Startups I did it backwards and created a product before I validated the idea. Now I need advice on how to find users for this thing I made. |
- I did it backwards and created a product before I validated the idea. Now I need advice on how to find users for this thing I made.
- Did I royally mess up when co-founding my company?
- How should I spend small grants (i.e. $3k)
- I'm struggling to launch my MVP, I need some help, what next steps should I do after launch and validate the MVP?
- Launching an app for US/EU market from India. Is it feasible?
- How can I LEGALLY build my startup around using Independent Contractors?
- Questions about CE/RoHS certification
- Trying to decide to stay back at the startup as the CPO or accept the offer from Microsoft
- Choosing a business lawyer and general counsel
- How do I estimate the cost to have a software approved as a FDA medical device?
- Finding Student writers
- Questions on Equity - Job offer
- Should I Leave My Startup? (Share Your Advice/Experiences)
- How to recover from a botched/badly executed city launch and rollout? Can it be done?
| Posted: 06 May 2021 02:14 PM PDT About 6 years ago my coworker showed me his side project that was netting $3000/month and I got all excited about that and started my own side-project immediately. It wasn't until recently that I started reading more about the startup lifecycle and realized that I had bypassed some of the most important steps. So now here I am with a working product, one regular, paying user and no idea how to market or find users. Yikes. The product is a pay-per-use game server hosting service. Unlike all of the other game server hosting companies my service has no monthly subscriptions. Users add some funds to their account and that gets debited when they start and stop game servers, potentially offering significant savings compared to monthly subscription hosting. My target market are busy gamers (perhaps with families and kids, or a busy career) who spend less than 70 hours a month multiplayer gaming, or people who don't need a game server running 24/7. Anything above that and they'd get better value by renting a server that runs 24/7 with a monthly subscription elsewhere. Some thoughts I have about marketing moving forward:
Content Marketing
Market each game individually
I'm a bit unclear as to how these ideas can translate to paying users of my service though. And I don't know how to get the word out there that I exist without feeling like I'm spamming everywhere. There's so much information out there on marketing strategy I feel like I'm spinning my tires trying to learn anything and I'm a bit overwhelmed with choice overload and analysis paralysis! Where do I even start with marketing? What should I be learning first? What's the best way to get users on my site? I could spend hours and days just reading startup and marketing content on Reddit, and I have, but I still feel deadlocked. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Did I royally mess up when co-founding my company? Posted: 06 May 2021 09:05 PM PDT A little over a year ago I took an opportunity to co-found a company with two other people. As a tech person, I often get pitched to develop "new great ideas" with the promise of pay later but equity now. They didn't have anything built yet, so I decided to take the approach of negotiating for a mix of both pay and equity to build the product. I wasn't fully sure if these other guys were legit, but I agreed to leave my cushy consultant gig to "co-found" with them. I received a fair market salary along with 5% restricted stock in the company (1 year 25% cliff and 1/48 vesting per month thereafter). My responsibility was to generate product ideas, build it, release the MVP and then continue iterating. Since then, the company has been growing beyond what I had ever thought possible. We have a dozen employees, most of which I oversee. And a large company (one that you've definitely heard of) approached us to discuss buying our company. This of course has started to lead to feelings of being undervalued on my end. We're only a little over a year in, but I am feeling that I got the short end of the stick. I understand that I fully agreed to take the salary up front, and the non-technical cofounders took a big risk on paying me to develop in the early stages. What I've built is proving to be wildly successful - I am feeling that I asked for way too little in equity / pay from the start. To be clear - these other non tech co-founders have also been instrumental in the success of the company. We wouldn't be where we are without everyone's contributions. I am looking for opinions on this position - did I get shafted on this 5% equity stake or is this a fair scenario? Would also appreciate any advice as to how to negotiate for more equity going forward. Thank you for reading! TLDR: I took 5% stake and a salary when co-founding a company. I built the product from the ground up and it's successful. Should I have asked for more? [link] [comments]  |
