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
- How I failed 6 side-projects in 10 months
- Struggling with meaning and startup ideas
- Lots of you have good advice for finding good tech leads/cofounders, but what advice do you have for tech leads looking for good startups/businesses to come in on?
- New business (help)
- Why did your previous startup fail?
- Kickstarter and similar funding campaigns for startups
- Have you ever had an idea haunt you?
- How has your landing page evolved to increase conversion?
- Breaking even, but need to scale
- Creating LLC for non US Citizen
- How can I leverage live chat bot messaging to generate more inbound leads?
- When is it the right time to form a business?
- Suggestions for ProductHunt launch?
- How to get your first customer
- clothing brand start up
- Best ways to find partner/cofounder
- How do I successfully partner with a larger company?
- Contract writing - Do you just make up your contract/SOW IDs?
- What's the best way to start charging for my Customer Support auditing / advice?
- What is a plagiarism applied to a startup company?
- Launched a Startup, growing quickly but funding and more..
| Posted: 22 Oct 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]  |
| How I failed 6 side-projects in 10 months Posted: 23 Oct 2020 12:36 AM PDT After losing my job in December of 2019, I decided to step into bootstrapping my own ideas for a while. First (don't do this), I worked for more than 6 months on my first idea, a very simple one, but difficult to execute. An email service provider. It wasn't easy, but I did it. I launched. 1 upvote on Product Hunt, mine... Crickets. I probably cry on the inside. After spending an immense amount of hours tweaking and fixing and making sure everything was workings, 99.9% of the visits to the landing page, never past from there. 2,058 visits since 20th May. 0 clients. No one has seen my app. After that, I thought: Ok, if people don't pass from the landing page, I am going to create landing pages and test ideas. So I create:
All failed. What I learned
That's it. Honestly, I sometimes think to stop and to just work for others. I think that I don't have it, or that I am just not good enough. But I keep trying. I can't help it. I am sure many of you can relate. At the end of the day, you only need to win once. [link] [comments]  |
| Struggling with meaning and startup ideas Posted: 22 Oct 2020 05:25 PM PDT I've been a successful affiliate marketer in the past. Covid killed my last contract so I'm basically out of work. I know I want to start another online business but I have trouble figuring out what matters to me. I for once want to start a biz I'm both passionate about (subject matter) and can also make big bucks. It might actually give me some purpose. Problem is I find almost no business niche interesting besides shit that is largely unreal to make money in (music, entertainment, some sort of sci fi healthcare shit that I don't have the skills to invent.) Most businesses are so damn redundant and boring. Most provide no to little value to the world. I.E widgets, websites, businesses designed just to compete for existing markets, they are all mostly useless clutter. You know that feeling of talking about your new business when it's redundant and boring and doesn't really matter. Does anyone have advice for this mental dilemma or overcame it? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2020 08:39 AM PDT Title says it all. I'm a mid level developer, but as I move more into senior roles, I know I want to take a more technical lead on projects, with the hope of moving into a technical side cofounder role. How to pick the right startup, at the right time? I mean its either this or a big money jump to FAANG or fintech as a senior. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2020 08:24 PM PDT Hey! My names Jaxyn and I'm 14, I'm planning to start up a little shirt business and a little skate shop type thing. I was wondering do I just need to buy plain sweatshirts and tshirts etc, then get a heat press and just put the design on it? I have always came up with great ideas but I'm serious about this one. Me and my friend tyler want to do this. [link] [comments]  |
| Why did your previous startup fail? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 08:45 AM PDT We love to share our successes, and study people and businesses that have found traction so we can try and emulate them. This seems like a fairly sensible thing to do, but by only studying success we fall into the trap of Survivorship Bias, which can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about why a startup actually succeeded. As much as it is interesting to study the startup that became a unicorn, there is also great insight to be gleaned from the 9 other startups that didn't make it off the ground. So with that in mind, I'm interested to hear from founders who have had previous startups that didn't work out and any reflections you want to share on what went wrong. [link] [comments]  |
| Kickstarter and similar funding campaigns for startups Posted: 23 Oct 2020 01:19 AM PDT Good Morning fellow redditors, I hope all of you are doing well and successful. In my case, I'm trying to get there. But i got an idea to help get my start up going with some financial fuel by using a kickstarter campaign and others that are similar. My question is this; how do you propose your idea for kickstarter without giving it away completely for others to try to copy it? Secondly, what are the pros and cons to a kickstarter? Thanks for yall time. Cheers Update: my start up is an app [link] [comments]  |
