Startups Off my Chest: Design/UX should be the forefront of a start-up, Engineering led Products are subpar. |
- Off my Chest: Design/UX should be the forefront of a start-up, Engineering led Products are subpar.
- Startup only makes $20k/month. Time to shut it down?
- Notebrowser. the easy access notes app
- Where to find people to gauge interest during idea phase?
- Do I need to legally protect my IP?
- Frustrations within the startup world
- List of All Business Models
- How I managed to boost my team productivity by 20-40%? Apple, Google, Ikea, and IBM have been using this method for over a decade now. This is a long one
- I am interested in starting a business, but when I simulate expenses vs revenue it seems to be improbable to personally profit. Any ideas?
- Quitting a Startup Help
- What should I do? Should I trust my Gut feeling also?
| Off my Chest: Design/UX should be the forefront of a start-up, Engineering led Products are subpar. Posted: 01 Feb 2021 05:22 PM PST I gotta get this off my chest, and I'm sure I'll piss some people off in the process. Stop putting engineers in charge of startup product planning. Would you put a carpenter in charge of planning your house? Of course not, that's what design architects are for. Part of the problem is engineers and investors think a like, they think more features equals more profit. This simply is not true. The best startups have great experiences with simple features. In fact, studies have shown design led companies have 56% higher revenue on average. You need divergent creative thinkers at the helm of product planning, not engineers. Without great experiences, your functionality isn't worth a damn. Thanks for attending my ted talk. [link] [comments]  |
| Startup only makes $20k/month. Time to shut it down? Posted: 01 Feb 2021 01:30 PM PST Hi All, I have a unique problem - I started a company in 2014 that grew at the start, and then flatlined. We have been making $20k a month for 3-4 years now. It covers costs and salaries, but that's about it. I have tried many things, none of which worked. We're just stuck. Most likely the size of the market is this big. I'm thinking - what next? Do I shut it down and move on? Keep it running in a slow death drift while I explore other ideas? I cannot 'leave-leave' because so many years have kept me dependent on the salary I get. No savings. Oh yes, and we raised about $2m, so if I sold it, I'd end up with absolutely nothing. Any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Notebrowser. the easy access notes app Posted: 01 Feb 2021 11:22 PM PST Notebrowser. hey, i'm in college and i have this project called Notebrowser. Notebrowser is an app that allows you to search for key words from notes that you take in class. It works like a scanner that turns your handwriting letter into computer fonts such as arial, helvetica, or similars. it's an easy access app to all your notes. whether you write it on paper or on the app itself. i'd appreciate a lot if you could click in the link to learn more about it. [link] [comments]  |
| Where to find people to gauge interest during idea phase? Posted: 01 Feb 2021 11:26 AM PST I'm a first-time solo founder, and I believe I've fallen into what I've now realized is a pretty common blunder. I've built out an MVP for a product guided by a few outreach calls over the past few months. I now have a potential angel investor lined up, however he's now asking me for metrics showing that people want to use this product. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't have that evidence outside of 3-4 anecdotal conversations. My product relies on a kind of trilateral user base similar to Plaid. The first prong is a set of large institutions - this is who I figured I'd try to attract last, and I have a plan for how to do that. The second prong is a much larger set of developers - this is who I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to get a hold of over mainly LinkedIn. The third prong is basically anyone - this is who I realized I should've been focusing on first, but I haven't done anything as of yet. The largest group can feed into the larger group can feed into the small group, the way I now see it. I've been lurking here for a bit now, and have seen a lot of advice indicating that I should build some sort of signup form that lets people into the beta / waitlist / whatever. This creates a pre-built supply of customers, and also would provide me something to show this potential investor. It seems like the steps many founders follow are:
I feel like there's a huge gap between Step 1 and Step 2... getting "people" to your landing page for your unknown company that still has no product, revenue, etc seems like a fool's errand... Most people on this site advise not paying for an ad campaign to attract people to your landing page. How would you go about getting interest, then? Engaging on Twitter / Clubhouse / Reddit? (If it's not clear by now: I'm an engineer-turned-product person, not a digital marketing person lol). [link] [comments]  |
