product with programmable hooks.
    • Fill niche functionality with partners, turning yourself into a platform.
    • Make it easy to import and export data in bulk.
    • Build no-regrets enterprise features.
    • Sell to the right customers.
    submitted by /u/staysaasy
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    How much would software developers charge?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 09:44 PM PDT

    I've tried and tried but I can't seem to find a technical partner with enough experience and knowledge to develop an app or software. I have 2 app ideas and 1 SaaS product idea that I'd at least like to get a working prototype of. Unfortunately for me I don't have the programming knowledge nor the network to find someone capable of helping me with my concepts. So now I have to ask what the average going price of hiring developers is and what do you recommend I do other than hiring the pros?

    submitted by /u/the_pro_inquirer
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    One of my best friends is one of the smartest people I've ever met and hypermotivated to begin a startup. He has no idea about my domain and his verifiably good idea. How do I approach this without being screwed?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 04:13 AM PDT

    I have a strong background in programming and systems engineering and only have recently found one of those niches that makes startups work. I have had many months of experience with this domain and I think I'm finally onto something.

    My friend and I have been both wanting to do a good startup for a while and while I trust him, I do not want to let a proprietary idea get stolen after several months of my domain expertise and few competitors in the field. I finally found a good idea that could satiate him but I want to make sure that I can go into business with him without being screwed because we're both broke and desperate. He's kind of a dick but unusually kind.

    IDK if he's a thief but I don't think so. CYA, basically.

    I've heard about stolen ideas that killed the first Valley startup I worked for. Somebody talked too much while two companies were in infancy, and the bigger company may have cost me my job as it took over.

    We could build this business together, at least after he had the basic domain concepts down which I could explain in an hour. But I want to do this with him appropriately and in a manner that doesn't get me screwed in the end because I have little else at this point to keep a roof over my head right now.

    Somebody once said something like keep your friends close, but keepy our enemies closer. I am entering a new chapter with a friend I've known for 20+ years but have never gotten into this with him before.

    PS: "Him" could be anyone, and that's the problem with trust in this business.

    submitted by /u/combuchan
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    Need help on the business side of things, hiring a temp freelancer

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 08:34 PM PDT

    I have some design overflow work I need a temporary freelancer to do. Basically I am the middle man. Not much maybe 1 to 2 projects every couple of months. I have no idea where to start when it comes to the business side of things in hiring them. For instance, how do I account for them in taxes, showing that I didn't not make how much they charged me. And what is the best way to pay them?

    Are there any resources in learning about this?

    submitted by /u/BlisterInNY
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    Compensation for CPO role in Series A startup

    Posted: 06 Sep 2020 12:10 AM PDT

    I'm being recruited for a Chief Product Officer role at a startup that did their Series A about one year ago.

    I'm confused by the compensation package.

    • Instead of straight equity, they are offering me stock options.
    • The options are set at2x the strike price after Series B, which the company hasn't done yet.
    • They've offered 0.5% ownership if I calculate it.

    This seems low? Or are my expectations too optimistic?

    I'm excited about the product and the role would be a fun challenge for me, but right now it just feels like I'd be leaving a cushy job in a post-IPO unicorn, with a lot of unvested equity still on the table, for something that... doesn't even have the promise of big money.

    Please help evaluate the offer and guide where I should push to negotiate!

    submitted by /u/takeflight77
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    books on startup business plans

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 11:30 PM PDT

    I have read all the bibles a while back, but don't recall most of it anymore, as I have been out of touch.

    I have a general idea of the business(es), but need to create more concrete plans, especially for investors. Any books you guys would recommend specifically for business plans?

    submitted by /u/Teaching_Rough
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    Legality of showing analytics of a product review from eCommerce websites such as Amazon Shopify etc

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 11:24 AM PDT

    Hi I wish to run some analytics based of user comments about a product and tech blogs on my website.

    I am thinking of crawling the data and running some analytics on top of it to show the user some insights about a product.I do not wish to sell but just to show insights.Can I do that?

    Can I embed review texts /links on my website?If no then anyone has any idea what would be a legal way to go about it?

    submitted by /u/12max345
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    How to determine the best monetization strategy for your app?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 02:56 PM PDT

    How are apps that are sort of used every so often valued? I know that Apple paid $400M for Shazam, but why? How does an app like Shazam make money?

