Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome) |
- Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome)
- I was promised a percent equity, and suddenly I am receiving a fraction of it via options. As a founding engineer, what are my options?
- How to manage expertise in a start up when you are too young for the skill experience
- Is it normal to be paranoid?
- I am writing the SaaS GTM mega series
- How do you handle budgeting in a growing startup?
- My team got an invitation to join an e-club campaign. I'm afraid they'll take a large amount of equity from the start up.
- Tip for founders: if you don’t conduct enough customer interviews, speaks to the wrong individuals, or manages the conversations poorly, you cannot be sure that you’ve identified a problem worth solving.
- How to pitch my startup ?
- What happens to a startup's debts if everyone gets laid off and the founders / CEO leave the country?
- Would love some perspective
- What role typically takes on Customer Discovery?
- How to pitch platform to College Students
- How to prove that people will buy your product?
| Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome) Posted: 17 Feb 2022 09:01 PM PST Welcome to this week's Feedback Thread! Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:
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| Posted: 18 Feb 2022 01:00 PM PST I'm a very early engineer (since pre-seed) of a startup about to get another series B fundraise. My job offer letter states I get "2.1% of company shares vested evenly over 4 years". A year after I started I received an invite to Carta which shows I have 100,000 options. I recently learned what the # outstanding shares are currently, and it appears percentage has tanked (even considering dilution). My CEO is known for being "frugal" when compensating, and recently he has been shady and hard to get ahold of when I asked surrounding questions to verify. For example, I wanted to know the # outstanding shares when I joined so I could assure my percentage matched. Dilution should've brought me down to maybe 1.1%, but comparing my options with outstanding shares i'm at 0.4%. CEO started an email thread with our company's external lawyers and mentioned that information about fundraising (such as # of outstanding shares when I started) is information only for stock holders not option holders. Since my offer was company shares (not a specified amount of stock options), do I have a right to this information? The CEO later on told me in passing he is supposed to involve those lawyers as a precaution for the worst case scenario when an employee leaves and 10 yrs later they demand a percentage of the company. I am trying to remain at the company for the next 2+ years since I love it here, however I do want the equity I was promised. I've received enticing offers lately but haven't left because of the equity, so maybe I screwed myself there (my base is okay though). How can I verify that I have the equity I was promised without burning bridges? Do I directly reach out to those lawyers, or would that backfire? Is this not worth fighting towards and I should stick with my options and remain quiet? Any and all advice would be helpful, I'm not sure how to move fwd [link] [comments] |
| How to manage expertise in a start up when you are too young for the skill experience Posted: 18 Feb 2022 10:04 PM PST Me and my team mates (2 others) have been deeply researching about the product we are working on. We did many customer interviews and we did problem observation and all. But the problem is that my team don't have enough expertise on the program we're working on. We personally talked to few software engineers and they are like "you're too young to get this thing done" and that we "don't have enough expertise". To which I agree. My friends on the other hand wants to chill out and work later after few years after learning the skill and all.No compromise. I don't want to drop this because I know in a couple of years this innovative idea will give birth to sh*t ton of competitors into the market. So instead of giving up, I want to add another person into this who can help us build our prototype and help our team learn the skill properly. Any advice on what I should do? p.s; I am not an engineer but I'm good at business management, marketing, financing and managing people. So I don't have any deep knowledge regarding the core technology. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 18 Feb 2022 06:26 PM PST This may be a silly question but I'm gonna ask it anyway. I'm on my way to creating a startup tech company. That's all I'm gonna say about it right now because... I'm paranoid that people I don't know and don't trust are going to take my idea(s). Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are 100s of people who have had my idea before amd I understand my idea isn't truly special no matter how many people I trust tell me it is. But, I want to capitalize on my idea sooner than later. As of now, my idea doesn't exist, that's why I want to capitalize on it fast! I want to patent the tech, get the trademarks, etc before I start talking seriously to anyone. Is that... normal? I'm normally really trusting of people and don't typically have trust issues. Sorry if this post is violating any rules or too vague or something. I'm walking on eggshells with this idea because... well... I'm paranoid lol. [link] [comments] |
| I am writing the SaaS GTM mega series Posted: 18 Feb 2022 10:43 AM PST Hey all, I am writing a complete guide to SaaS go-to-market strategy. It is for new businessess as well as those businesses who have been operating for a few years but haven't tasted the growth yet. But why a new series when the internet is brimming with podcasts, interviews, and case studies on the growth strategies of top unicorns? Case studies and examples of the world's top 25 unicorns are good, but they have three shortcomings:
My only assumption in all of the above is that you either have or can bring together the skills, time, and other resources needed to implement these strategies, for strategies work only to the extent of their execution. At the same time, here are the things that I am NOT assuming:
You can use this approach irrespective of your location, social influence, or funding if you have a product and a minimum level of resources for implementing strategies. Guy Kawasaki famously said you should not listen to bozos, and I don't want to waste your time on underdog hogwash. Availability of money, network, and location do affect one's success but its correlation, not causation. There are ample examples of companies located in the heart of silicon valley and sitting on a pile of money, losing the game.
With the context in place, here's is what I will cover in this series:
In this first chapter of this series, I am sharing four essential concepts that will help you build a point of view (POV) unique to your business. The quality of your POV decides the quality of your business decisions. Bad decisions lead to bad results. And hence they determine your field of possibilities.
1. Growth strategies as a function of business stageConsider this — An entrepreneur launched a basic functional product and acquired a few carefully selected early users to validate the idea. The three-member founding team is now fully occupied resolving support tickets and gaining user insights to build a valuable product. A few online marketers got wind of the traction and approached the founder to appear on their podcasts. Having listened to superstar founders on podcasts, they appeared on one of them and liked its high. A few more interviews and traffic to their landing page jumped multifold. Someone told them to double down on what works, and they went all-in — social media, interviews, podcasts, 24x7. All kinds of users are now using the product, overwhelming the small team and delaying timelines. They can't distinguish between the ideal user and others and find it challenging to prioritize feature requests. They managed for a few weeks, but now user complaints are piling up. Their best customers, who used to be their advocates, are dissatisfied and have left. The churn rate has gone through the ceiling, investors are sending mails after mails, founders are bewildered, and their business is a falling comet. What went wrong? During the early stage, the entrepreneur should have stayed focused on working with a manageable number of carefully selected ideal users to validate their idea. The last thing they needed was to get distracted by publicity. Even though the case study above is inspired by real events, it's not a commentary on the adverse effects of PR. Instead, it aims to bring home the risks of mismatch between growth strategies and the stage of a business. There are two lessons here: * Growth strategies are unique to a business. * Growth strategies are unique to the stage of a business. Decide on key metrics at each stage of your business and then calibrate your growth strategy to move the needle during that stage. Every time your business transitions from one stage to another, growth activities will change accordingly. A key inflection point in the life of a SaaS business is product-market fit. Before you reach PMF, all your growth activities should focus on reaching PMF.
2. What is Organic Growth?Consider this — you have just finished building a product and, after announcing its launch on Twitter, decided to run Facebook ads to bring people on your landing page. After a month and $2000 in ad spend, your landing page got 4000 unique visitors out of which 70 people found the concept interesting enough to signup for a free trial. 20 out of these 70 completed the onboarding as the rest either found the onboarding too complicated or could not understand the UI altogether. At the end of the 14-day free trial, one user upgraded to the $29 a month paid plan. With acquisition cost of $2000, it will take more than five years to break even. On surveying the rest of the 19 free users, you realized that:
Will increasing the ad budget from $2000 a month to $5000 result in higher growth? I doubt it. However, if you can:
...then, you have set in motion the wheel of organic growth. Thus the six core pillars of organic SaaS growth are: * Market * Product * Price * Economics * Machine * Distribution Organic growth leads to and exists at the intersection of the best fit of these six pillars. Organic growth is not just organic traffic; it's the organic nurturing, conversion, retention, and delight of the highest possible proportion of the best-fit segment of that organic traffic. A common misconception and attraction for Organic SaaS growth is that it's free. In reality, organic growth is low-to-medium budget instead of being free. You won't be spending huge money on paid promotions, but you will still invest time, energy, and resources researching, designing, and implementing various strategies. Then what is the most significant advantage of organic growth strategies? It is the possibility of building a competitive moat at the intersection of low risk, high value, low cost, and medium efforts. Someone can copy your Facebook ads, landing page, and even your pricing page, but it's almost impossible for anyone to copy the best-fit of all six core pillars of your SaaS business.
3. Value vs GlitterGlitter is vanity, noise, and perception of constraints. Vanity is far more prevalent than you would like to believe. So many people fall for vanity because it's often disguised as value. Glitter comes in many forms; an excellent way to differentiate it from value is to see it in relation to your KPIs. For example, prime office location and podcast appearances are vanity metrics during the idea validation stage. It will take clarity to thoughts for you to stay away from glitter, more so when it's everywhere on the internet, always trying to steal your attention one way or the other. Sometimes SaaS founders go through the phase when nothing works. During these bewildering times, they look at success stories of other businesses on social media and try to copy their growth activities - social media, cold emails, webinars, new funnels, blogs, ads, and everything in between. This is no strategy; this is madness. It is difficult to say which growth strategy will work for your business at the onset, but one thing is certain, if you are doing something just because ten other people are doing it, it will not work. It may seem difficult not to fall for the noise in these low signal-to-noise times. But the risk of giving in to the glitter is multifold - loss of effort, loss of resources, loss of time, loss of other possibilities, and finally, the loss of hope. One fail-safe to guard against glitter is to take common wisdom with a pinch of salt, for common wisdom is superficial.
4. The Quest for LeveragesA great many businesses have been built on leverages unknown or unavailable to their competitors. Some have used the leverage of low-interest debt to fund geographical expansion, some have used the leverage of technology to beat the retail giants, some have used the leverage of deep customer insights to offer better services, and some have used the leverage of the network, aka 'who all we know' to close enterprise deals. The list of leverages is endless. A business that has discovered and successfully implemented leverage is a business on wheels - customers love it, competitors can't get their head around its growth. Same laws of nature govern our lives; some people struggle with basics while others achieve great heights within those similar constraints. The truth is, leverages are the secret growth levers of visionaries. But leverage is leverage if it's used — if someone born with a good voice and natural musical talent chooses to work as a bank clerk, it's leverage wasted. On the other hand, when a SaaS entrepreneur decides to relocate to the US a few years ahead of his business's listing on Nasdaq, it is a great leverage discovered and implemented. As a SaaS founder, your responsibility is to discover and then use the unique leverage that your business potentially has. Here are the two approaches to discover leverages that has worked in my experience:
Thanks for reading, if you have suggestions or feedback, do let me know. [link] [comments] |
| How do you handle budgeting in a growing startup? Posted: 18 Feb 2022 08:16 AM PST We're bootstrapped and have product-market fit. Our staff feels overwhelmed, but we're doing our best to grow into the increasing responsibilities. Until this point, I've overseen all purchase decisions, but I know this will not scale forever. At what point do companies start giving budgets to different departments? Are there any good books on how to use budgets within an organization? Thank you. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 18 Feb 2022 10:18 PM PST I'm 19 years old and we are working on a very innovative and revolutionary start up (at least thats what I believe). So when I first I talked to an e-club mentor in my college and he was impressed by the idea, he then asked me to gather all the information required and depending on whether it will work or not, he said he'll sign our team up into this campaign. We do need an external advisor and experts in the technological field to run our start up because me and my team mates don't have deep knowledge in the core skill of this start up. I don't know what these campaigns really do so I need your advices on if we should find experts by ourselves and build the prototype by ourselves or should we just join the campaign and take their help? I also don't know if the campaign provides the experts we want and if they do so, I'm willing to share up to 16% of the equity to the campaign. What do you guys think about this? Any advices? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 17 Feb 2022 02:54 PM PST Common errors with customer interviews lead to unreliable data that takes a long time to clean up and make sense of – if it makes sense at all. The biggest challenge is finding the best way to talk to your customers and then knowing what to do with that information.
"Wouldn't you say it takes too much time to sort through startup advice?" Instead ask: Ask "What's been your experience with startup advice?"
"How often will you go to the gym next month?" might elicit the response, "Every other day." Instead ask about past behavior, for example: "How often did you go to the gym last month?" which might yield, I haven't been there in three weeks"
What problems would this product solve? When would someone really need this? Why? Today, what might someone use instead to solve the problem? Why might this new solution be better? Worse? What barriers might someone encounter when using this product? What's missing? What could be removed?