| Have you ever had an idea haunt you? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 10:45 PM PDT It's 1:30 in the morning here. An idea that I worked on in 2017 for 6 months has made it's scheduled reappearance. Every 6 months this idea starts to haunt me. I'll be 25 in January. I first had this idea when I was 21. I spent 6 months straight working on it. I didn't make a penny but I went from a hazy concept to a concept and model that was well thought out and had product market fit. Essentially what I did is I went to every big brand in the space along with every target user (it was a 2 sided concept) and asked them what they hated about the idea and why it would fail. One by one I took all their brutally honest feedback and refined the idea after every conversation. It was a consumer based concept that revolved around micro influencers. Since I stupidly went into debt to pay my living expenses during the 6 months I had to give in and finally explore something that could make me money to live on since I was paying my way through college. My then mentor who invests in and develops real estate and used to work in Silicon Valley (he took a company public in 2002) talked me out of it when he basically said I'd need millions of users to ever make any real money. Shortly after that I started a B2B marketing agency that I grew to $38k a month and 6 employees. We expanded way too fast and crashed and burned. I'm now working for another agency that I own equity in and am brokering joint ventures in the side. This idea keeps haunting me. I try to talk myself out of it. It would take millions of users to ever make the kind of money I have made in the past and am making now. It would take half of what I'm making a year just to develop it. I tell myself I can make more selling B2B in a year than I would make with this in the first 5 years. But It just keeps haunting me. [link] [comments]  |
| How has your landing page evolved to increase conversion? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 12:41 PM PDT What are some ways that you have improved your landing page to increase conversion or resonate with your visitors more over time? Here are a couple of possible strategies, but I am interested in learning about what else may have worked for you
[link] [comments]  |
| Breaking even, but need to scale Posted: 22 Oct 2020 12:28 PM PDT We have a two year old start up that is break even, and some months even more so (user based). We are in a unique space of home health software, and though we are acquiring new clients monthly, we want to scale. Our struggle has been in the funding world. We are struggling raising seed rounds which is confusing. I have seen companies with just an idea raise $1M, but we have actual sales, a growing client base, a multi billion dollar market cap, and people are "interested but not writing checks yet". Any advice on effectively raising seed capital would be appreciated. This obviously is not in my normal wheelhouse. [link] [comments]  |
| Creating LLC for non US Citizen Posted: 22 Oct 2020 06:09 PM PDT Hi people! New member right here. Hope you all stay safe, healthy and make lot of sales. I'm about to start my business company in US because I really need to accept credit cards selling there. I was going to use Stripe Atlas but I can't because Im not a US citizen so I can't open an LLC. I will go with Firstbase from now.. Anyone have any recommendation or suggestion? Also, when you recommend to set up the company. Wyoming or Delaware? Why? Thank you very much! Best regards [link] [comments]  |
| How can I leverage live chat bot messaging to generate more inbound leads? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 09:23 AM PDT This week I was talking to a client who told me about how they were leveraging live chat bots. This made me think that we were being too passive on this opportunity. Trying to do some more research on how to leverage this and if the investment is worth it. My company is a B2B SaaS, does anyone have insights on this? Perhaps you have tried having bots and/or humans starting conversations with visitors on your website...? [link] [comments]  |
| When is it the right time to form a business? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 10:47 AM PDT What I'm referring to is going though the legal process of setting up a business and choosing a partnership, LLC, etc. In what part of your startup process did you guys do this step? I'm thinking of doing this now to get it over with, but at the moment I'm creating prototypes for my product and don't know if it's necessary. I want to get a patent, so don't know if I need this. [link] [comments]  |
| Suggestions for ProductHunt launch? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 02:05 PM PDT Hey We're finally planning to launch a product we've been working on for years on Producthunt. The gifs and pictures are ready, but my account has few to no followers. I've read the official blog post about the subject, and they say it's not as important anymore to have plenty of followers, and that we should submit around 9 ET? If you have any suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them! Thank you [link] [comments]  |
| How to get your first customer Posted: 22 Oct 2020 01:33 PM PDT Hi all, I am a little bit frustrated (or I am becoming frustrated haha). So I finished my platform to connect bars and customers and published my app. I contacted a lot of bars via email (around 200 mails now), but I just got two responses until now. Which were rejections. I know, that it is a bad time for this area, but I am seeing some other businesses, who are gaining more customers in the same area. They are bigger, that is true, but they are not that flexible as me. They just offer happy hour prices, which is a good thing as well, but I am offering a complete package. I also understood, that bars does not have a lot of time, so we are working on more automations and more features. I know, that there is a market for that, before covid I even talked to a few bars and they wanted to join us. My plan was to start in my home city in phase 1 and roll it out in the country afterwards. So my question is: How would you reach