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_areaman
Oct 28, 2009

I want to harvest more money out of my users. I built a free app that integrates with a financial investment product. I get 3 to 10 new users every day purely from organic app store search. I get about $1.60 per user, per year off of mobile ads. The subscription product that removes the ads nets me $4.55 per user, per year. I'm not really interested in ideas for pushing more subscriptions, I'd rather just make more money off of everyone if possible. I have many ideas for how to sell more subscriptions, but the big money will be in increasing the money extracted from the huge amount of non-premium users.

I would like more users, of course, but that is really the job of the business I integrate with, as a subsection of their users naturally seek me out if they want to operate via mobile, because I'm basically the only game in town as the competition is laughably bad. I am trying several tactics to get more users per day, which is helping, but that is a tough battle.

I have considered renting / selling my email list, but I have yet to find a way to reliably do this in a straightforward manner. Any info or opinions on this? I have lots of detailed information about each user, as well.

Also, there is affiliate marketing. Amazon does not allow you to put affiliate links in mobile apps that aren't in the Fire store, which I find odd considering how much money they would make, so for affiliate marketing I'm basically pushing weird financial services I have never used, or pushing products from weird retail websites to them. I'd rather just find cool, relevant amazon products (books, etc.) and put some affiliate links in the app, which I apparently can't do (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Also, my users REALLY love my product, I'm extremely reactive to their needs and am helping them invest lots of money. So the user base is very active, using the app several times each day.

So, does anyone know any tricks for squeezing more dollars out of your users?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

snagger
Aug 14, 2004

_areaman posted:

I want to harvest more money out of my users.

I don't know your app, but financial + affiliate seems like it'd be a great combination that's compatible with above-board products and techniques. Can you copy Mint's model of linking to major banks/credit cards/insurance? Or can you tailor mobile ads to these? Those sectors have crazy high ad spend.

Gounads
Mar 13, 2013

Where am I?
How did I get here?
From last page... in case anyone wants to know how it turned out.

Talked with lawyer/accountant and was right in my thinking about taxes. But there's this thing called a profits-only interest which essentially states you're entitled to a percentage of profits and appreciation in value. Since it's worth $0 on day one (no appreciation) it's not taxed. We went with that but at a higher percentage.

I would have preferred transitioning to a c-corp and doing options, but there were other reasons not to right now.

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine
If I want to eventually spin off a side project into a startup, do I need to incorporate the business through Delaware or something ahead of time? In the show Silicon Valley they get an investor's check made out to their "company" before it's been legally created which causes problems. Obviously it's TV but I'm worried this is a common mistake for founders without business experience.

Gounads
Mar 13, 2013

Where am I?
How did I get here?
Spin it off when you start looking for investors or another person joins in. Probably a good idea as soon as you have customers as well to limit liability.

You don't *have* to go the Delaware c-corp route, but investors like it for a variety of reasons. An LLC is an easier route.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Gounads posted:

Probably a good idea as soon as you have customers as well to limit liability.

Incorporation isn't a magic totem. A one-man corporation may not protect you from very much in court, and all the company's debts will be in your name anyway (because the corporation won't have enough credit)

If you are concerned about personal liability for your small business activity, you need to have umbrella insurance.

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck
I'm working on a SaaS business to "insource" rather than outsource collaboration. I'd lov it if you could spend a moment and answer a few questions for me.

When you visit https://www.worktopus.com does the home page:

A: Clearly explain what the service is and how you'd benefit;

B: Convince you to sign up and give it a try.

C: if not, where do things fall down?

slap me and kiss me fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Feb 8, 2016

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Pfox posted:

I'm working on a SaaS business to "insource" rather than outsource collaboration. I'd lov it if you could spend a moment and answer a few questions for me.

When you visit https://www.worktopus.com does the home page:

A: Clearly explain what the service is and how you'd benefit;

B: Convince you to sign u and give it a try.

