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movax posted:Just thinking quicker would be nice (like 3 years instead) as my long term plans would be around that range, but that's all subject to change, I suppose! Ask for the number of fully diluted shares outstanding if you want to know the % of the company it is. Not sure how wise or not it would be to ask for share price or whether it's founder stock or normal stock, as I've never asked, but those would be useful data points.
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Jun 13, 2013 22:00
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Ask for the number of fully diluted shares outstanding if you want to know the % of the company it is. It states a 'strike price' in the offer proper, so I know how much I would be paying for the entirety of my options. I need to ask them more about the corporate structuring though, seeing as I think the same organization/people are under a few different umbrellas. Regarding just plain salary negotiation (other thread is slower I guess), is there anything special wrt to startups? Ideally I'd be asking for ~$9k more (that's what I want, so maybe I should ask for a bit more than that).
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Jun 13, 2013 22:03
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I read an article on Hacker News that went through the math and basically said that shares were worth much less than just taking a higher salary unless you're one of the very first employees. E.g. If you have 0.10% of a company that gets bought for $50 million, that's worth $50,000. Over the four years it took for the shares to vest, it amounts to ~$12,500 a year. So if you're being paid below market rate there's a very good chance your shares won't make up the difference.
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Jun 14, 2013 09:00
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in_cahoots posted:I read an article on Hacker News that went through the math and basically said that shares were worth much less than just taking a higher salary unless you're one of the very first employees. E.g. If you have 0.10% of a company that gets bought for $50 million, that's worth $50,000. Over the four years it took for the shares to vest, it amounts to ~$12,500 a year. So if you're being paid below market rate there's a very good chance your shares won't make up the difference. That's the common impression, yeah. To make that calculation you need to know the valuation of the company, fully diluted shares outstanding, and the number of shares you'd be getting. Alternatively, you can figure out the current valuation of the company from the assigned stock price and your percentage, and sanity-check it that way.
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Jun 14, 2013 17:17
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:That's the common impression, yeah. To make that calculation you need to know the valuation of the company, fully diluted shares outstanding, and the number of shares you'd be getting. Alternatively, you can figure out the current valuation of the company from the assigned stock price and your percentage, and sanity-check it that way. And you still have to take into account any liquidation preferences that might exist or come to be imposed. Basically, it's hard to impossible to make any decent cash out of employee shares unless you're hired very early, or the company does a Facebook.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:52
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I'm looking for a bit of advice on a company my partner and I have started. Our website is here: http://skillflip.com/ Basically, the idea behind the site is that it's a booking system for people who have a skill or hobby they want to share with others, and earn a bit of money doing it. The site aims to make this easy for the person doing the teaching, so they don't need to worry about their own website. So the teacher creates a profile and creates a class listing, and Skillflip takes a 15% commission of each student's class fee in exchange for administrating the marketing, booking and payments side of things. Students can then review and comment on the classes they take. In order to generate a bit of traffic and interest in the site, we assisted a friend who is a pastry chef to establish some cake decorating classes. We contacted a coupon website and organised a deal with them to promote the classes. For these classes, we handled the bookings, negotiating a deal with Scoopon, organised the kitchen space where the classes took place, even managed to get a sponsorship deal with a fondant and a flour manufacturer which covered the cost of some of the ingredients in the classes. Basically, we organised everything and all the chef had to do was show up and run the classes. While this has so far has gotten about 500 students through the cake classes, it was a lot of work for us to do all the organising and for the amount of work it took, we (Skillflip) didn't end up making a lot of money. But it's gotten the class off the ground and now the reigns have been passed onto the chef and he will be doing all the class and kitchen organisation from now on. Skillflip will still manage the bookings, payment system and customer helpdesk side of things. Now we are at a bit of a loss as to where to go next. We'd like to get more people running their own classes in order to help the site grow but we're not sure how to go about it. We've discussed a couple of options such as branching into online classes and courses as well, but ultimately we feel a bit like we're spinning our wheels here and need to find a direction to go in. Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated, I think we could use a bit of outside perspective at this point!