| Do I need to legally protect my IP? Posted: 01 Feb 2021 04:39 PM PST Hi! First of all, thank you in advance. I love this community and am grateful to have a place to turn to for advice. So, I'm a solo-founder. I JUST incorporated and I'm ready to apply to a few accelerators. Before I do, I want to make sure my IP is protected. I'm in a weird situation and I don't know how to proceed... From Sept 2019 to April 2020 I was a mentor to a group of engineering college students. My job "responsibility" as a mentor was to design an app or website for them to build so they could have experience working with an outside stakeholder. I used this as an opportunity to have them build a VERY basic framework for my MVP that I could circulate among potential clients — with the idea that, if there was interest, I could build the real functionality on top of their existing framework. In April 2020 they delivered the final project to me and I realized that the work they did was basically useless and I couldn't take it to market... so I started building my MVP completely from scratch in a new programming language. The students and I jointly own the IP of the framework that they created in Sept 2019 - April 2020.... But I solely own the IP of the MVP that will go to market (right?). Do I need to track them down and get them to sign something to protect myself down the line? Something that makes it clear they have no stake in the company? Am I over thinking this? Thank you to anyone who can help here! It's much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Frustrations within the startup world Posted: 01 Feb 2021 06:36 AM PST Hey all, I wanted to chat about a recent frustration I've been having. I've been working for startups since fall 2016, after coming from the restaurant industry. I've had projects in food-focused startups, mostly, but a couple of semi-successful e-commerce ones as well. I'm struggling lately because I'm thinking about moving on to another project (after a decent F&F round, founders are struggling with getting to series A, and they're about $13,000 back on my bills). I'm looking for work and I'm finding it really difficult to position myself with my true value. I think a lot of people think my resume sounds like bullshit, but I've also had the opportunity to learn from the right people, and put this into words in a way that's attractive to startup founders. Could I get some feedback and discussion from you all - if you were hearing this level of experience, what would you want to hear?: I came from 20 years in the restaurant industry, so I'm very familiar with running businesses on a shoestring, as well as finding quick, effective solutions to problems. I know when I can do a project myself, and when it makes sense to hire out. I project manage (in the classical sense) very well - comes from years of being a chef - but no, I don't have a degree in project management. I just know how to delegate and how to keep people on task. I can scope out the UX for your website and tell when people are running into problems. I can build you a basic Shopify page. I can build and manage your customer service team from scratch (I've done five of them), and create the customer service "decision tree" to make sure performance is optimized. I know what kind of advertising works and what kind doesn't. I know the basics of digital marketing and how to leverage it to get more sales. I've written and operated under a bunch of P&Ls and COGS calculations. I have a bookkeeping certificate (not a degree, a certificate), so I can help eyeball your books. If you're dealing in a physical product, I know how to communicate with non-American producers, deal with all the customs shit to get it over from China, appropriately warehouse it, manage the shipping logistics and order flow sends. I know how to fill out a bill of lading and organize freight to get your items where they're supposed to be. Are you selling food? I know the co-packers, I know how to get you into grocery stores, I know how to test your product before you even get it to that point. I'm City of Chicago food manager certified. I don't have a business degree. I don't have a marketing master's degree. I don't have a green belt in lean six sigma. I'm just a guy who's been through the wringer a bit. Does that mean you get me at a bit of a discount? I don't know, probably. But I feel like it's difficult to be taken seriously as someone who can really help out your startup without these things that seem like puke-inducing LinkedIn brownie points, certifications for the sake of being certified. (No offense to anyone who has these.) I'm not a specialist, I'm a jack-of-all-trades, but I feel like this is quickly losing its value. I'm not trying to turn this into r/careers, but I need to be in startups. I have zero interest in applying with ConAgra or General Mills or Google or Facebook or whatever, and even if I did, my resume would get kicked out by the algorithm anyways. So I guess I'm here to ask, is there a place in startups for me, or is the culture changing so much that I'm climbing uphill? Any advice you all can give? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2021 04:58 AM PST Hello All, As a business nerd, I have been wondering why nobody has a singular list of all business models. I know that there are lots of variations and iterations in building a business, but a lot of the building blocks are the same across industries. There are other sites that have a list of business models, but they all aren't exhaustive lists. So, I decided to try and create an exhaustive list of all the business models out there. I have put it below. Please let me know what you think or if I missed any (or if any can be combined). I only wrote down the business model name and any alternative names for it, but for anyone who's interested, I'm looking to write a description for each too.