C: if not, where do things fall down?
The explanation's good enough, but unless you already have a pile of customers and you're just asking us to vet your design and copy for its own sake, your time is gonna be better spent going out and talking to people who might give you actual money for this instead of optimizing your marketing materials.

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

Vulture Culture posted:

The explanation's good enough, but unless you already have a pile of customers and you're just asking us to vet your design and copy for its own sake, your time is gonna be better spent going out and talking to people who might give you actual money for this instead of optimizing your marketing materials.

That is good advice. I'm definitely stalling because I have no idea how to sell. Any suggested reading materials?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Pfox posted:

That is good advice. I'm definitely stalling because I have no idea how to sell. Any suggested reading materials?
Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany was the first really good book on his customer development philosophy, though he's since distanced himself from it because he doesn't much like his disjointed, collection-of-essays writing style in that book anymore. He's more recently published The Startup Owner's Manual, which is great. Buy the second and skim the first for anything that he forgot to carry over.

The Eric Ries book The Lean Startup is sort of the Startup Bible and is a great resource on how to define a Minimum Viable Product, which will help guide the direction of your meetings (the Lean Canvas stuff is useful too). From a development-side perspective, knowing how to write and organize user stories is a really important skill for turning these meetings into products, and I'm a big champion of Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping for this one.

When the time comes to pitch your stuff to journalists for PR, Ed Zitron's This is How You Pitch is a concise, no-bullshit read on how to interact with people who will get your name out there.

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.

Pfox posted:

I'm working on a SaaS business to "insource" rather than outsource collaboration. I'd lov it if you could spend a moment and answer a few questions for me.

When you visit https://www.worktopus.com does the home page:

A: Clearly explain what the service is and how you'd benefit;

B: Convince you to sign u and give it a try.

C: if not, where do things fall down?

A. It seems like an in-house Stackoverflow, where you can build a knowledge base inside of your company.

B. Sorry, we already have Confluence and Questions for Confluence set up which seems to do something similar. As for your copy, "enters the skills they need to complete the job" is a bit confusing, especially if they don't know the skills they need.

quote:

Worktopus monitors your organization's most in-demand skills, and compares that with what people are good at. It's simple to see if there's a mismatch, and that makes recruiting the people you actually need a lot easier.

This is actually a really interesting value proposition. Hiring, especially for every hot tech company, is a HUGE issue. The wrong hire may take months to weed out and cost tens of thousands of dollars (even more so if found through a recruiter). If you're familiar with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on Hacker News), he just released a new startup aimed to hire better (http://starfighters.io - though it's aimed at programmers). A general purpose tool that could help managers and HR departments highlight a shortage of skills and then go out and find that specific person would be very valuable.

quote:

Worktopus is private, locked behind your corporate email address, so you don't need to fear prying eyes. We use a document reference system that ensures your sensitive documents stay within the firewall, whether it's on your own servers or housed with a cloud storage provider you already trust.

Hows that work? It can access files behind a firewall? One of the huge reasons the Atlassian suite of tools is so popular is because they can be hosted internally.

C. I know MVP's generally don't need to look great, but the design is very off-putting to me. The half rounded half square everything is jarring, and stuff like the screenshot below with the weird line and almost no-contrast menu don't inspire a lot of confidence. I would definitely find another fresher template first (maybe one based off Bootstrap or Foundation).



Not crazy about the name, but there are a zillion oddly named successful enterprises (wtf is an Atlassian, btw?)

The other posters have great suggestions on how to start selling. Definitely get this in front of actual decision makers (CIO's, HR people, middle managers) and see what their thoughts are.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
The one thing that strikes me as odd, that you'll certainly need to explain to more astute buyers:

You're pitching this as a tool to help facilitate cross-functional, self-organizing teams. The way you're highlighting in-demand skills and using them to influence HR, rather than product teams, to create positions means you're creating centers of excellence with shared resources, not giving each team the resources they need to successfully build their products. How do you reconcile these?

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

It's not really clear to me how you're doing "We do this by in-sourcing your critical tasks to the already vetted, experienced people within your organization who have the expertise and spare capacity needed to get the job done." A deeper explanation (on another page, anyway) or screenshots would go a long way to helping me be less skeptical.