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Aug 23, 2013 04:20
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I don't have much advice on what direction to take it but I think it's a great idea! Have you targeted it towards crafty type people at all? I imagine it would be useful for people who really want to teach things like knitting, scrapbooking, sewing, and things along those lines. I don't imagine most people feel skilled enough in many things to teach a class on it but I know that having those kind of skills and the ability to teach them might make for good classes and be in demand if they were offered. Also I think people with those skills would be pretty excited about the opportunity to teach them without having to make a real major "business" of it.. edit: I have a coworker who is an avid knitter, hosts craft night and teaches her friends and coworkers how to knit. She would probably love the idea of teaching small classes in her off time. If you can target people like that in cities all over, you might have more classes going frequently. "Skills" is obviously incredibly broad but targeting small businesses whose customers have a skill might be a decent way to go. Make targeted printable fliers and email to small craft businesses (yarn stores?), boutiques (learn to alter your own clothes), bike shops (people want to teach and/or learn bike repair). They'll probably be happy to give that info to their skilled customers or might even start hosting those classes themselves. edit: I love this idea. I want to invest a million dollars in it. I wish I had a million dollars. Ooner fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Aug 23, 2013 |
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Aug 23, 2013 04:29
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Ooner posted:edit: I love this idea. I want to invest a million dollars in it. I wish I had a million dollars. Where were you when I was trying to launch Knackeo.com? That would have kept us up and running...  --- Long story short, I tried this in 2011-2012. (RIP) Basically, you've nailed down the toughest challenge: organizing the teachers (finding classroom space), and finding the teachers in the first place. Fortunately, there are plenty of teachers right now that need this. Beer Brewing stores, dance studios, lots of places hold classes already, but are doing it via email registration and checks at the door. You could be their online presence for them, similar to EventBrite does for meetings and conventions. Once you start getting a steady flow of teachers and learners, the next step is facilitating the learning, finding new classes for the learners to take. Let them show off their progress, and since you know what skills they have, you can either recommend more advanced classes to them (which helps the teachers find more students as well) or turn them into teachers after they've taken enough classes. 15% is a good number, and the website is top notch. Good luck, and PM me if you need more advice, as I'm intimately related with this type of venture and really want this idea to succeed!
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Aug 23, 2013 05:21
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Sorry to bring some rain to this parade. So you're pairing local students with local teachers? Hello Groupon circa 2009. It's not surprising that your first deal was with a local deals site that rhymes with Groupon. Nor is it surprising that your pivots into events organizing take on the air of LivingSocial's poorly-ending Adventures vertical combined or the bookings/helpdesk/payment thing that Groupon tried and failed last year before pivoting into ecommerce. Those seeking piano or art lessons will always hit Craigslist or ask their social networks, and there's no room for a middleman. Cooking classes and the like are date activities and not things that bring in recurring revenue. Have you considered matching people and letting them teach online? Popexpert and Google Helpouts just sprang up, like, this month. Investors are going to want in on that party right now.
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Aug 23, 2013 11:44
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bee-- how are you different from Skillshare and Udemy?
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Aug 23, 2013 17:13
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Online training for most things is easy to find. Just search youtube for thousands of free videos for cake decorating or learning the piano. Some people even leave their contact info so you can ask questions. It's a good idea, but may be more successful if you find lessons that people need to learn, but is not as easily accessible as youtube.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:58
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bee posted:I'm looking for a bit of advice on a company my partner and I have started. Our website is here: http://skillflip.com/ One idea perhaps a facebook API so people can share what they did or bought on your site to their facebook friends to get some virtual word of mouth going. Could also offer a small discount for folks sharing or liking your page. You could also find a skill that would work well as a donation, maybe a class for kids, job skills for the unemployed etc.. something that would be nice and help folks out and try to get some free press about what your company is doing. The individual classes you could advertise in other places craigslist etc.. to drive traffic to the website. For those you have already reached and who have done classes a loyalty program to keep them coming back, buy 5 get 1 free, or some percent off for returning customers, referal incentives etc...
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Aug 24, 2013 19:40
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Thanks for all the great responses everyone.snagger posted:Sorry to bring some rain to this parade. Yes. We know the Groupon thing is not sustainable and don't want to stick to that model. It's just something that we happened to organize for a friend. But it's not where we'd like to compete or get into. snagger posted:Those seeking piano or art lessons will always hit Craigslist or ask their social networks, and there's no room for a middleman. Cooking classes and the like are date activities and not things that bring in recurring revenue. Now this is a very interesting idea. This last week we've been talking about a pivot into having online video classes as well. But the real-time help for money idea like Popexpert and Google Helpouts has got me thinking. I'll get back to that below. swyys posted:bee-- how are you different from Skillshare and Udemy? Skillshare is probably our biggest direct competitor (as if we're competition yet! ha!) but I've noticed over the last year that they've gone through a few pivots. They started off very much as the same concept with in real life classes, and the idea of "anyone can teach anything to anyone". However they've since been pushing online video classes more and more to the point where now it all seems to be online, and only experts get to present. My guess is that since they do have some funding they're under pressure to scale, and online classes scale so much quicker than real world classes which are geographically bound. Udemy is very similar to Skillshare in that the classes are very "vocational". Web design, business mentoring, SAP, etc. It's where you learn stuff for boring things like work. What makes Skillflip different is that we want it to be more fun and social oriented. Think of it as where can I learn to do all the things on my bucket list?. More "feel good" than "business". We also definitely believe there is value in real life interaction. As a student you can get instant feedback on things: "No, you're mixing that all wrong - here let me show you". And you get to ask questions which are not necessarily covered in the curriculum. Also, there's so much competition for the vocational type stuff that I think it's getting a bit overcrowded: lynda.com, Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathwright, StraighterLine, TED Ed, Course Hero, etc If I can wax on about end game: we were always hoping that this could become a very informal and social exchange of skills (hence the skillflip name). I can teach you to play chess. You can teach Ben to play guitar. Ben can teach me how to surf. And for nominal fees. And you build a reputation in your skillset through reviews and recommendations. Basically a social network of people's skills. Everybody is good at *something*!  However building such a two-sided marketplace is obviously hard. So the idea was to try to actively recruit people who already teach as our early adopters - and hopefully the more social informal teachers would grow organically. However: Our offering to people who already teach is not exactly super inspiring or adding much benefit to them. We're learning this now, hence we're pretty sure we need to do a pivot. But pivot to what? |Ziggy| posted:Online training for most things is easy to find. Just search youtube for thousands of free videos for cake decorating or learning the piano. Some people even leave their contact info so you can ask questions. It's a good idea, but may be more successful if you find lessons that people need to learn, but is not as easily accessible as youtube. This is true. However I'd still argue that online video classes with high production values do have a place. An interesting case I came across is creativebug.com. They seem to be doing extremely well but focuses on a very specific niche (crafty etsy-like stuff). I'm starting to wonder if a combination of things here might be the go. - Create online video classes or howtos which are completely free. Put them on youtube with links back to the skillflip.com listing. - Back on the website, offer extras: * access to the teacher to ask questions * access to class extras such as example files, study guide, handouts, recipes, etc. * real time tutoring ala popexpert for a fee * ability to book and take a real world class * upload your project to get feedback from teacher and other students (ala skillshare) Offer the website access as a subscription eg $20 per month get you access to all the teachers and extras. Revenue share with all teachers based upon number of views and interactions etc. Thanks for reading everyone!