Edit: Thank you for the silver. It's my first one! Woo! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2021 06:14 AM PST As someone who manages a team of young and innovative people who work on different solutions for different clients productivity really matters to us. Customers are now increasingly more difficult to attract and satisfy. The stakes have never been higher for me especially during the pandemic. Because you need to ensure the survival of the company, and to ensure that you need to constantly Innovate and work harder than other players. Btw this is a challenge for a lot of companies as productivity is proving to be the deciding factor for who gets to stay on the market and who will be faced with failure sooner or later. There is hope my friends, a secret mechanism that ups the productivity of the employees by 20-40%. The biggest companies in the world have already put it to use and experienced unbelievable success. A human-centric methodology with which a company can increase the quantity and quality of the work and reduce the time required. The secret of design thinking methodology and here are 3 reasons why it works:
Humans are emotional, impatient, unpredictable, and sometimes have personal struggles. They are also problem solvers, creatives, and drivers of change. At the end of the day, all humans require the same thing: empathy. Introducing the Design Thinking Methodology means that all employees will be able to identify problems more easily and develop new solutions a lot faster. This is because the Design Thinking strategies enable people to focus on the true end goal, envision the problem more clearly, and create a great solution for a fraction of time.
During the industrial revolution, companies started to focus on how to boost productivity and increase efficiency. At that time, tasks required mostly physical work and repetitive movement. A lot has changed since that time, especially the nature of work. Employees are now after their intellect and creative capacities. That has made the challenge for increasing productivity a far more complex one: Reducing the friction of the mind is no easy task. This is why design thinking methodology is the best solution. People think better when they are in a relaxed environment and are more creative when they work in teams. The design thinking methodology is based around co-creation and teamwork. This method is so effective they call it the productivity hack of 21 century.
People in general, but especially millennials are most motivated when they feel a sense of personal responsibility. When people work together they really don't want to be the one that fails the others. As design thinking is based around teamwork, it accomplishes to create this kind of shared responsibility. Another way in which design thinking motivates the employees is by enabling the employees to really create solutions that are many times better than the ones already on the market. Millennials also claim that they are uninspired because they don't really feel like they are really contributing. With design thinking, they really have the chance to create solutions that could actually change the world. Now I'm gonna break down the stages: 1. Stage 1: Empathize - Research your user's needs. Here, you should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, typically through user research. 2. Stage 2: Define - State your user's needs and problems. It's time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. The definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation. 3. Stage 3: Ideate - Challenge Assumptions and create ideas. Now you're ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to "think outside the box" look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem you've created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here. 4. Stage 4: Prototype - Start to create the solution. This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product to investigate the ideas you've generated. This could involve simply pater prototyping. 5. Stage 5: Test - Try your solutions out. Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative. Teams often use the results to redefine one. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations, and refinements- to find or rule out alternative solutions. Is your company using this method? Have you noticed any change? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2021 03:30 AM PST I am exploring opening an agricultural technology company. I am literate in mathematics/statistics so I have gone about calculating what I believe would be a fair simulation(albeit an overestimate) of what is the Initial Overhead, Monthly Expenses, and Monthly Revenue. The issue I experience is that at the end of the month, I have calculated my monthly revenue to be $19518 and my monthly expenses to be $17646, leaving $1872 "profit" unaccounted for. Each operation will cost roughly $200k overhead to set up(again, likely an overestimate), and is directly scalable. I am unsure if just given these macro numbers I can justify dedicating the time to pursue this venture. One place I see that can be trimmed is that the expenses calculate in the payment of an Agricultural Scientist a contracted salary of $62,000 a year. This could be simplified with automation(which I have planned out in my schedule to personally complete this summer) that would diminish the requisite employee salary for this and subsequent operations to ~37,000 given the price for unskilled labor where I intend to open shop. To me, this does not appear to be a gamble that would net me greater profit than what I could otherwise make risk free by dedicating myself to my own job and intra-business mobility. Am I being totally blind to something? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2021 08:27 PM PST I recently quit an unofficial startup and I need help. The only document I signed the past was an NDA. I did not sign any employment document. The original agreement was that upon getting the initial funding I would be able to choose to leave with 10% of the fund or maintain 10% equity in the startup. This was promised to me verbally and no document was drafted out of this agreement, so it might as well not exist. Fast forward, now I discussed with him that I want to quit the startup. He's unwilling to give me the 10% as I was not finished with a working MVP. Now that I exit, he wants me to sign a termination contract stating that I as an employee will return everything I worked on for 0 share. Additionally, I need to write all the documentation for my code and upload it to the repository. What is stopping me from just ignoring him and don't do any of the things he asked? Is there any potential for legal repercussions in the future? I really don't want to put in the effort to document all the things I worked on. [link] [comments]  |
| What should I do? Should I trust my Gut feeling also? Posted: 31 Jan 2021 08:24 PM PST I was reading that guy's post about his Gut feeling on his start up situation and it genuinely scared me in the sense that I thought what I read was very similar to my own position. So as an act of speaking about it as I have for over a year suppressed my own thoughts and actions of what my start up is like, I'd like to have the opinion of you all for what I should look to do next as my judgement is very clouded. I have had some terrible last few months, the stress of not knowing exactly what I am doing and just crazy amounts of shit that I will outline in the post below has really worn on me. Disclaimer This is a long winded post Firstly, I have been working within this Startup for approximately a year full time without compensation (Commercial property development ) I'm young (20) and I have been learning a lot. I had no prior experience (apart from book knowledge) in the area and I have been grinding and learning how the business works along the way. I had been brought in as a co-founder as such underneath the main guy (CEO) and have been the only employee for the whole period of time I have worked with him. I originally decided to work with the guy for a few key reasons. He made me aware that he was a previous success in the industry, and at his pinnacle was worth in excess of 100M AUD (his company more then that) in 2008 before the banks went broke and lost most if not all of it (I was shown documents, it was true, he has outstanding court cases with major banks that he is jointly suing them for). He has also been within the industry for over 45 years. I never asked important questions though like, why offer an opportunity to me to work with a guy like you then? One of many things in hindsight I had wished I had done in my own DD before working with him. The experience stacked up in my head and I guess I was just engrossed in the idea of working in something I was actually passionate about, but as I have slowly got to know the guy and work through putting deals together, his competency, lack of organization, time management and arguably reckless actions have repeatedly led us to high stress inducing situations, bills, losing contracts etc. that I seriously wouldn't have thought could happen with someone of his experience ( I do know shit happens sometimes). I seriously question his ability and his word that he will do things as he fails to deliver on his word at least 30 - 40% of his time. It feels like we are in a constant cycle of pushing back DD time frames or anything related with organizing other people or on properties to get something else done, which to me naturally frustrates me from a punctual perspective and has definitely deteriorated some important relationships along the way. Leaving all this work on getting concepts completed and the works and him on ridiculously short time frames and thinking that they are realistic. For example after pushing the DD extensions back 3 times trying to put the whole deal together within a week (start to finish) when we have been working on other projects the whole time and directly telling me to my face he could get investors in within a single day of that week. All to find of course he didn't or they cant pay in or he didn't get someone for whatever BS reason. Then, when has found investors on ones that had more realistic time frames, he has just taken there word to invest in a project