Also knowing where it fits in an organization with internal wiki pages/Atlassian Confluence or Slack would personally help me. (tangentially, the slack and confluence sites do a good job of explaining what they do and how they programmatically/technically interface with other products)

_____

My product (https://www.nanaya.co) launches on Valentine's Day. I'm looking forward to sleep or, more realistically, getting inundated by inevitable bug reports and server issues. Our launch party last week went over pretty well, there's nothing like people laughing, smiling , and squatting on the demo computers not letting others do it so they can play around with it more. We must have been doing somethings right. :unsmith:

Would be curious for any thoughts on marketing. Paid for some promotional work, we have a lot of social media hooks in the results pages, and will be using data to run a blog like OkCupid's. Personally, I'm frustrated reaching out to press who never respond while covering other dating-related startups. A major concern is that we're bootstraping a big data product from nothing so the results are a bit funky - we'll need a lot more users to try it out before results stabilize.

guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Feb 11, 2016

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck
Ahhh, so much feedback! Thanks, all!

Vulture Culture posted:

Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany was the first really good book on his customer development philosophy, though he's since distanced himself from it because he doesn't much like his disjointed, collection-of-essays writing style in that book anymore. He's more recently published The Startup Owner's Manual, which is great. Buy the second and skim the first for anything that he forgot to carry over.

The Eric Ries book The Lean Startup is sort of the Startup Bible and is a great resource on how to define a Minimum Viable Product, which will help guide the direction of your meetings (the Lean Canvas stuff is useful too). From a development-side perspective, knowing how to write and organize user stories is a really important skill for turning these meetings into products, and I'm a big champion of Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping for this one.

When the time comes to pitch your stuff to journalists for PR, Ed Zitron's This is How You Pitch is a concise, no-bullshit read on how to interact with people who will get your name out there.

That's great, thanks very much!

musclecoder posted:

A. It seems like an in-house Stackoverflow, where you can build a knowledge base inside of your company.

B. Sorry, we already have Confluence and Questions for Confluence set up which seems to do something similar. As for your copy, "enters the skills they need to complete the job" is a bit confusing, especially if they don't know the skills they need.


This is actually a really interesting value proposition. Hiring, especially for every hot tech company, is a HUGE issue. The wrong hire may take months to weed out and cost tens of thousands of dollars (even more so if found through a recruiter). If you're familiar with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on Hacker News), he just released a new startup aimed to hire better (http://starfighters.io - though it's aimed at programmers). A general purpose tool that could help managers and HR departments highlight a shortage of skills and then go out and find that specific person would be very valuable.


Hows that work? It can access files behind a firewall? One of the huge reasons the Atlassian suite of tools is so popular is because they can be hosted internally.

C. I know MVP's generally don't need to look great, but the design is very off-putting to me. The half rounded half square everything is jarring, and stuff like the screenshot below with the weird line and almost no-contrast menu don't inspire a lot of confidence. I would definitely find another fresher template first (maybe one based off Bootstrap or Foundation).



Not crazy about the name, but there are a zillion oddly named successful enterprises (wtf is an Atlassian, btw?)

The other posters have great suggestions on how to start selling. Definitely get this in front of actual decision makers (CIO's, HR people, middle managers) and see what their thoughts are.

Essentially, although it's also for task collaboration, not just questions and answers.

It sounds as though your company has an appetite for collaboration, you're just already filling it. Fair enough, I'll just have to win you over in the future.

The document reference segment simply points to a path - it can be internet / cloud, it can be intranet, or it can be a network path to a document. Follow the link, and your computer will do the rest.

Good catch on the menu contrast, I've corrected it.



Vulture Culture posted:

The one thing that strikes me as odd, that you'll certainly need to explain to more astute buyers:

You're pitching this as a tool to help facilitate cross-functional, self-organizing teams. The way you're highlighting in-demand skills and using them to influence HR, rather than product teams, to create positions means you're creating centers of excellence with shared resources, not giving each team the resources they need to successfully build their products. How do you reconcile these?


There's a tactical layer, which is self-organizing teams and employee-to-employee collaboration. There's also a strategic level; by monitoring the skills each task is tagged with, it becomes quite easy to see what's in demand within a given company, and similarly, by monitoring the skills attached to each user profile, see what the existing strengths are. Worktopus provides tools to reduce the need for external hires, but it also makes it easy to see when you need them, and what they should be good at.


guidoanselmi posted:

It's not really clear to me how you're doing "We do this by in-sourcing your critical tasks to the already vetted, experienced people within your organization who have the expertise and spare capacity needed to get the job done." A deeper explanation (on another page, anyway) or screenshots would go a long way to helping me be less skeptical.

Also knowing where it fits in an organization with internal wiki pages/Atlassian Confluence or Slack would personally help me. (tangentially, the slack and confluence sites do a good job of explaining what they do and how they programmatically/technically interface with other products)

_____

My product (https://www.nanaya.co) launches on Valentine's Day. I'm looking forward to sleep or, more realistically, getting inundated by inevitable bug reports and server issues. Our launch party last week went over pretty well, there's nothing like people laughing, smiling , and squatting on the demo computers not letting others do it so they can play around with it more. We must have been doing somethings right. :unsmith:

Would be curious for any thoughts on marketing. Paid for some promotional work, we have a lot of social media hooks in the results pages, and will be using data to run a blog like OkCupid's. Personally, I'm frustrated reaching out to press who never respond while covering other dating-related startups. A major concern is that we're bootstraping a big data product from nothing so the results are a bit funky - we'll need a lot more users to try it out before results stabilize.

There's a whole section of screenshots on that very page in the 'How it Works' section.

Good point on where it sits - it's designed to be a lightweight collaboration tool. Post a task, tag it with skills, and anyone across your entire organization who has those same skills tagged in their profile will match the task, so you don't collaborate with just your immediate team, but people who have the skills you need no matter where in the organization (or the org chart) they are. If you work in a company of 10-30 people, it's probably not for you, but if you're in a company of 50+ (or 500) and don't know everyone personally, there's probably someone out there who can help you out with an issue you're having who you haven't even met.

The aforementioned document reference section exists on a per-task basis, and it allows you to link to basically anything, so you can absolutely link an internal wiki, Confluence page, bug tracker, or any other exposed page.

Cast_No_Shadow
Jun 8, 2010

The Republic of Luna Equestria is a huge, socially progressive nation, notable for its punitive income tax rates. Its compassionate, cynical population of 714m are ruled with an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one outside the party gets too rich.

Octopus guy. I think you need to focus a little more. What is the one unfair advantage your giving the people who sign up with you? Is it better hiring or better collaboration? Decide and make the lesser or the two support the other. Good for its own sake doesnt sell very well. Clear links to how this makes me able to out perform MY competition does.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

Pfox posted:

There's a whole section of screenshots on that very page in the 'How it Works' section.
Doh, I did miss that. Those images are so small I scrolled right past them. Might want to crop out the white sides and make the images larger and more visible (while leaving the magnifying glass).

Honestly some minor tweaking of the splash page will go a long way into making the information pop out. I've been fighting this issue myself, so I have a lot of empathy.

quote:

The aforementioned document reference section exists on a per-task basis, and it allows you to link to basically anything, so you can absolutely link an internal wiki, Confluence page, bug tracker, or any other exposed page.

That might be good to write about. Might be brain dead obvious to you but a cold reader might not connect the dots.

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

guidoanselmi posted:

Doh, I did miss that. Those images are so small I scrolled right past them. Might want to crop out the white sides and make the images larger and more visible (while leaving the magnifying glass).

Honestly some minor tweaking of the splash page will go a long way into making the information pop out. I've been fighting this issue myself, so I have a lot of empathy.


That might be good to write about. Might be brain dead obvious to you but a cold reader might not connect the dots.

Straight up, you missing those images has led to another site redesign that puts a screenshot of the product in action right above the fold. It's actually way better than trying to explain in a couple lines of text. I'm rolling it into another batch of changes and it should be live in a day or so.

Thanks!

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Pfox posted:

There's a tactical layer, which is self-organizing teams and employee-to-employee collaboration. There's also a strategic level; by monitoring the skills each task is tagged with, it becomes quite easy to see what's in demand within a given company, and similarly, by monitoring the skills attached to each user profile, see what the existing strengths are. Worktopus provides tools to reduce the need for external hires, but it also makes it easy to see when you need them, and what they should be good at.
Ultimately you need to be concerned with the people who are telling you "I'll give you money if _____" and not internet loudmouths but this thing I quoted is a non-answer. Who's going to be acting on this information, and how does that concretely help facilitate better self-organizing teams?

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Feb 13, 2016

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Vulture Culture posted:

Ultimately you need to be concerned with the people who are telling you "I'll give you money if _____" and not internet loudmouths but this thing I quoted is a non-answer. Who's going to be acting on this information, and how does that concretely help facilitate better self-organizing teams?

I know this is implied in your statement, but ideally people are telling you that in some binding way. Eg, not internet loudmouths that will say they will give you money, but people you've spoken to that will actually give you money. It's very easy to assume one is the other and walk yourself off a cliff.

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

Launch day for https://www.nanaya.co and we have far more users than my wildest expectations. of course that means our server is not coping well. I guess that's the best way to fail if I have to pick a way.

Otherwise, >10k users so far and haven't spent a dime on marketing (besides publicists for this launch) and a substantial amount of traffic is coming from social media sharing. We have a strategy to keep the more users coming after the rush that will hopefully work. I'm pretty content.

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

guidoanselmi posted:

Launch day for https://www.nanaya.co and we have far more users than my wildest expectations. of course that means our server is not coping well. I guess that's the best way to fail if I have to pick a way.

Otherwise, >10k users so far and haven't spent a dime on marketing (besides publicists for this launch) and a substantial amount of traffic is coming from social media sharing. We have a strategy to keep the more users coming after the rush that will hopefully work. I'm pretty content.

That's awesome, congrats!

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.
Wow, that's really awesome guidoanselmi.

What's the stack the server/software is built on? Where are you hosting it? (Site's down for me now, unfortunately).

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

musclecoder posted:

Wow, that's really awesome guidoanselmi.

What's the stack the server/software is built on? Where are you hosting it? (Site's down for me now, unfortunately).
Yeah this is far beyond my wildest expectations.

It's been fluctuating through the day though and I did have that issue later. We are on digitalocean at the moment - I haven't been thrilled with their options and service (no phone) and we can get more cores without ~45m downtime and partition resizing.

We are setting up a really beefy bare metal server on Softlayer (I dare our users to break that one) after receiving a $1000/month credit through a local startup event. They've been awesome for customer service and options FWIW.

We'll bring it down shortly once the Softlayer one is up. We were expecting more load through the week, so we're rushing hard atm...

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.
Yeah I live in Dallas and have a box on Softlayer (we have our local meetups at their HQ), definitely the best for hardware.

Chunjee
Oct 27, 2004

Seems perpetually down because https://www.nanaya.co/ leads nowhere. http://nanaya.co/ works however.
DNS/Alias may need a little tweaking. I didn't see this answered but what software is it built on?

edit: oh maybe its the [url]https://[/url]

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

Yeah we had an emergency sever migration last night and are forwarding from the first server to the second until DNS kicks. It still hasn't so it's really odd. We've been in major damage control mode since we've gotten all this load.

Of course now we have 4k simultaneous users because this hit brazil...

We didn't build this for this scale and we didn't even put in our revenue gen features yet as we wanted users to have premium for the first few days or so till the server stabilized.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

guidoanselmi posted:

Yeah we had an emergency sever migration last night and are forwarding from the first server to the second until DNS kicks. It still hasn't so it's really odd. We've been in major damage control mode since we've gotten all this load.