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Aug 25, 2013 04:51
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bee posted:
Caveat emptor: I'm an entrepreneur but I don't know anything about your space. I do physical products you put in boxes and ship to people. Reading your posts, I get the impression you're going though a period of heavy uncertainty: you don't have any data on what works, you don't have any data on what your clients want, hell you don't even know who your clients are; and so your opinion on what the business should be shifts a quickly as a fart disappears in the wind. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think you need to stop pivoting. Choose one direction that you think will be useful to mankind (or just design something you'd like for yourself), build a good-enough version of that (might be just a google docs spreadsheet and a landing page) and go sell the poo poo out of it. Once 1000 people have told you 'no', then consider pivoting. If 10 people say 'yes' before you hit 'no' 1000, focus on what worked for those 10 and keep on going.
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Aug 25, 2013 11:59
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This seemed like a good place to post this. I just thought of a small piece of tech that doesn't exist yet but seems like it would be very useful. Its a simple piece of equipment to aid people. What's the next step? How do I get a prototype made? Kickstarter?
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Aug 26, 2013 07:36
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the posted:This seemed like a good place to post this. Where do you live? That will determine your funding options more than anything else.
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Aug 26, 2013 16:52
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Lets say there's a business up for sale that I'm considering purchasing. The owner (who I haven't yet spoken with) would probably accept somewhere in the range of $80,000-$150,000 with the high end of that being a definite sale and the low end being a guess. The business is profitable with good cash flow and the sale is through an established broker. I could come up with $30K as a down payment. My credit is good, I'm self employed, my income is good this calendar year but not great for last year. I don't have any assets. My question is: 1) Is getting a loan in this situation realistic in this day and age. 2) If so, how does that work? Do I talk to the bank before before making an offer? Or do I make an offer and once it's accepted apply for the loan? Basically, who do I contact first?
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Aug 28, 2013 21:03
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Definitely talk to the bank first. Also consider financing it through the owner.
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Aug 29, 2013 02:39
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jjttjj posted:Lets say there's a business up for sale that I'm considering purchasing. The owner (who I haven't yet spoken with) would probably accept somewhere in the range of $80,000-$150,000 with the high end of that being a definite sale and the low end being a guess. The business is profitable with good cash flow and the sale is through an established broker. I could come up with $30K as a down payment. My credit is good, I'm self employed, my income is good this calendar year but not great for last year. I don't have any assets. My question is: Also look to the SBA they lend through local banks and offer competative terms for situations just like this. http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/loans-grants If that doesn't work out you could always try getting the initial capital from friends and family though that has a whole different set of potential problems if things don't work out.
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Aug 29, 2013 13:50
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Kickstarter seems like a terrible fit for a prototyping round. You'll get a cash infusion that will take you through a few iterations of SLA and run out right when you're looking at a bill for tooling a production run.
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Sep 3, 2013 21:24
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JawnV6 posted:Kickstarter seems like a terrible fit for a prototyping round. You'll get a cash infusion that will take you through a few iterations of SLA and run out right when you're looking at a bill for tooling a production run. aka OUYA
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Sep 3, 2013 21:52
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Those of you with very small teams (under 5) and VC, how much do you work in a week? I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to train myself to sustain 7 days, but I've totally failed at it so far. Unless you never lift, always eat out and have someone do your laundry / chores, you pretty much need at least 1 day a week to get that stuff taken care of. You could probably eat pizza every day and never go to a grocery store, but that's just not my thing. That and I do like my 9 hours of sleep. And if that's your "break day", then you might have not actually done anything "relaxing" that week, which seems to add up over time.
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Sep 15, 2013 22:39
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You'll just be dumb if you try to sustain 7 days. You have to take a break. Basically the main rules I follow when working a lot without going insane are to always sleep without an alarm, and on days when you're working, avoid all foods (or drink) with carbohydrates (carbs make you dumb for an hour or two, and this is also an easy way to avoid falling into a junk food diet), and always be awake from 5-11 AM Saturday morning for golf no matter what (or substitute a time/activity of your choice). Also, never work more than 12 hours in a day (including lunch). Don't count the hours, count the progress. Review your work the subsequent day and analyze whether its quality is really that good, to make sure you aren't doing worthless sleep-deprived work. Other tricks: Find a place that serves omelettes and opens at 5 AM. (Don't eat the toast or potatoes.) Find a "Mongolian BBQ" place and figure out when it's not crowded -- this is the ideal form of fast food take-out. Also one simple goon trick: You can wear the same pair of jeans multiple times without cleaning them and nobody will notice! Also pants generally encapsulate the dirty underwear smell better than shorts.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:17
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Stop throwing that many hours at problems. 40-60/week is more than enough to get poo poo done, focus on being rested and at the top of your game, every single day. Also, if you have VC money and are that understaffed, how are you not aggressively expanding your team?
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Sep 16, 2013 10:15
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I'm working on a side-project. Technically I'm on top of things, but I am a bit out of my depth on legal matters. For instance, in order to accept payments through something like Stripe I'll need to put some Terms and Conditions and possibly a Privacy Policy. I can get someone to draft this for me of course, but I was wondering if anyone has a good recommendation for T&C "templates" that I could customize. I realize this doesn't imply that I shouldn't get these looked at, but at least for the time being I would at least have a reasonable placeholder.
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Sep 16, 2013 11:51
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Sagacity posted:I'm working on a side-project. Technically I'm on top of things, but I am a bit out of my depth on legal matters. For instance, in order to accept payments through something like Stripe I'll need to put some Terms and Conditions and possibly a Privacy Policy. I can get someone to draft this for me of course, but I was wondering if anyone has a good recommendation for T&C "templates" that I could customize. I use stripe for my business. They have their own T&C and Privacy Policy that their customers can use. I built my site with square space so stripe's legal docs came already integrated into the payment gateway. Stripe has excellent customer support so I'm sure if you e-mailed them and asked nicely they'd sent you some a good T&C and PP
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Sep 16, 2013 15:11
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Excellent news. Well, another story to tick off then!
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Sep 16, 2013 16:26
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Any of you guys using Reddit for marketing purposes? Our posts did well but we now have some people who perceive us as competition, and our posts are being downvoted into oblivion as soon as they go up. Need to learn how to play this game, and I'm all ears for advice.
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Sep 16, 2013 19:48
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shrughes posted:You'll just be dumb if you try to sustain 7 days. You have to take a break. Basically the main rules I follow when working a lot without going insane are to always sleep without an alarm, and on days when you're working, avoid all foods (or drink) with carbohydrates (carbs make you dumb for an hour or two, and this is also an easy way to avoid falling into a junk food diet), and always be awake from 5-11 AM Saturday morning for golf no matter what (or substitute a time/activity of your choice). Also, never work more than 12 hours in a day (including lunch). Don't count the hours, count the progress. Review your work the subsequent day and analyze whether its quality is really that good, to make sure you aren't doing worthless sleep-deprived work. Thanks for this, I needed this reminder to go the gently caress home instead of working even later and killing off 3-4 martinis while I'm at it.
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Sep 16, 2013 20:01
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shrughes posted:Other tricks: Find a place that serves omelettes and opens at 5 AM. (Don't eat the toast or potatoes.) Find a "Mongolian BBQ" place and figure out when it's not crowded -- this is the ideal form of fast food take-out. Silicon Valley-specific tip: if you're in South Bay, go to the New Mongolian BBQ place on Castro in downtown Mountain View.
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Sep 17, 2013 02:11
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Hi guys, unfortunately there's no information in the first post, so I hope I'm not going over old ground. I've just built a small website that provide tools to assist students learning Mandarin Chinese. I'm happy with how it looks and confident that there's nothing else like it available: http://www.hanzidata.com I've posted the link on a few Chinese forums, but I'm looking for better ways to build traffic. I'd also like to consider monetizing it, although there's apparently not enough text content for Adsense. Any general tips?