| How should I spend small grants (i.e. $3k) Posted: 06 May 2021 03:21 AM PDT So basically I'm running a bootstraped startup - it's a SaaS. I just got a $3k grant from my university to spend on the development of my startup. The problem is that I'm actually confused how to spend it. If I would get e.g. $100k I would probably hire a dev to help, run paid ads and generally aim to grow much faster. But the problem with $3k is that it's not enough for any of this. I'm afraid that if I use this $3k to scale rapidly I will largely increase my costs, then the grant runs out and I'm no longer able to sustain those costs. What do you recommend? Thank you! EDIT: forgot to mention that the website is already up and running and I have 10 paying customers. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2021 10:50 AM PDT I imagined a tool to help users like me in our trading activity, before it I studied some basic programming language to better understand how to make it, but not yet a programmer. About 6 months ago I hired 2 freelancer developers to build a web platform as a MVP to my startup. It's a long history but during the work they failed to delivery as combined, technically they didn't know properly how to develop it (before, they said they knew and had some previous jobs done), and after that I had bad experiences with another developer as well, and now I am again with two other developers almost finishing the work but still with some problems that we are trying to solve. First of all, I have shame to say it, I know that I failed as a leader and manager, but at least I learned a bit with those situations. The first lesson is that when developing something not much simple I should avoid or not even hire junior or middle developers, they aren't all bad but the risk is too high, the main reason is about responsability. Senior developers, as I have seen, at least are more likely to treat their tasks and deadlines with responsability. My main problem now is to have my MVP concluded, the current 2 developers were hired in a freelancer base, they both have a fulltime job and work on it only in spare time (some hours during the day or weekend), our communication also get prejudiced because they are not available all the time, sometimes they are in meetings on their full time jobs. They look more responsabile than the previous developers, but the deadline is delayed for about 5 days now and I am very worried about it. The MVP is already simple, not much functionalities, the point is that isn't very easy to find available developers nowdays available to freelancer jobs and at the same time that know some of the technologies that I need, at least in my country, I am from a developing country, I am trying to hire here for communication reasons and also enjoying it is way more affordable than hire from a well developed country. I think the current developers will finish the platform in the comming days, with some delay and might not be perfect, but useful. My add worries is about what to do next, I think that in about 10 days with project working I can know if it was validaded, but I already saw it isn't sustainable to keep the product with developers in a freelancer based, I need people very committed to the project, so I need to hire people in a full-time base and possibly with equity incentives in a vesting contract. Some of my questions and things I am struggling with:
I understand the user pain, I'm one of them and believe the project will be validated and it could even be much better. I confess that I thought about to give up for now and try to study more programming to make it by myself in the future, but I am keeping things going and seeing if I am able to bring the project to live. [link] [comments]  |
| Launching an app for US/EU market from India. Is it feasible? Posted: 06 May 2021 11:16 PM PDT As the title says, my target market is in the USA and some countries in the EU. The app is a charity aggregator app where users can see what different international charitable organizations are working on and donate to a particular project. The app takes a small cut to maintain the platform and the rest goes to the charity. My main worry is that if the company is located in India (the undisputable breeding ground for scammers) users not be willing to use the app assuming it might just be a scam or something. I am moving to the US in the fall to pursue my master's. Should I wait until I am there and register a company there (If it is even possible) or should I go for it now (I have 3 months to fully dedicate to the app)? I searched and found some ways to register a company offshore but they looked kind of scammy. Do people even care about where the company is registered? [link] [comments]  |
| How can I LEGALLY build my startup around using Independent Contractors? Posted: 06 May 2021 08:39 AM PDT So I'm building a startup around a weekly/recurring service in the pet industry We started out subcontracting the fulfillment to other companies in related industries while it's going ok we are finding that the businesses pull out when we get too many customers for them and when it starts competing with their core business in terms of time. The original idea of partnering with and subcontracting the work to existing, well established businesses was to leverage their payroll, insurance, employees, management structure, etc. so we wouldn't have to build from scratch After doing a successful test launch in a small market in Florida with a relatively established but small company we just launched in Boston last week with a large company and hit almost 60 customers in a few days only for them to back out and leave us with 60 angry dog owners who we had to cancel on. The reason for backing out was that our customers were taking too much of his time away from his main business My mentors and investors are urging me (more like demanding) to adopt a model similar to Wag, Instacart, Rover, etc. and build the company with independent contractors. Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm scared to death of going down this route because of all the lawsuits around using independent contractors. Is there ANY way of doing this legally and in a way that doesn't open me/the company up to lawsuits? [link] [comments]  |