Of course now we have 4k simultaneous users because this hit brazil...

We didn't build this for this scale and we didn't even put in our revenue gen features yet as we wanted users to have premium for the first few days or so till the server stabilized.
Haha, I know this problem well. On the bright side, you didn't have Kevin Rose tweet out to 1.6M followers while you were in beta asking them to help him test something

Emnity
Sep 24, 2009

King of Scotland
I am looking for some guidance in this here thread.

I would love to start my own business and may some day decide to do so, but at present I am in a financially secure position in a good company and with a decent salary as part of a large utility firm, and I see no need to change this in the short term while I have two very small children. My core duties are Project Management for CapEx and OpEx projects, Risk and Interface Management and as a liaison with our delivery partners in some countries where the regulation requires it.

My interests are in Business Development and I chair and attend a number of work groups within the company and its subsidaries.

I would like to determine, based on the experience of those in this thread, if there is value in me trying to approach younger startups to provide my skillset to support their technical ideas. The intention would not be that I ask for a market level salary or payment at the time, but that I potentially gain shares or some other form of security based on my contribution to their success, potentially securing a future full or part time role as appropriate.

I am currently also progressing through my MBA, just incase this is relevant.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Emnity posted:

I am looking for some guidance in this here thread.

I would love to start my own business and may some day decide to do so, but at present I am in a financially secure position in a good company and with a decent salary as part of a large utility firm, and I see no need to change this in the short term while I have two very small children. My core duties are Project Management for CapEx and OpEx projects, Risk and Interface Management and as a liaison with our delivery partners in some countries where the regulation requires it.

My interests are in Business Development and I chair and attend a number of work groups within the company and its subsidaries.

I would like to determine, based on the experience of those in this thread, if there is value in me trying to approach younger startups to provide my skillset to support their technical ideas. The intention would not be that I ask for a market level salary or payment at the time, but that I potentially gain shares or some other form of security based on my contribution to their success, potentially securing a future full or part time role as appropriate.

I am currently also progressing through my MBA, just incase this is relevant.
Don't plan on being a co-founder while you've got another full-time job.

There's plenty of room to be an advisor somewhere, but do you have any credibility or experience with the startup way of doing things? Risk management for a utility sounds like basically the opposite of the kind of experience most startups need.

Emnity
Sep 24, 2009

King of Scotland

Vulture Culture posted:

Don't plan on being a co-founder while you've got another full-time job.

There's plenty of room to be an advisor somewhere, but do you have any credibility or experience with the startup way of doing things? Risk management for a utility sounds like basically the opposite of the kind of experience most startups need.

Co-founder isn't necessarily where I am aiming at present for sure.

Risk Management is just one facet of what I deal with and certainly isnt a defining element. I have assisted a small number of companies owned by friends and family in a business development and trouble shooting role, with high levels of success across what are very diverse businesses. Beyong that no direct startup experience but I am quick-study and will research as appropriate.

But your answer is generally seeming to point in the 'no' direction regarding my suitability.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Emnity posted:

Co-founder isn't necessarily where I am aiming at present for sure.

Risk Management is just one facet of what I deal with and certainly isnt a defining element. I have assisted a small number of companies owned by friends and family in a business development and trouble shooting role, with high levels of success across what are very diverse businesses. Beyong that no direct startup experience but I am quick-study and will research as appropriate.

But your answer is generally seeming to point in the 'no' direction regarding my suitability.
The small business development is a lot more applicable, for sure. Startups are funny animals: you have a group of people with certain skill sets who know they want to build something cool, but they don't know what it is yet, they don't know how to monetize it, and they have no idea where the money is coming from in order to get there once they do. Business development in an early-stage startup context means meeting with people and getting them to tell you what they would give you money for, then you need to figure out whether that's a direction you want to go in or whether it's a distraction from the core direction you want your product to take. Business development is a valuable role, but early-stage companies need to all be meetings to figure out what a minimum viable product is. Advisory roles are doable part-time, but I can't see how they would work for anyone without a proven track record of successes with startups. Any founder can read the same Steve Blank/Eric Ries/Alistair Croll books about how to build a startup. If you're really great at selling, that might be valuable on its own.