out to bars right now? I think, that my approach via email is not the best, since they are not working in an office and checking their emails. Maybe they even think: Oh no, this is just more advertisement. I am not a sales person, my background is highly technical. That is why I think, that our product is offering a lot of benefits for the customers, but I do not know enough to present it in the right way. Maybe I need to start calling them and try it like that? We also designed a roadmap from the feedback we received from the bars in the beginning and releasing an update to improve the platform every 2 weeks. I hope anyone of you has an idea, because filling up a platform is very hard, but I think I cannot start getting users before I have some bars and offers within the app. Thanks! Jan [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2020 12:15 PM PDT i want to start a clothing brand and the only thing that's overwhelming me is all the certificates i need. i'm located in california and to start a business i need a business license and a sellers permit and something called an ein if i want to hire others but there's so many names that i'm so confused. i also don't know when to do this step. i want to file for it as soon as i'm about to start promoting since i don't want anyone to steal my business name but i'm so overwhelmed...any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Best ways to find partner/cofounder Posted: 22 Oct 2020 07:28 AM PDT Hi all, basically the title... what has been your most successful methods to find a partner/co-founders? I tried co-founders lab but their processes seem to be outdated... I have the know-hows, I am looking for the right sales/business development person... Any ideas are appreciated... [link] [comments]  |
| How do I successfully partner with a larger company? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 10:11 AM PDT Hey guys. Our small startup is looking to partner with a much larger company and we're just at the stage where we're strategising how to approach them. To provide some background, we would be asking them to "sponsor" our platform and use their marketing outreach to promote to users. In return, we would be willing to come to an agreement on revenue sharing, data sharing, or perhaps an equity stake in our company (we're still looking into this). I just had a couple questions, and I would be really grateful for any guidance:
Thanks for any help :) [link] [comments]  |
| Contract writing - Do you just make up your contract/SOW IDs? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 10:02 AM PDT I am super new to the startup world. I tried searching on Google about this, but couldn't find anything. Wondering how you all determine your SOW IDs for clients. Do you just make it up? (Like 00001.) Or do you actually have a specific numeric system? Very much appreciate the advice! Background info: We are a design agency in our very early stages. Right now we are prepping documentation and setting up our finances. [link] [comments]  |
| What's the best way to start charging for my Customer Support auditing / advice? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 09:14 AM PDT I've been helping London based startups with their entire Customer Support strategy for over 10 years now (I'm part of a lot of CS communities, so am happy to help out when asked.) But recently, having been affected by the current climate, I was wondering whether anyone had any advice on how to start charging for these requests?. I feel like I add A LOT of value to these companies and give advice that comes from years of experience / learning from mistakes and outcomes. Any advice would be amazing. Thanks so much in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| What is a plagiarism applied to a startup company? Posted: 22 Oct 2020 08:37 AM PDT I want to borrow some articles on CBC News for analyzing data for my startup company. Is it alright to post maybe part of the articles by mentioning the source ? I don't know anything about legal issues of a company. Please let me know more details about the legal and illegal activities about a company. Thank you very much! [link] [comments]  |
| Launched a Startup, growing quickly but funding and more.. Posted: 22 Oct 2020 08:26 AM PDT Hello, I'm looking for some feedback on a current startup that we launched recently. It's a remote jobs marketplace and we have added over 4000 workers in 45 days. They are from various countries and the salaries are very low. (They set their own price.). Example: My friend hired a talented web developer for $600 a month. A web designer for $200 a month full-time for both. (It's not a job board.) First I should provide some background, about 2 1/2 years ago, I was looking for an interesting startup and the cofounder contacted me about building a remote jobs marketplace. I thought it was interesting and a way to help a lot of people (with the countries targeting). The cofounder and I worked on the project various jobs full-time. We did outsource the design and development. The development took longer than expected as we did add some additional features. Both of us started with the start up knowing we both had some health issues. Mine is definitely more serious. But our problem has been raising capital. We have bootstrapped it to this point and are low on funds. I'm not able to go out due to health. So, I think has been a huge detriment. He's in a different country and the country is broke basically so no funding options there. The cofounder has been struggling as he has no income, so would like to go back to his previous job. I'm doing okay financially but healthwise not so much. I like the website and would be a customer. I just don't want to fund it on my own. I am really unsure on what to do going forward.. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
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