Avoid saying: "Would you use this?" Instead your response should be: "Okay, why would you want that?" [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 17 Feb 2022 05:56 PM PST Hi, I'm 24 with a new product / app for the pet industry. I own a small pet company that does 30k/mo in sales but only profits around 12k. And another seasonal business that brings in around 50k/yr I'm meeting a customer of mine that showed interest in mentoring me but I'd like to pitch him. He's probably worth 20-30m, his house itself is 13m so maybe more. He's an angel investor and on the board of five different companies. My only problem is I don't have a college degree, no financial sheets, all I have is my experience in the pet industry and hard work. I could fund this new business myself but I'd go broke doing so as there are costs of development, marketing, design, all that. How do I approach this potential investor directly and leave the meeting we have scheduled with a serious conversation. When I was 19 I pitched my first pet company and got laughed at and it didn't grow to be a massive company but still brings in a few hundred thousand each year. I have a banging pitch deck and product is almost ready (MVP). My question is how do I explain this product / app with intent for investment. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 17 Feb 2022 03:55 PM PST [Based in the United States] This is something that I've always been curious about. This happened when the pandemic hit at a Startup I was at. It had raised a ton of money in the early couple of rounds, but failed to raise its latest round. (I later found out that it was because the 2 biggest investors did not want to bite the bullet and lead the next round, so they were just waiting and hoping for another sucker to join and be lead investor, which never happened). Right before the startup collapsed, it had racked up many millions of unpaid invoices to different suppliers (it was a hardware startup). After the startup laid everyone off, the founders (one who was also CEO) basically resigned and wasn't heard from again. The CEO was last heard from giving a statement from another country telling a journalist about how the startup failed due to factors outside his control. So what happens to the millions in debt and unpaid invoices that the startup owed? I looked up the startup's name and found several court filings. In the filings I read, apparently one of the investors created a holding company outside the US and transferred all the IP to that holding company before the startup fell. The investor is also based in that country so I doubt if the US-based creditors can reach them. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 17 Feb 2022 10:39 AM PST Do clothing start-ups get funding? How would one differentiate themselves enough to get funding? Is it purely based on branding? I understand unique designs but there's a relative limit to uniqueness in this sphere today isn't there? Launched a very very small clothing brand less than a month ago, still learning the ropes and nowhere close to looking for funding, but was just wondering what funding for clothing start-ups would look like! [link] [comments] |
| What role typically takes on Customer Discovery? Posted: 17 Feb 2022 10:27 AM PST I always assumed Customer Discovery was a Product Manager role, which in the beginning is the founder, and oftentimes is also the person who does sales. Now, I'm interviewing for a job inside a DeFi / Blockchain company where they are looking for 3 separate roles.
The company is a startup with 2 founders and a bunch of developers. They develop different products in different sectors, so now that they have finalized the deal on this product with some partners, they are looking for people to take ownership and bring it along while they go back to the drawing board and figure out selling other products. I am expecting to talk to them soon but I am confused by who would be doing Customer Discovery, and go through all the typical iterations to understand and improve the product. Should I assume this is the Business Development Manager? Won't they be focusing on straight up revenue? Or is it tipically the approach to have the sales person take in the feedback? It seems like it wouldn't be the right person. While he definitely has the experience to understand the customers' needs and therefore take in some information, that isn't really their job. Maybe it is when it's a 2 people startup, you go out to sell your product, you can't, you talk to the customers, you understand the issue, you pivot, you go out again. Am I just overthinking this? [link] [comments] |
| How to pitch platform to College Students Posted: 17 Feb 2022 02:07 PM PST Hello everyone, So we are going to launch soon and our platform is strictly for students that want to grow their careers using other students' experiences. With that being said, we are going to Universities and pitching our platform in classes next week (with the professor's consent ofc). What is the best way to "sell" the platform? We created it to help students w their careers but we need students to actually be on there to actually help each other out. Here are our pros: - Just graduated so we look like college students - Student exclusive website Cons: - Kinda suck at public speaking (We are all introverted comp sci students but we have basic presenting skills) - Not a lot of content on the site So should we go in there and appear really relatable? More mature? Make it like a sales pitch? Show them a demo? Ask them to sign up? Does anyone have successful experience pitching to college students to use their product? Thank you. edit: To quote from a post I just saw, I'm young and don't know shit so literally, any advice would be good. [link] [comments] |
| How to prove that people will buy your product? Posted: 16 Feb 2022 09:15 AM PST Hi! We are working on a service for memorizing foreign language words and phrases. Currently we're trying to validate our idea. We run a few Instagram campaigns for gathering email leads. We've achieved 2% (12k unique views) conversion from the Instagram AD, 30% (emails only) and 17% (email + phone number) conversion on the landing page. We took the leads who left both an email and a phone number and counted unit economics. The numbers look good but we still would like to prove better if people will buy it. So my question is about how did you prove that people will buy your product? What are your real cases with that? [link] [comments] |
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