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Sep 17, 2013 03:56
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Silicon Valley-specific tip: if you're in South Bay, go to the New Mongolian BBQ place on Castro in downtown Mountain View. I was specifically thinking of that one. I got dinner there today.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:04
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danse macabre posted:I've posted the link on a few Chinese forums, but I'm looking for better ways to build traffic. I'd also like to consider monetizing it, although there's apparently not enough text content for Adsense. Any general tips? I think you'll find the blogging/SEO thread helpful: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3447030
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Sep 17, 2013 14:48
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Since danse macabre mentioned it, do we want a really big and informative OP? I'm personally scared that the range of options for a 'startup' are so wide, and there's so much necessary information, that the thread would just devolve into a debate over what deserves to be in the OP. Your thoughts?
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Sep 17, 2013 14:49
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shrughes posted:You'll just be dumb if you try to sustain 7 days. You have to take a break. Basically the main rules I follow when working a lot without going insane are to always sleep without an alarm, and on days when you're working, avoid all foods (or drink) with carbohydrates (carbs make you dumb for an hour or two, and this is also an easy way to avoid falling into a junk food diet), and always be awake from 5-11 AM Saturday morning for golf no matter what (or substitute a time/activity of your choice). Also, never work more than 12 hours in a day (including lunch). Don't count the hours, count the progress. Review your work the subsequent day and analyze whether its quality is really that good, to make sure you aren't doing worthless sleep-deprived work. I think I'm going to institute the Sundays to be off limit so I can cram in gym, groceries and the rest of the day with the SO and then hopefully have a energized 6 days afterwards. We'll see how that turns out. I think ultimately being able to get 9 hours of sleep every day can make it or break it, as long as morale isn't completely in the gutter. As long as your head is thinking clearly, you're probably going to be ok.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:41
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DreadCthulhu posted:I think I'm going to institute the Sundays to be off limit so I can cram in gym, groceries and the rest of the day with the SO and then hopefully have a energized 6 days afterwards. We'll see how that turns out. Why are you trying to work 80 hour weeks? Is the product of your work that well defined that you just need to build whatever it is you're building, to the exclusion of any sort of intellectual work? I have a small team with a very short runway and I'm trying to move everyone from the 60-hour panic weeks, to a 30-hour 4-day week, so everyone is better rested, at the top of their game, and making better decisions. You need to know right away if you're in a position where you need to be a grinder or a thinker, and adjust your hours accordingly: if thinker, work on having less work; if grinder, work on being able to do more.
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Sep 18, 2013 17:40
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Drive By posted:Why are you trying to work 80 hour weeks? Is the product of your work that well defined that you just need to build whatever it is you're building, to the exclusion of any sort of intellectual work? That's a good question. The product is somewhat defined, in fact we made a few institutional sales already, but we have no idea if this will scale. In fact right now it looks like it won't, too much hand holding to make a very measly sale. If we don't come up with a better monetization route (or a different engine of growth) we're done in half a year at best. We're continuously trying different experiments, and the thing we stress hardest is the speed of iteration of such experiments. The more we try, the better our chances of striking gold and not having to go back to real jobs in a few months. Our runway is extremely short, around 6 months at the current rate, and we've just started paying ourselves "salaries" to survive (after 1.5 years of sucking it up). Our incubator's demo day is in 3 months, so we need to fake that perfect last minute hockey stick to make it to a reasonable seed round (our industry is pretty tough as far as vc goes, so every little bit counts). The better our traction at that point in time, the better the chances of missing the timing on that seed. At this point 80 hours is out of question, I don't even know how to do that. I agree that's kind of immature and an indication that you're not really doing work for at least 20 of those hours, but trying to live the "lifestyle". I'm a bit too old for the whole "don't shower for 3 days and sleep at work". Ideally we're aiming for 60h of well-rested work, which is pretty achievable with 6 day work weeks, but if you work intensely enough you could be done in 40. And yes, I 100% agree that working less helps you considerably with not being stuck in the trees and missing the big picture, but there's something to be said about the power of continuous rapid experimentation. Ideally we'd have both, but it's been very tough so far.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:46