    What are creative monetization plans for apps like these?

    Also, what are the limitations for using a no-code platform to build an app? Are they sort of plug-n-play? Or can you really customize the functionality?

    submitted by /u/BigDumbTees
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    How to get clients for a new consulting company?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 02:30 PM PDT

    I'm working with a couple people to start a consulting firm for startups. We've been doing a lot of cold emailing with some luck, but it simply isn't sustainable. Do you all have any suggestions on how to gain more traction and bring on more clients? Thanks in advance.

    submitted by /u/sassysnacker
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    How do I get a meeting with an executive of a company that my startup will benefit but needs as a partner?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 05:57 PM PDT

    I am a CEO of an early stage startup in the consumer IoT space. We have a pretty solid understanding of our market but one of the persona's that is part of our solutions interaction is critical as a channel partner for us to be adopted. Me or my team of founders don't really have the connections in this specific industry. so meeting with someone in these large corporation that would be willing to listen to our pitch and agree to pilot/beta test our solutions as our partner has been challenging. Our theory is not just to offer them a value proposition but to actually build hooks from our solution to their specific pain points.

    How do startups manage to do this ? Is cold calling a bunch of executives with a 1-Pager the only option?

    submitted by /u/vzone675
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    Sunday’s Success Stories - Celebrate Your Successes From the Past Week: Anything goes, none too small!

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 06:05 AM PDT

    Welcome to this week's Sunday's Success Stories Thread.

    A lot of us get way too hung up on the destination and the fact that we are not there yet.

    It is important to take a moment to reflect on a great quote from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., "The steps you take don't need to be big, they just need to take you in the right direction"- Jemma Simmons

    This is extremely relevant to all of us in this community. We should all be more aware of the successes we achieve every day that carry us closer to our goals.

    Celebrating these successes, no matter how small they are, allow us to stay motivated, focused, and happy while we struggle to achieve dreams of various sizes.

    The purpose of this thread is to share our successes from the week with one another and have something to celebrate together.

    So, let us know what successes you have achieved this week! Nothing is too small or insignificant!

    #Because this is meant to be a safe place to support emotional and physical health there is a zero tolerance policy in effect. Be KIND. Be sure to report any conduct that is in violation of that key tenet.

    You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    Does location matter when starting a Film Production studio?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 10:42 AM PDT

    I truly need expert insight on how to weigh my options for either establishing myself somewhere where it is already a hub for production but will be extremely expensive and saturated, or initiating somewhere where it is not a hub for production, but will be cheaper and less saturated allowing for more contrast and better visibility?

    The focus of the Film Production studio would be to mainly provide Post-Production services such as Visual Effects, Sound Design, Editing, etc. - and to also provide an interior studio facility for Production services such as Motion Capture, Soundstage Production, Virtual Production (using Unreal Engine), etc. for Live Action feature films, shorts, commercials, TV shows, and streaming content.

    I am currently a Maryland resident, but I am trying to decide between relocating to New York to take advantage of the consistent sea of clients and filmmakers who take their craft seriously and are actually willing to pay for quality work OR staying in Maryland to initiate my startup with lower costs to both physical space and hiring crew/staff, but risk hurting my business due to less local clientele who aren't acclimated to feature film business - however it could help Maryland become more of a beacon for Feature Film and Entertainment.

    Does this actually matter when it comes to providing these types of services? Obviously, some work such as the Post-Production can be done remotely from anywhere in the world, but it's also the facility usage that concerns me. If I remained in Maryland, and was able to afford a much larger studio warehouse space (maybe 80,000 sq ft. or more is only about $800k - $8 mil in Maryland) than operating in NYC, would it attract more serious filmmakers and companies to film their productions at my studio? Or would it hurt my business because it wouldn't be worth the trip versus conducting business in the already-well known and established New York City, or even going past Maryland and heading straight for Atlanta, Georgia?

    ​

    Any and all advice will be genuinely appreciated! Thank you for your time! :)

    submitted by /u/RedEyedHolloway
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    Why should I invest in a startup?

    Posted: 05 Sep 2020 03:09 AM PDT

    Let's suppose that this question is coming from a general individual. How should I answer the question? What are the short term and long term benefits of investing in a startup or co-founding a company? What are the disadvantages? How do you usually answer this.

    submitted by /u/lyfexe
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