| Questions about CE/RoHS certification Posted: 06 May 2021 04:22 PM PDT Hello, My company is selling equipment for laboratory (university, research institutes) with mainly hardware (CNC custom parts, linear stages, small motors) and a bit of electronics (there is a small control box). Let's say our product is similar to a table top 1 meter x 1 meter 3D printer in terms of hardware. Do we need CE marking to sell low-volume (~x5 per year) to such laboratory customers in Europe/US or is there maybe be an exception for research equipment? Do we need RoHS compliance? If yes, do we validate RoHS compliance by obtaining from sellers a RoHS certificate for every single of the 200+ components of our product? Does a simple small worm gear for example also need a RoHS certificate? Should we get rid of any small component (e.g. washers) for which we cannot obtain a RoHS certificate? I cannot believe that every company would have to compile a document with hundreds of RoHS certificates for each of the components they use? Should our custom CNC machining supplier also provide RoHS certificates for every single custom part? I will surely talk to a lawyer or a compliance consultant, but I wanted to start getting an overview here (and it might be useful to others). Thanks for any help [link] [comments]  |
| Trying to decide to stay back at the startup as the CPO or accept the offer from Microsoft Posted: 06 May 2021 07:31 AM PDT Hey guys, I have been banging my head over this and really could use an outside perspective. I started at this early stage startup 3 months ago, with the offer of 3% equity vested over 6 years - with a cash proponent which is less than half of someone like me would make as a Senior Product Manager at Amazon. The startup was bootstrapped and the 2 founders were paying my salary and other stuff, out of their pocket. We recently raised $2M USD in funding but at the sametime, Microsoft reached out to me offered me a job as a L64, Senior Product Manager. Now I am a bit lost of words - I think i have both good options and very conflicting thoughts between choosing one over the other. Basically, I feel I am underpaid at this startup. As the startup has raised money, the founder told me that my equity would be diluted by 25% in this angel/seed round of funding. Currently, we are in the process of releasing the product but the product isn't out to the customer and hence has 0 ARR. Couple of Concerns I have: - First my equity is vested over 6 years, with 1 year cliff and vested annually then. I want to negotiate it to 4 years with 1 year cliff, with monthly or quarterly vesting thereafter. - I woud want to renegotiate equity to 3% post raising or at least reduce the vesting to 4 years. - I want to increase my cash component by over 50%. I know its a huge ask but its still less than what I would make something similar at Amazon ( I am sorry for not a better comparison, let me know if there is other way to compare this). - The founder gave me ESOPs recently, but hasn't told me the total number of outstanding shares of the company, even though there is share price and our post-money valuation would be $10M USD (he is still closing the fund). I don't think this is a $1 billion Startup but it is certanly has the potential $100 million one. Note: I agreed to his terms, of 6 years, 3% to be diluted at seed and low cash - as I was in one of the worst positions in my life. I had tried to build another startup that failed due to trust issues with cofunders, was cash strapped, lived with parents as a mind 30-year old and mentally in a horrible state. Now, its only been 3 months and I am not sure what I can do about this. I do like the team and stuff but I want to be treated fairly. What is fair for me and how can I best negotiate it? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!! [link] [comments]  |
| Choosing a business lawyer and general counsel Posted: 06 May 2021 12:52 PM PDT I am a new start up founder and wants to get some advices on my current dilemma regarding which lawyer to choose for my business. I am a first time founder and have little knowledge of law. Lawyer A is a woman, I am too so that already makes her more appealing. She came from a referral from a partner at a big top law firm. She is a "of consul" at a local boutique firm, came from top firm and top law school but the top firm experience was 10 years ago. She has been a consul at a software company and had her own small business during the 10 year of "gap", I noticed that her state bar membership was paused during this time. Lawyer B is a man, referred by one of my friend who was a previous client of his, he is a partner at his boutique firm, and his fee is slightly higher than the first, but definitely had dealt with more clients than A who had the 10 year gap. Neither has specific knowledge about my niche domain industry, but both seems willing to listen and learn about it. On the expertise side I think the 2 firms are on par, B probably has more cases under his belt than A but this is only my speculation. I wonder if I would receive more hand holding from A since she is not a partner (more of a freelancer) and she is sort of just starting back out not long ago (since 2019). But B came from a strong referral, so I also think he would make time for me, even though he is clearly more busy. My general wonder is, who seems like a better choice for me, and what other factors do you guys all consider while choosing a lawyer that will hopefully will hold a long term relationship with your company? [link] [comments]  |
| How do I estimate the cost to have a software approved as a FDA medical device? Posted: 06 May 2021 08:24 AM PDT Does anyone have any experience with FDA medical device approval? We're road mapping a clinical path forward with a potential angel investor group and looking for a high level idea of the cost and timeline to get a mobile software for substance use disorder treatment designated as a class II medical device and approved by the FDA. Any help is of course appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2021 03:26 AM PDT Hello, I am thinking of trying one last thing with my "startup" and that is to turn it into a blog site. Initially, I wanted it to be a service platform and I was able to implement the features because I am more technically skilled. Now, I would like to hire writers because I can afford it and more importantly I know I am not a writer. Where can I find student writers? I don't want to get banned spamming "Looking for student writers" everywhere so is there a place where I can find students to write for my site? I don't want to do fiverr or other freelancing sites because my target audience is American college students and I would like to keep it local I guess. Ideally, if I can get in touch with some writing clubs from the colleges that would be great. Any help is appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Questions on Equity - Job offer Posted: 06 May 2021 08:29 AM PDT Hi everyone, So I'm being offered a package with $20k in equity instead of a percentage, and I don't really understand what it means. I've looked up online and it seems that it is more often communicated in %. I would be Sales Manager and the company is growing crazy fast ( 50M seriesB), part of YComb and there are planning to do an IPO in the foreseeable future. What does this package mean for me, and is there more info I should ask to determine the potential of this? Thanks!!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Should I Leave My Startup? (Share Your Advice/Experiences) Posted: 05 May 2021 07:16 PM PDT So I was recently hired on to lead marketing and business development efforts for a fintech startup, and as much as I love the project, there have been some red flags along the way that give me pause. On top of that, I have been sacrificing sleep and physical health trying to make this work with all my other commitments. So last night, I decided I should leave and focus on my other endeavors. The issue is that I talked to my CEO today and had a great conversation about the future of the company, my role in it, and what we need to do to grow this thing. And it just energized and excited me even more than before! For context, I'm also a college athlete, I run a successful education company, I have the opportunity to launch a new side venture in the cannabinoid space, and I do independent consulting for small businesses. If I just focused on my education company and sports, while launching my new venture and doing some consulting on the side, I could comfortably make $100k-$200k this year without overextending myself (roughly 60 hour work weeks). But with this fintech startup, I'd have to work about 100-110 hours a week to do everything I want (which I've been doing the past two months), and it's just not healthy. I think I'm struggling with shiny object syndrome. If this fintech startup is successful, my equity would easily be worth 8 figures, even 9 if things go really well. But that's a big IF. Is it worth staying on for that upside? And if not, how should I handle leaving the team? I think I'm far too nice, and I feel bad for leaving even though I've done about 250 hours of work thus far with no compensation. So how have you all handled similar situations? What should I do? Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How to recover from a botched/badly executed city launch and rollout? Can it be done? Posted: 05 May 2021 06:42 PM PDT So I'm in a living nightmare and have been the last couple of days. I'm building a startup in the backyard dog poop removal industry (don't laugh - it's a billion dollar industry). I'm using a contractor-type model that's vaguely similar to Ubers model. Instead of using and having to manage individual independent contractors I went to companies in similar industries (landscaping, lawn care, junk removal, dog walking, etc.) and partnered with them to fulfill the service. That way I'd leverage and have access to their employees, payroll, management structure, insurance, etc. instead of having to start from scratch. My company would handle all the marketing and signing up the customers. After doing a test launch in a small town in Florida with a small junk removal company (that is going very well) I partnered with a pretty sizable junk removal company outside of Boston for a bigger launch. We launched last week with paid ads and got traction extremely quickly. The owner of the junk removal company said he needed a lot of customers fast to make it worth it so we spent relatively heavily and booked 50 customers for this week in a matter of days. Monday we had 3 cleanings and it went well. The owner did them himself. Then he suddenly backed out with 47 other people who we booked expecting service this week. I don't live in Boston. I live in DC He told me when we originally talked he had an employee who was "ready and excited" to do this that he would put on this. That was a flat out lie. He didn't have an employee. He had a "friend" who was interested that he planned on hiring once I got him the volume he said he needed. Well I did that and the friend backed out. I talked to the "friend" today and he never actually agreed to anything and never even quit his $65k a year job After a very strongly worded email the owner agreed to service the people scheduled for Thursday and Friday (but no one past this week) and personally call the rest and apologize. I guess I'm wondering if there are any examples of successful companies screwing up launches and how they recovered from it [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