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DreadCthulhu posted:That's a good question. The product is somewhat defined, in fact we made a few institutional sales already, but we have no idea if this will scale. In fact right now it looks like it won't, too much hand holding to make a very measly sale. If we don't come up with a better monetization route (or a different engine of growth) we're done in half a year at best. We're continuously trying different experiments, and the thing we stress hardest is the speed of iteration of such experiments. The more we try, the better our chances of striking gold and not having to go back to real jobs in a few months. No Wave fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 20:49
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No Wave posted:Are VC firms so stupid that they can't tell the difference between real growth and "that perfect last minute hockey stick"? I mean this as a sincere question. It's a gamble. If they wait too long, the train could be gone, the terms might have become much better for the founders, and VC returns are severely diminished. They have to make 100x off of black swans for their business model to make any sense. They will have wasted their time chasing a lovely return that makes no visible difference for their fund, meaning that their fund will shrink, they lose prestige and eventually their jobs. Not that their fund management cut isn't very generous, but that's a different story. If they invest too soon, they might throw away money for no reason by committing to a dumb project. For seed rounds VCs are investing in the potential, the "hint of a hockey stick" is where it's at. For A rounds that won't cut it anymore and you gotta show a lot more real growth/revenue/traction or whatever metric is relevant for your business model. DreadCthulhu fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Sep 19, 2013 |
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Sep 19, 2013 00:43
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DreadCthulhu posted:That's a good question. The product is somewhat defined, in fact we made a few institutional sales already, but we have no idea if this will scale. In fact right now it looks like it won't, too much hand holding to make a very measly sale. If we don't come up with a better monetization route (or a different engine of growth) we're done in half a year at best. We're continuously trying different experiments, and the thing we stress hardest is the speed of iteration of such experiments. The more we try, the better our chances of striking gold and not having to go back to real jobs in a few months. I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this. I don't care for Lean and think quality of iteration trumps speed of iteration. Experiments should be driven by hypothesis drastic enough to change your whole business, and that takes strong intuitions, time to think and a lot of industry-specific knowledge. No one strikes gold at random, you learn to dig in the right places. You are not a lottery ticket. If you don't know enough about your industry to make educated guesses about the future just shut the whole thing down right now. I wouldn't though, you're doing something right if you have sales. If something's connecting with people, you need to amplify the effect, broaden your reach and make sure it's scalable when it needs to scale. DreadCthulhu posted:Our runway is extremely short, around 6 months at the current rate, and we've just started paying ourselves "salaries" to survive (after 1.5 years of sucking it up). Our incubator's demo day is in 3 months, so we need to fake that perfect last minute hockey stick to make it to a reasonable seed round (our industry is pretty tough as far as vc goes, so every little bit counts). The better our traction at that point in time, the better the chances of missing the timing on that seed. 6 months is a shitload of time, are you kidding me? Also, no one half clever goes to or cares about demo days. Optimize for the long term, not for a stupid deadline. At the most you can use Demo Day as a PR tool if you have a shiny number or a new release. DreadCthulhu posted:At this point 80 hours is out of question, I don't even know how to do that. I agree that's kind of immature and an indication that you're not really doing work for at least 20 of those hours, but trying to live the "lifestyle". I'm a bit too old for the whole "don't shower for 3 days and sleep at work". Ideally we're aiming for 60h of well-rested work, which is pretty achievable with 6 day work weeks, but if you work intensely enough you could be done in 40. I think you need to get out of panic mode. What works for me is facing the cold, hard facts: -demo day is worthless and you shouldn't care about other people's arbitrary deadlines. -6 months of runway is plenty to get to ramen profitability or hockey-stick growth. -your product is either working or it isn't. You need to find out which and apply the appropriate fixes. Stop with the loving pivots. -If you fail your life is not over. What's the worst that can happen? If you're a decent developer I'll get you a job in a week. I don't have all the answers and I'm sure as poo poo not a success case yet, so what do I know. In any case, this job is tough and I've felt lost plenty of times before, so if you ever want to talk to someone who's taking the journey and vent, I'd love to have a chat over skype. If you're in SF I'm coming over in a week, let's have a beer.
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Sep 20, 2013 00:03
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