and haven't got them to sign anything that obligates them. Which from my what I understand in all honestly seems to be a seriously common, common sense risk mitigation process that he doesn't bother or think of and made the last deal fall through ( I had told him to that we needed something like this too) Something which concerns me considering the size of his previous operations... During the time I have worked with him, 30 - 50 hrs weeks on top of university, on top of another part time job and the works. I have spoken to him on numerous occasions about my schedule and trying to get other things in life completed. Yet he still will call me at say 5 am in the morning to start work or try and call other people at ridiculous hrs as well? Also Trying to work 7 day weeks and making me feel guilty that I haven't been working hard enough to get XYZ over the line in time. He is also constantly adding more things to the plate as well, with constantly 5 - 7 projects open at a time and I continually have stressed to him that there is simply not enough resources (that I know of), let alone time to put these together. Over the past year, we would work around 2-3 projects and have them almost 90% completed and ready to get over the line until something else came on his radar that would jeopardize and eventually fall through another deal we had spent months working on and could have made sizeable funds for the company ... On top of that, working with him there is minimal discussion around funds, equity compensation and risks involved with directions the company makes. There is a non-contracted but somewhat mutually assumed agreement that he funds upfront costs as he runs the projects considering he knows my own situation as a uni student. However, Dates and invoices are left in his emails that he doesn't organize time-frames around and are left unattended and things that I think I would technically be up for as well if they were not paid. Which has been one of many considerable concerns of mine as there are just too many balls up in the air in this regard. The whole journey with him feels like for every one step forward its another 5 steps back and I feel guilty and unsure what to do? I am deeply involved in putting these deals together and from a financial modeling and analysis perspective they make sense, however I am constantly finding that roles we have assumed in the running of this company are consistently unclear and his failure to bring in investors (he is the one that is supposedly well connected) have then found me in discussions with him about finding funds elsewhere on the internet or some shit like that ( I have no clue of anything in this regard). I was originally brought into this start up as I had become unemployed and I thought it may have been a way to eventually make some money. I wasn't necessarily brought in for any formal expertise but I think for my work ethic and somewhat sound knowledge of the area. (it helps I had been studying RE dev for a while in interest), but I cant help feel that I'm being used and screwed over. While also putting myself at heighten financial risk and not being in control of it. In discussions with him, some numbers or equity compensation have been thrown around but never contractually agreed upon. (around 10%) has come up a few times yet I feel that over time this seems to reflect very little given the amount of risks that are involved. I had been in a exhausted state for the few months and due to stress had found significant less motivation to do work. Mostly feeling scared, extremely frustrated and played. Like the guy that posted before I am as well a bit of a yes man by personality type and due to a lack of experience in the field paired with a mixture of naive-ness in business relationships and how processes should work I feel very worried in the situation I have found myself in. I for a long while took his word at face value but now find myself thinking that I couldn't trust a word he says for as far as I could throw him. The conflict inside of me though is rife and he always seem to have something to say that smooths out whatever issue there is temporarily, and I guess this is why I have stayed working and doing what I have been doing for as long as I have purely on the hope that something will turn out. I feel in my gut that there is just so many red flags everywhere and I have been trying to ignore it for months as I was unsure If I was right or what I should do. I personally don't have anyone else to speak out to on the matter so after reading the guy's previous post I decided it was time to ask. So ultimately my question is, what should I do? Can I help turn this around. Are my feelings justified? Did I overlook his experience as a major chance of pulling something successfully off? Should I flat out leave and not look back? I need some objectivity given I don't know what to believe anymore. I apologize if this post comes off as a rant, I do not intend it to be so edited for grammar [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Startups - Rapid Growth and Innovation is in Our Very Nature!. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment