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got off on a technicality
Feb 7, 2007

oh dear
I work for a VC firm in Palo Alto if anyone has questions about that odd little world. Our sweet spot is Series A/B, but Leroy I would be happy to look over your exec summary if you like

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wins32767
Mar 16, 2007

Admirable Gusto posted:

I work for a VC firm in Palo Alto if anyone has questions about that odd little world. Our sweet spot is Series A/B, but Leroy I would be happy to look over your exec summary if you like

I've heard about some odd companies getting funded in health and healthcare. How much knowledge does the average VC shop have about regulations and their impact on product development? Is that generally part of the pre-investment research process?

Leroy Diplowski
Aug 25, 2005

The Candyman Can :science:

Visit My Candy Shop

And SA Mart Thread

J4Gently posted:

Check your PMs,

I had a surprise meeting about funding yesterday. Thanks for the help! I implemented a lot of your suggestions. I'm supposed to hear something today. :ohdear:

got off on a technicality
Feb 7, 2007

oh dear

wins32767 posted:

I've heard about some odd companies getting funded in health and healthcare. How much knowledge does the average VC shop have about regulations and their impact on product development? Is that generally part of the pre-investment research process?

Sorry about the delay, I blame the forums database.

The fund I work for is particularly interested in healthcare as a sector; we have i) a bunch of experience incubating companies that are creating new medical devices and software, ii) close relationships with many leading experts (and institutions) in the field and iii) a whole network of people within our portfolio and at other funds whom we chat with all the time. Right now I'm deep into diligence on a genomics company that we want to invest in, and am about to spin up a whole gaggle of regulatory experts. I've done a bunch of work in the payor space as well (arguably even more convoluted). As for the typical fund I don't really know, but I'd say everyone realizes that investing in healthcare is hard to do right, and certainly a whole lot more complicated than trying to fund the next consumer messaging app.

What are these odd companies that you've heard of?

wins32767
Mar 16, 2007

There was one where they were trawling message boards to try to find side effects and then give recommendations as to which drug to use and another where they wanted to use big data to try to cut out doctors and go from entered symptoms to a diagnosis and give advice on how to deal with it. Both of those obviously get way into the regulatory weeds.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest post. No lies whatsoever.

Hi thread.

I'm going to turn to SA because I'm running out of options in my personal network and this is all pretty new to me. As a tldr:

I'm a late 20s systems engineer/physicist with a very strong CV for my fields and track record in leadership (NASA flight project SE, various work in cost/risk modeling has been presented to congress/blue ribbon panel, have been principle investigator, won grants, etc) - but I thought of an interesting idea for a web startup that I imagine would have a good spot in the consumer market and be something that competitors/existing companies would love to buy out for the service it'd provide. I developed a prototype for the service which works; right now, I'm in the process of patenting the service under my own name. I reached out to an investor who said he'd be interested except: he wants to see a real version and I'm very overbooked career-wise, so he'd want to see a co-founder that is full-time.

Unfortunately, I don't know that many devs that are free to be full-time on a startup. I've talked to some friends-of-friends which ended up flaking out.

At this stage, I'm deciding if I really should find a co-founder to be a developer or just try to go full-steam ahead and contract out the code. I'd honestly feel better with someone who is as committed as me to seeing the concept through.

I don't know if it is appropriate to ask here "hey, is anyone interested?!" or "does anyone know anyone who'd be interested?!" - if it is, then those questions (I'd be happy to go into detail with whomever). If not, where do I go about finding a developer co-founder? I logged into some matchmaking type sites which have low traffic, so no dice there. I'm tempted to swing by my local hackerspace and post something and also talk to my university's career center...I'd just hate to see this die without pushing the concept.

Also, I don't know what advice you guys might have about how do you divvy up partnership with co-founders? I'm self-funding for now and am just looking at this as a rule of thumb: http://fundersandfounders.com/how-funding-works-splitting-equity/

bee
Dec 17, 2008


Do you often sing or whistle just for fun?
^^^ My partner is a software dev currently working on a start up with another dude in the clean energy industry. How he met this guy was they both attended a conference on start ups and new technologies and basically just bumped into each other and got talking and discovered that they gelled. Perhaps attending a conference in the industry your idea is related to might be helpful for networking and finding someone.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest post. No lies whatsoever.

Yeah, I was thinking more about startup conferences than that. I joined the local startup meetup groups...so I'll try to attend those. Is there a good directory of conferences for tech startups?

I didn't think about the industry itself. I just looked up that industry conference and it'd be in January. Hopefully I have things in development by then, but that's all the more reason to go! Thanks!

e: I just found an affiliated forum but it isnt very active.

guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 29, 2014

Drive By
Feb 26, 2004

Dinosaur Gum
Finding someone who'll be as committed as yourself to your idea and who'll make a good long-time partner is hard. Co-founder mechanics aren't easy, and I've seen a bad relationship take down many promising companies.

Your problem's made harder by looking for someone who'll write most of the code for an idea they didn't come up with. Good engineers have plenty of ideas of their own to work on. If you're not fully committed to this yourself, the field narrows down even more.

I don't want to be overly negative, but I think you need to take a stand on what you're doing: Either it's a side-project, in which case you should contract out /building a simple first version yourself, get a few customers, and reevaluate, or it's a startup, in which case you should spend every hour you're not at your job working on it, with the idea of leaving employment as soon as possible. Finding a good co-founder for (1) is impossible. For (2) it's hard but doable, and it'll have to come out of either your extended network or early customers/competition.

Hollis Brown
Oct 17, 2004

It's like people only do things because they get paid, and that's just really sad
Does anyone know a good source to get small batches of company polos or t-shirts made?

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Used customink.com for my fraternity back in college, wasn't too bad for runs for around 20-30, especially if your design is simple.

Try looking for a local place too, they might be able to cut you a deal as well.

J4Gently
Jul 15, 2013

Leroy Diplowski posted:

I had a surprise meeting about funding yesterday. Thanks for the help! I implemented a lot of your suggestions. I'm supposed to hear something today. :ohdear:

Hey happy to help!! Hope you had a successful presentation!
Send me a message when you can I'm curious how it turned out :)

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Seeking information on business management; specifically, turning 100k in investment capital into a digital ad agency with steady staff, office space, and ongoing contracting work. I've done something similar before but, besides putting the principals in touch with my tax advisor, who should I talk to?

snagger
Aug 14, 2004

Golden Bee posted:

Seeking information on business management; specifically, turning 100k in investment capital into a digital ad agency with steady staff, office space, and ongoing contracting work. I've done something similar before but, besides putting the principals in touch with my tax advisor, who should I talk to?

If you've done something similar before, what do you need help with?

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
My thing is a consultancy that didn't solicit outside funds, so it's organizationally similar but I need to prep the proposal for investors (then oversee resultant funds and operations).

snagger
Aug 14, 2004

Golden Bee posted:

My thing is a consultancy that didn't solicit outside funds, so it's organizationally similar but I need to prep the proposal for investors (then oversee resultant funds and operations).

I am hopelessly confused by this post.

semicolonsrock
Aug 26, 2009

chugga chugga chugga
Cross posting from the Cavern of Cobol:

"I am in the process of writing a functional design specification document for an app, and while reading up on other people's methods, noticed a huge variety. I'm sure a lot of you have written these before, and I'm curious what process you have found most helpful. I'm working with a pretty small, flexible group, so I'm focusing mostly on getting ideas structured and including a lot of wireframed examples to think through ideas as I go. The big idea being making a document which will let the people who know what the users want communicate to the programmers what they will need. What does everyone else do?"

To be more clear though, this will be sent to a third party software co, so more specific = ok.

Golden Bee posted:

My thing is a consultancy that didn't solicit outside funds, so it's organizationally similar but I need to prep the proposal for investors (then oversee resultant funds and operations).

Do you want advice on pitching to investors? Or do you want legal advice?

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

semicolonsrock posted:


Do you want advice on pitching to investors? Or do you want legal advice?

Legal advice would be great.

semicolonsrock
Aug 26, 2009

chugga chugga chugga

Golden Bee posted:

Legal advice would be great.

You should probably look up various ways to fund companies (eg convertible note etc) and the legal ramifications. And what term sheets look like etc. I'd recommend like, a lawyer maybe. I think the expectation would be that you would present the terms initially.

jokes
Dec 20, 2012

Uh... Kupo?

For those of you in the service field, what do you find is the best way to attract random clients? Online advertising is cool or whatever, but marketing is a competitive field and the bigger firms will snatch up most of that business. I'm well-versed in SEO/SEM so online advertising isn't difficult and am branching off into starting my own consultancy firm (I'm also in law school and will go for an MBA after law school).

I have a few stable clients already lined up that will be enough to cover operating expenses, but want to grow it and have way too much time on my hands. I've found my best bet is small firms and startups who need help growing.

I'm considering going at this like a salesman and calling companies the old-fashioned way and scrounging my network, since I know an awful lot of professionals but that limits me to an immediate area. I have revenue to cover modest travel costs as well, and could go really anywhere in the US and have no problem driving too. It's just difficult since I really only know people in my immediate area.

sim
Sep 24, 2003

I worked at a small design service company for 5 years and the bulk of our clients came from referrals. They were also the best ones. Only a very small percentage of the clients that came from SEM were worth the time. Obviously that doesn't help you fill the pipeline immediately, but it's much easier to land a job based on an existing connection and recommendation than cold calling.

1. Do an amazing job on your first clients; exceed their expectations as much as possible.
2. Assuming they are very satisfied with your work, explicitly ask for a referral.
3. Offer them large discounts on future work for any of their referrals that lead to actual business.
4. Keep in contact with them, make sure they're still happy with the work. This will keep you fresh in their mind.

Hopefully at some point you stop having to work so hard at this and it just happens through word of mouth.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

sim posted:

Good advice

This has been my experience as well. You'll work a LOT harder convincing lookie-loos that they need a solid inbound marketing strategy. If someone comes to you, you're pre-qualified.

Have you tried offering better service packages for your existing clients? If you already do web content, could you create business emails?
Feel free to PM.

Edit: Things worked out.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jul 23, 2014

J4Gently
Jul 15, 2013

Golden Bee posted:

Legal advice would be great.

For legal advice talk to a lawyer...

Perhaps you have some local contact who can make a recommendation?


There are also some new online options that say they provide a better value.

Up Counsel is a pretty good resource and value for commercial legal work and they seem to be carving out a niche in business startup work.

https://www.upcounsel.com/

Another option is rocket lawyer though they seem very broad and not focused Up Counsel seems like a more curated platform.
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/

Leif.
Mar 27, 2005

Son of the Defender
Formerly Diplomaticus/SWATJester
As a lawyer, I wouldn't recommend Rocket Lawyer as a "find a lawyer, get legal advice" service. Their service is extremely focused around getting simple advice on simple legal documents (basic contracts, single-member LLC formation, etc.) I could go into more detail about it, but what it comes down to is the mandatory 40% reduction on our rates means that you end up scraping the bottom of the barrel for quality of your attorney.

Figure out what your issue is, and then seek out a lawyer in that field. Do you need a lawyer with experience in advertising? Do you need one that is familiar with financing and can negotiate your financing rounds for/with you? Do you need a litigator? A zoning expert? Someone with years of HR experience? It's not difficult to figure out who has a significant track record in those fields. Ask the local/state bar associations for recommendations. You can look at things like Superlawyers (if they review that practice area), or the "Best lawyers" issue of things like Washingtonian (whatever the equivalent is in your area). If you don't have a clue where to start, go on Avvo.com and see who is highly rated in your jurisdiction and feel free to ask any highly rated attorney there who they would recommend.

Then, pay them, and get your legal advice. ("advice" from non-lawyers is terrible. The other day I had to listen to an idiot 'retired paralegal' explain in excruciating detail how he "did his research" and came to the conclusion that no court except the Supreme Court is valid, and that he can defend clients as a lawyer because of a discrimination case that he misread/misinterpreted. Even when non-lawyer advice isn't simply wrong, it's usually unauthorized practice of law for them to give you "advice" of that kind.)

I'm wary of services like UpCounsel, in that they're often skimping on quality (UpCounsel, for instance, does not appear to require its attorneys to have malpractice insurance, and it looks like just about anyone can register there in 5 minutes.) And because these services are not law firms, they're not subject to ethics regulation the way a firm is.

Incidentally, 90% of the lawyers on those kinds of sites will not have touched any kind of finance in years, if at all.

BattleHamster
Mar 18, 2009

Hollis Brown posted:

Does anyone know a good source to get small batches of company polos or t-shirts made?

Lands End Business Outfitters is what the company I work for uses. We're small and usually order only around 2-4 polos or shirts at a time for new employees.

J4Gently
Jul 15, 2013

I agree on rocket lawyer it seems like a race to the bottom and in those types of situations quality quickly deteriorates.


But I do have a friend who used up counsel for some start-up work and he was happy with the work and results (they had been using a larger firm previously and wanted to try something different to save money as a bootstrapped startup). Prior to picking the lawyer he did talk to references

It seems like what they are trying to do is be selective and curate a pool of "good" lawyers on specific topics, now the danger is that in a quest for growth you lower standards and quality.


It will be interesting to see if they can strike a blance of quality vs quantity and if they can get market share.

PS: in looking for reviews came across this written by a lawyer who tried it out
http://abovethelaw.com/tag/upcounsel/

Leroy Diplowski
Aug 25, 2005

The Candyman Can :science:

Visit My Candy Shop

And SA Mart Thread

Leroy Diplowski posted:

I had a surprise meeting about funding yesterday. Thanks for the help! I implemented a lot of your suggestions. I'm supposed to hear something today. :ohdear:

Just popping in to say that we turned down the VC money and got an LOC from a local bank. It was definitely the right decision for us at the time.

J4Gently
Jul 15, 2013

Leroy Diplowski posted:

Just popping in to say that we turned down the VC money and got an LOC from a local bank. It was definitely the right decision for us at the time.

That is great news, for the amount of money you were looking for, and that short timeframe a bank loan looked like the best outcome for you, equity is very expensive in the long run.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest post. No lies whatsoever.

Thanks for the advice, folks. I'm going to update the thread with news because I'd appreciate any critique! This is all a new world to me as I actually work in government/academia.

-I posted in a recent hackernews thread looking for a freelancer dev/partner and got a pretty good response. i'll be interviewing people through the month. I'll pick a person to freelance or partner around early Sept. The developer will be creating a representative demo of the product which I'll use to show to investors & public (through kickstarter)

-I put in a provisional patent for my invention. I'm working with a patent attorney to have the complete one submitted by mid-end of Sept. IP will be in my name, not an LLC's name.

-At that point, I'll form the LLC & start a kickstarter to build buzz. I have no idea how much to raise for because I want to be able to meet my goal. I imagine dev costs & patent will be ~$8-12K which is out of pocket for me. The kickstarter and demo development should wrap up at around the same time, so I can give people who donated access.

-I did run into someone (a CEO) who has connections at a Big VC firm. I sent him an NDA and my deck. It was his idea to see where it goes, in particular courting a company the VC funds that would buy me out once a product is fully developed (this is my initial end game). I'm hedging my bets and doing everything independent of this, obviously.

Major questions:
-The invention needs significant access to data that companies I would want to buy me/partner with me have. The demo will not incorporate this data but future development must. I have no idea how to go about courting said companies to license data or partner with them.

-I suck at self-promotion and am a pretty private person. Are there any good resources for how to market a kickstarter? Any personal experiences?

-Assuming all goes well and I have a success kickstarter and completion of the demo, how do I court more funding? Do I just knock on the front door of a VC firm or angel investor's office?

e: ^^ How does getting LOC work? How much money/appraised value do you need?

Leroy Diplowski
Aug 25, 2005

The Candyman Can :science:

Visit My Candy Shop

And SA Mart Thread
I don't know much about your product, but I think I might be able to help out with a couple of your questions.

guidoanselmi posted:

Major questions:
-The invention needs significant access to data that companies I would want to buy me/partner with me have. The demo will not incorporate this data but future development must. I have no idea how to go about courting said companies to license data or partner with them.

You've been pretty vague about what the product is, so this might be a useless comment, but couldn't you generate a dummy dataset? Also, you could possibly offer a potential customer a steep discount on the services if a company gives you data to work with.

guidoanselmi posted:


-I suck at self-promotion and am a pretty private person. Are there any good resources for how to market a kickstarter? Any personal experiences?


I have run several successful Kickstarters. From my experience the companies that do best with KS think of it a way to sell pre-orders for products. Have a very simple value proposition and a good videographer. Also, really make sure you do your due diligence when coming up with rewards. If your product is more of a B2B service then KS would likely not be very fruitful.

If you suck at self promotion then practice, practice, practice. Pitch to yourself in the mirror. It's like playing the banjo. You will annoy the hell out of everyone at first, but eventually you well start to get some chops down.

guidoanselmi posted:


-Assuming all goes well and I have a success kickstarter and completion of the demo, how do I court more funding? Do I just knock on the front door of a VC firm or angel investor's office?

e: ^^ How does getting LOC work? How much money/appraised value do you need?

This is not what you will read if you google that question, but in my experience funding is very relationship driven. VCs don't fund projects they fund people. Incubators are an ideal place to run across potential investors, partners, and devs. Also, if you work in academia, there are a lot of colleges and universities that have specific funding and programs to link entrepreneurs in academia to funding. The Jim Moran Institute is the FSU version of this. Also, go make yourself known to your local chamber of commerce. Attend as many functions as you can (of many kinds, not just CoC) and practice your elevator pitch until you can get someone with no industry background to totally understand what your product is and how your product can generate revenue in 30 seconds.

To get an LOC for a startup you need to first have either a lot of collateral or documents showing at least some kind of cash flow through your business for about a year.

You mentioned that you are overbooked career wise. Startups can be very time and resource intensive. Do you want to be running a company? If not, you need to figure out who will. You have asked a lot of (pretty good) questions in this thread, but I think the most important question that you need ask yourself is exactly what you want out of your idea/product, and what you want out of your career. Do you want to eventually quit your job to run Guidoanselmi LLC? Do you want to do the minimum to get your idea up and running and then sell it off? At the end of the day you want to use your idea or your product to make guidoanselmi happy not the other way around.

semicolonsrock
Aug 26, 2009

chugga chugga chugga

guidoanselmi posted:

...
-Assuming all goes well and I have a success kickstarter and completion of the demo, how do I court more funding? Do I just knock on the front door of a VC firm or angel investor's office?

e: ^^ How does getting LOC work? How much money/appraised value do you need?

A few thoughts here:

1 -- Your product sounds b2b? Kickstarter isn't good for that really.

2 -- If I'm wrong, a successful kickstarter + a working product will definitely help in raising seed money. It shows consumer validation without actually having to have "real" traction.

3 -- Knocking on VC or Angel's doors will probably not work. If you do an incubator, that is incredible for intros. Otherwise, use anyone in your personal/school/work network you can find to get introductions. Worst case scenario: go on linkedin and get connected with the VCs there, it's usually easier to get intros there than in real life.

3.5 -- You want angel investors, not VCs most likely. Your size probably won't be large enough for most funds.

4 -- You want the IP to be your company's, not yours, generally speaking. The value to a VC of your company is waaaaaaay lower if it doesn't own your patent. I assume you could transfer this later, but something to think about.

5 -- I think a DE C corp is a better structure, but that's just me.

Happy to discuss more in PMs.

Baby Babbeh
Aug 2, 2005

It's hard to soar with the eagles when you work with Turkeys!!



I agree that Kickstarter is a bad route. Most people treat kickstarter donations as a way of preordering a project, and it sounds like your product has zero relevance to anyone that's not a company with data on hand.

I think you're probably not going to be able to get around raising institutional money, but a big name VC is not where you start. You need to find some angel investors, which you can probably do on strength of a semi-working demo, your own background and a good story about the size and direction of the market you're trying to target. The trick is to figure out who would actually use your product (i.e. the people in management roles at the companies that would be your customer) and then work like made to try to get in front of them and pitch your idea to see if you can get one of them to toss you a couple bucks. This is about money, but it's more its about names, if you can say "My product is primarily aimed at meeting the needs of companies like Company X in Industry Y, and Executive Z of Company X who's well respected in Industry Y believes in this product enough that he put his own money behind it" then that makes your pitch to other potential investors much stronger. If you can get an investor who knows people, he might be able to introduce you to other potential investors and your first customers.

Once you have a little money, the goal is to hire a dev full time and then get a minimal product out as quickly as possible so you can start getting customers and validating your story. Then you try to raise a Series A from a an early stage VC, who will primarily be evaluating you on:

Your existing investors
Your team
The customers you've amassed
The product and how big a market opportunity they think it is

In about that order. A VC will almost assuredly want you to become a Delaware C corp, incidentally, because its a better structure for companies that will issue stock.

J4Gently
Jul 15, 2013

semicolonsrock posted:

A few thoughts here:


4 -- You want the IP to be your company's, not yours, generally speaking. The value to a VC of your company is waaaaaaay lower if it doesn't own your patent. I assume you could transfer this later, but something to think about.



This one is the key, as you stated it (you keep the ip) there would be no reason for someone to invest in your firm.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest post. No lies whatsoever.

Thanks for the responses. I have a provisional patent so I can disclose at least what it does: it's an algorithm for decision analysis of long-term romantic relationships. tldr: it tells you the cost/benefit of being with someone specific (e.g. current partner, online profile) vs staying single and looking for someone more compatible. There's a lot of interesting data beyond that and a lot more machinery that goes into how it actually works.

It probably sounds crazy but I've had the theory reviewed by a good many folks (statisticians & physicists) and people are universally impressed. My background in complex systems modeling and cost/risk analysis gives me credentials as well.

Just quickly:

semicolonsrock posted:

1 -- Your product sounds b2b? Kickstarter isn't good for that really.

2 -- If I'm wrong, a successful kickstarter + a working product will definitely help in raising seed money. It shows consumer validation without actually having to have "real" traction.

This really is a b2b effort at its core but the popular appeal is undeniable, so I want to leverage that and get some users and see what the data I get looks like.

I wonder if kickstarter will nix me (if so, indiegogo for me). It will first be an end-user service and I ask for user to self-report things which makes it super unscientific but it still works. I've been running & testing my prototype without data. Real data will make it work legitimately. YMMV type thing.

Obviously, this is targeted at Those Major Companies who have romantic demographic data and work to match people. Hopefully the patent will lock them out of the methodologies needed to develop a similar algorithm? I'm leaving that to my patent attorney. In general, it's very difficult to compete with the statistics they've generated on romantic personalities - grassroots methods of obtaining data (e.g. surveymonkey) won't make me competitive in short time scales. A partnership is ideal and I look forward to licensing the API to whomever, though a little bit of work needs to be done on the statistics at that point. Through b2b, I will never have to worry about licensing data - I get their data so I can give them numbers back. Obviously there's contractual issues on use, storage, etc which may give me more data on my severs at the expense of $, but that's a ways down the road.

Leroy Diplowski posted:

I have run several successful Kickstarters. From my experience the companies that do best with KS think of it a way to sell pre-orders for products. Have a very simple value proposition and a good videographer. Also, really make sure you do your due diligence when coming up with rewards. If your product is more of a B2B service then KS would likely not be very fruitful.

My current model is that only kickstarter supports will have access in the foreseeable future as an incentive to invest. Got a script written, videographer, a cute cat, and rights to music from a band. We'll see what comes out of it. At this point, I'm planning on the kickstarter ending/product finishing before the holidays so kids can be guilted by their folks for still being single, etc.

quote:

Also, if you work in academia, there are a lot of colleges and universities that have specific funding and programs to link entrepreneurs in academia to funding. The Jim Moran Institute is the FSU version of this. Also, go make yourself known to your local chamber of commerce. Attend as many functions as you can (of many kinds, not just CoC) and practice your elevator pitch until you can get someone with no industry background to totally understand what your product is and how your product can generate revenue in 30 seconds.

Just looked into my uni's fund last night. I'll be doing that though money won't come through for a bit, presuming I win the competition.

*I can transfer it over to TBD corp. The reason I was planning otherwise was a former roommate and Very Successful M&A attorney told me to keep it in my name as extra leverage in any negotiations. Makes clear sense why that makes it less appealing for VC, though.

e: as an excited note, purchasing the domain name tonight!

guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Aug 28, 2014

semicolonsrock
Aug 26, 2009

chugga chugga chugga
Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah selling the tech of the company to someone later on definitely seems like it would make sense. Also, sounds interesting?

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest post. No lies whatsoever.

Thanks. So I'm not announcing it to the world yet, but I'll just put this here for now in case you guys have any suggestions: http://dryenta.com/.

It's a generic page that I'll clean up & make more approachable over time. I should have a logo in a week or two (done by a friend who's also doing some animation for the kickstarter video). Eventually it'll be replaced by something much nicer right before the kickstarter goes live.

Finch!
Sep 11, 2001

Spatial Awareness?

[ ] Whaleshark

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Is anyone attending The Lean Startup conference this year, or have any feedback from previous years?

Some background: I'm visiting the US for seven weeks from early November, mostly for fun, and although my company is not a startup (my father founded it 40 something years ago) I'm attending. We're a small (Dad, myself, one developer and one or two more geologists) business dealing in petroleum exploration information. Dad is a fit 74 years old and we're trying to sell our data asset but aren't having any success because customers would rather buy individual datasets as they need them, rather than a whole bunch of data they don't need for a whole bunch more money. Realistically, the data should belong to the federal government but we've managed to annoy their people who do the same thing as we do by doing a better job, and they'd rather try to catch up than buy our data. I've never really had any intention of taking over the business but I'm looking at side projects (and we have many ideas but too few people to implement them) to diversify the business and put our huge data archive to some use and fund a team to continue Dad's life work. Unfortunately, Dad is old and wants to do things his way (small team, no debt, he personally oversees everything) so any diversification will have to be a startup in itself, with access to our data and only limited funding. Sigh.

I figure it never hurts to learn from new people from diverse environments, the networking opportunities will be good, and I'll be in town anyway... so attending makes sense, but it's not too late to bail if it's a waste of money.

USDA Choice
Jul 4, 2004

BIG TEN PRIDE
Hi startup goons,

A friend and I are starting up a wooden sunglasses brand and we're learning a ton as we go. A lot of startups in this thread and in general revolve around software, services, or other intangible products so it's somewhat different, but we both truly believe in the product and have already been through so much just to get some prototypes that we finally like.

Talking with vendors and getting into supply chain has been quite the initiation but right now the stage we're at is marketing and I'm looking for input by anyone that's had a successful time funding a campaign for on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. From what I've already read in this thread, we seem to be hitting the important buttons of it being B2C and a product that's not widely available at Target or big boxes. I've made an SA-Mart post and our Indiegogo campaign is halfway in, and so far pretty much all of our advertising has been an SA banner and Facebook/Twitter shares from friends and family. Our problem is that we haven't gotten good penetration on these; our personal social media accounts only have so much reach. I'm looking into buying official Facebook advertising and promoted tweets and wonder if anyone has had any real success with these, particularly as they relate to campaigns and not products already in the market.

I'm also looking for any general advice on selling durable goods in general beyond just the funding campaign. The general cost of acquiring customers, how product sales rose or fell and other concerns are all something we're interested in.

Drive By
Feb 26, 2004

Dinosaur Gum
I run a physical product company (https://www.cookmellow.com) that was kind-of crowd funded to great success. Happy to help if I can, shoot me a pm if you think I'd be helpful.

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moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web

guidoanselmi posted:

Thanks. So I'm not announcing it to the world yet, but I'll just put this here for now in case you guys have any suggestions: http://dryenta.com/.
lol what the hell is this? forecasting whether a relationship will work?

What is your plan to monetize it, it seems like this would be one of those MSN quiz articles, not anything someone would actually pay for.

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