Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls sre welcome) |
- Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls sre welcome)
- Is it ok to have similar pronunciation as other business?
- I want to develop an Idea but I am not an expert in developing software.
- What to say in the first call with a potential mentor?
- How do you convert users from trial to paid?
- Thoughts on paying a freelance developer in company equity?
- Startup Suggests 'Own Laptop' As Employee: Is This Wrong?
- How to structure your first enterprise deal?
- Nervous about launching MVP due to lack of resources - any advice or words of wisdom?
- Opt-in, Zero and First-party Data: Why is it going to be important in 2022?
- Amateurs Talk About Product, But Professionals Study Org Charts
- Extension of options exercise deadline
- I need advice on starting a business.
- Opinion on no ESOPs for new employees, only a salary?
| Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls sre welcome) Posted: 16 Dec 2021 09:01 PM PST Welcome to this week's Feedback Thread! Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:
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| Is it ok to have similar pronunciation as other business? Posted: 18 Dec 2021 02:58 AM PST I'm coming up with my business name. I made new word by combining my parent's last name. Spelling is unique (google searched and does not show any same spelling word), but pronunciation is pretty common. There is a company sounds same in different business field. For example, Let's say there is existing business called 'yu'. If I name my business as 'you' will I have a legal issue? If so, put another word after 'you' (for example, 'you studio') can solve the problem? [link] [comments] |
| I want to develop an Idea but I am not an expert in developing software. Posted: 17 Dec 2021 07:39 AM PST Hello everyone I have an Idea for a Wordpress plugin ( eventually compatible with more CMS ) but I am not knowledgeable in programming. I have tried connecting with people who are but can't seem to form the relationship then put the Idea out there. Does anyone have advise on how I can make those connections? Thank you, [link] [comments] |
| What to say in the first call with a potential mentor? Posted: 17 Dec 2021 09:02 AM PST I cold emailed several successful founders and landed a call with one. I'm a former founder myself who built a company out of college which didn't work out. Now I'm looking to surround myself with smart people and also to get a job. Long term goal is to do another startup. I want to get the most out of this 15 min call. So far I came up with these questions which I plan on asking after I share more on my journey:
Any suggestions? He's well connected and I would love to leave a great impression. Thanks! [link] [comments] |
| How do you convert users from trial to paid? Posted: 17 Dec 2021 01:56 AM PST Hello! I'm co-founder of an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. We want to offer a [free] trial for users to test our product before buying a monthly subscription:
(One of the most common solutions I see are those annoying automated emails - but, do they really work?) Thanks! [link] [comments] |
| Thoughts on paying a freelance developer in company equity? Posted: 17 Dec 2021 10:35 AM PST Has anyone paid a freelance dev or any freelancer in company equity to work on a short term project for your company? It seems very uncommon but not unheard of. Of course, you would both have to agree to the contract to exchange the shares/options etc. [link] [comments] |
| Startup Suggests 'Own Laptop' As Employee: Is This Wrong? Posted: 16 Dec 2021 06:40 PM PST In a nutshell, I'm interviewing at a small French-based startup (remote, am in UK). They say they have a subsidiary set up in the UK for an existing employee, so I could be an employee vs. a contractor. I asked about a laptop, namely would one be provided or if I could be reimbursed if I needed one.Reply: "As [company] is now ISO27001 certified (we have yet to market it), we are moving to a fleet of computers. However, it is not implemented yet, and it might be a few months until we are able to provide computers to everyone. Do you have a personal computer that you could start with or would you need one from us from the beginning?" Is this shady? I was thinking a good excuse to soften things would be to say I'd need to return my current work laptop and my own one is very old and likely unfit for work. So ideally, one provided or reimbursed please. Any advice welcome. p.s. I do need the job, but I don't wanna be jerked around. Company is bootstrapped. 13 people on LinkedIn, website says 30. [link] [comments] |
| How to structure your first enterprise deal? Posted: 17 Dec 2021 09:56 AM PST Hello I'm a co-founder of an early stage B2B hardware + SaaS startup. To give some context, our business model currently is to sell a piece of hardware for a one time cost and additionally ask the user to subscribe to a service which will deliver insights from the said hardware. Currently one of our potential enterprise customers in the resorts and hotel space is in the middle of a trial. We shipped a device to them and are delivering insights to them. The trial period is about to come to an end and so far they seem pretty happy with what we're providing them. Since it's the first time we are actually selling the device along with our service we are unsure of how to price the subscription (the device cost is fixed). Are there any tips on how to structure your SaaS pricing for an enterprise deal? Should we go aggressive (keep in mind this would be our first paying client)? Or should the subscription be priced dirt cheap? [link] [comments] |
| Nervous about launching MVP due to lack of resources - any advice or words of wisdom? Posted: 16 Dec 2021 01:16 PM PST Hi all. So I'm in the process of rushing out our MVP (also working a full time job) by New Year. It's a tech platform. It's just me and one other person, and I'm the one building it. I'm naturally very detail-driven and take my time over things. Essentially, I like to do things properly the first time. I always do untold amounts of thorough research and form my own conclusions about how to approach something... Until this MVP. I've really struggled with this shift in mindset to "just get something working" from my natural "let's do this properly. Powerful infrastructure, microservices, lots of automated tests, design system, reusable components etc". I can't describe how tough it is. I've always been a perfectionist. I'm at a point where I'm getting things working, but I'm cutting corners so that I can finish it faster. It's having an adverse effect on me in the sense that it almost feels pointless continuing because I know it could be done a lot better with time and, most importantly, more resources (money and people). Essentially, "why bother if you're not going to do it properly?". The issue is, even if I "do it properly", I still don't have the people or resources. Being able to bounce ideas off one another, whiteboard designs etc. I don't have any of that. It's all me and how I think it should be done. There are some areas I haven't been exposed to much across my career (e.g. infrastructure and Dev ops) so I'm nervous about how it'll hold up, the monthly costs without funding etc. Imposter syndrome kind of? I realise that if we did have funding and more people then we could build it out properly. We could set deadlines and solve problems collaboratively. Build great architecture and have people with the necessary skills etc. Just worried about it really. Is this normal or am I worrying over nothing? It's the fear that it goes live and issues happen because I don't have many tests, the infrastructure isn't overly powerful etc. I realise the most important thing is to just get something out, but if it's glitchy people won't use it again. It's really tough. Any advice? Sorry all. Just super worried! Thanks [link] [comments] |
| Opt-in, Zero and First-party Data: Why is it going to be important in 2022? Posted: 17 Dec 2021 01:49 AM PST Apple and Google are removing support of third-party cookies. So, what now? *dramatic pause* Welcome to the era of opt-in, zero and first-party data. A move that puts the customer in control of their data. Zero-party Data: Info customers explicitly provide to your company.It's privacy-first, taken with consent, and the best part? It's unbiased. For example: Quizzes, chatbots, surveys, polls etc. First-party Data: Info you directly receive through your company's channels and sources. The two types - customer and user data.
For example: Purchase history, "viewed items", Pixel integration on your website to learn user behavior etc. Why this data-culture? Zero and first-party data are preferred as it comes directly from the source, your customer. In this digital age where privacy concerns are growing, Zero and first-party data offer direct insight into your customer's behavior, preferences, and it helps build trust and create personalized experiences. P.S. In what ways do you think this opt-in, zero and first-party data will evolve with time? [link] [comments] |
| Amateurs Talk About Product, But Professionals Study Org Charts Posted: 15 Dec 2021 08:52 PM PST Way back in 1967, when software development was the domain of giants )on whose shoulders we stand today, Melvin Conway made the following observation:
What is an organization's communication structure? To a first approximation, the communication structure is the org chart. Now, you are probably quite familiar with organizational charts, and you may even have some considered opinions about how useful they are. But, Melvin Conway's law is telling you that your org chart has quite a lot to do with how your product will get built. Why?
The logic here, essentially, is that certain communication pathways within your organization are lower bandwidth than others. Even with the best of intentions, two people on very different teams within the same company can struggle to establish enough common ground to really exchange much information with each other. I'm sure you've experienced this phenomenon. Because of this, there is a natural tendency to architect your product around these difficult, or at least lower bandwidth communication channels. One way to do that is to separate the product into components and have those components interact with each other in well defined and limited ways. This can have pretty profound effects. For example, Amazon's org structure made AWS almost an emergent property of Amazon's business rather than a deliberate strategy. Amazon, famously, organizes itself into two-pizza teams. The idea is that each team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. What went along with that was a mandate, back in 2002, that these teams needed to expose their data and functionality to each other through service interfaces. Which is essentially a fancy way of saying that each team needed t0 publish the inputs they would accept, and the outputs that are expected. Amazon did not care about what technology its teams used to implement their service, but the communication between teams would be done through service interfaces. This takes the approach of channeling communication within well defined interfaces to its logical conclusion. I believe that, back in 2002, this edict was primarily about preserving the ability to organize Amazon into two-pizza teams. Without this service interface approach, as Amazon grew, any two-pizza team would quickly be overwhelmed by the task of keeping up with the communication with all the other two-pizza teams. With it, Amazon was able to build out another service which was a directory of its services and the inputs and outputs associated with them. Then all of these teams could simply discover the interfaces for all the other teams and use them. The way to preserve two-pizza teams was to tell each team that it should treat all other teams as black boxes and provide a black box interface that all other teams could use. This organizational structure, which prioritized the two-pizza teams, had the result that the task of creating AWS was approximately equal to the task of exposing some of Amazon's internal services to the public. That's a much simpler (not simple) task than trying to create a cloud computing infrastructure from whole cloth, as others had to do. There are certainly pros and cons to Amazon's approach. For one thing, AWS can't really be said to have a single user experience. There are many different user experiences, almost one for each AWS service and that can be disorienting. For another, the documentation on AWS is centered around each individual service. But, most AWS users want to stitch together at least a few different services. It's often better to search the Internet for examples about how to knit AWS services together rather than try to find the answer within AWS' own documentation. And I know many of you are mapping this entire post on to the running discussion about the trade offs between microservices and monoliths. That's an important discussion with lots of implications for development, operations, testing, scalability, etc. etc. The point here is that we think that these strategic choices about the tradeoffs between scalability, flexibility, consistent user experience, technical architecture, etc. are made by product people who are thinking about product market fit in partnership with engineers thinking about the right technical implementations to support the product goals. We, quite rightly, lionize people who can craft insanely great products. It's hard to do! When you think about org charts, you probably don't associate them with Steve Jobs levels of awesomeness, do you? But Melvin Conway and I are here to tell you that the way you structure your organization has a huge impact on the space your product leaders have to operate in. There's a well known, but no-less fantastic quote, (which I hope I am quoting accurately):
That thought really applies here. Before your product team can start thinking about how to craft your product, and how to achieve product-market fit, your organizational structure has determined much of the structure of your product. Just as logistics sets boundaries on the tactical and even strategic choices available to armies, so do organizational structures set boundaries on product teams. So, if you separate organizational structure decisions from your product decisions, don't be surprised if your product leadership runs into frustrating barriers that product-oriented frameworks, tools and training are ill-equipped to solve. It's worth remembering that among the very first decisions Steve Jobs made about the development of the original Macintosh was that the Macintosh team would be in its own space, set apart from the rest of Apple. They even took to flying a pirate flag, to demonstrate their willingness to go their own way. I'm not sure how or even if this structure was reflected on Apple's formal org charts, but I am sure that it had a profound effect on the development of the Macintosh. Startups, in their earliest stages, don't have to worry about many of these trade offs. At the beginning, your team is small enough to support high bandwidth communications among just about the entire team. But as you grow larger than hunter gatherer bands, you'll need to make decisions about how to structure your organization because our natural methods of group organization, being adapted to groups of hunter gatherer size, can no longer fill the gap. Many, if not most organizations think about their own internal needs when they make these choices. But as we know, because Melvin Conway taught us, those choices also impact your product design, your product market fit and your customer. Choose wisely! This post originally appeared on my blog (with fun pictures) here: https://www.macdougherty.com/posts/amateurs-talk-about-product-but-professionals-study-org-charts [link] [comments] |
| Extension of options exercise deadline Posted: 16 Dec 2021 10:17 AM PST It would take a TON of money to exercise my options if and when I leave the startup I am at. Causing a large financial risk for me to take if I want to keep the shares when I want to leave the company. I know of newer startups that allow 7-10 years to exercise your options, mine didn't when I joined. Has anyone been able to request extension of the options exercise deadline after joining the startup? [link] [comments] |
| I need advice on starting a business. Posted: 16 Dec 2021 12:02 PM PST I [16M] have wanted to start a business for a while. I first liked the idea of starting a business at around 2 years old (interested in starting a restaurant.) But over time, my passions changed a little, but I still have an interest in starting a business. Over the last few years, I've developed a pretty thought out plan. But that's just what I have.. a plan. I have two ideas I want to kind of simultaneously do. One of them is a for-profit application, that is sort of a social media, but it is quite different from common social media apps today. Still uses primarily the same concept, but features are widely different. This would obviously take a lot of work, time and capital.. so am interested to have advice on this idea. The other idea is starting a nonprofit or not-for-profit organization. My idea is something I'm passionate about, but primarily for a nonprofit there is a bigger challenge, finding people interested in devoting time to your idea. I'd like to start a student led organization, and understand there are different legal situations based on region, but I'm fine with making adjustments, as I'm very flexible on this idea as long as it accomplishes the goal I set out for. Any advice is appreciated. [link] [comments] |
| Opinion on no ESOPs for new employees, only a salary? Posted: 16 Dec 2021 11:54 AM PST Im part of a startup who is currently expanding the team beyond the cofounders and we are currently looking into salary structures. We do not have an ESOP pool and hence are planning on giving only a salary. What would be the advantages/disadvantages of this? Would it be worth creating an ESOP pool instead of going this route? [link] [comments] |
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