I'm not saying to do it or don't do it, but know what you're getting yourself into. You should probably immerse yourself in a few and they way they operate before trying to get on board telling anyone how to run or grow theirs.

the talent deficit
Dec 20, 2003

self-deprecation is a very british trait, and problems can arise when the british attempt to do so with a foreign culture





Emnity posted:

I am looking for some guidance in this here thread.

You have a skill set that would be tremendously valuable to a certain class of startups but also one they are unlikely to recognize they need. Where are you located? If you are in a tech hub your best bet is approaching vc and angel investors and offering them analysis and services for portfolio companies. If you're not in a startup rich environment consider partnering with someone with money and a desire to fund startups and becoming angels/vcs

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

Gounads posted:

Spin it off when you start looking for investors or another person joins in. Probably a good idea as soon as you have customers as well to limit liability.

You don't *have* to go the Delaware c-corp route, but investors like it for a variety of reasons. An LLC is an easier route.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

Incorporation isn't a magic totem. A one-man corporation may not protect you from very much in court, and all the company's debts will be in your name anyway (because the corporation won't have enough credit)

If you are concerned about personal liability for your small business activity, you need to have umbrella insurance.

Thanks for the advice, sorry for the late reply. We would have two founders and maybe freelance contractors. I'll look into corporation credit and LLC stuff.

Emnity
Sep 24, 2009

King of Scotland

the talent deficit posted:

You have a skill set that would be tremendously valuable to a certain class of startups but also one they are unlikely to recognize they need. Where are you located? If you are in a tech hub your best bet is approaching vc and angel investors and offering them analysis and services for portfolio companies. If you're not in a startup rich environment consider partnering with someone with money and a desire to fund startups and becoming angels/vcs

Thanks for your input. I am currently based in Berlin, but originally from the UK and often in Madrid.

I will look into this option.

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



I have a couple creative ideas that I want to start engaging other people for help with. They take the form of software. How do I go about seeking people out and hiring them as a freelancer while protecting my idea? Do I just need an NDA? If so, where can I find a reliable source for NDA tempaltes and other legal templates. or should I find a lawyer? What kind of lawyer?

I also am open to the idea of finding partners on these ideas, where should I go to get setup in place for that kind of engagement? For instance, I'm a software developer and I'd like to find a graphic artist to be my creative partner and work on the graphics, splitting ownership of the project 50/50 - what ways are there to make that official and legally binding?

Cast_No_Shadow
Jun 8, 2010

The Republic of Luna Equestria is a huge, socially progressive nation, notable for its punitive income tax rates. Its compassionate, cynical population of 714m are ruled with an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one outside the party gets too rich.

KoRMaK posted:

I have a couple creative ideas that I want to start engaging other people for help with. They take the form of software. How do I go about seeking people out and hiring them as a freelancer while protecting my idea? Do I just need an NDA? If so, where can I find a reliable source for NDA tempaltes and other legal templates. or should I find a lawyer? What kind of lawyer?

I also am open to the idea of finding partners on these ideas, where should I go to get setup in place for that kind of engagement? For instance, I'm a software developer and I'd like to find a graphic artist to be my creative partner and work on the graphics, splitting ownership of the project 50/50 - what ways are there to make that official and legally binding?

You can probably get a boilerplate nda from the Internet which is good enough until you need a lawyer for other things.

If you want to officially split your company you need to actually make one and then divide shares to fit the split. Either see a lawyer or get googling. Although you can do it more informally at first you will want to do it properly fairly quickly once you have established you're actually going through with everything.

50-50 with an artist seems dumb though. Either this is a real business in which case either pay cash or bring on an artist who had other more valuable skills to a start up or its just for funsies in which case 50% of bubkiss is still bubkiss.

If this is a real business there are very few ideas where my first employee/partner is ever going to be the graphics guy. If your primarily a coder you probably want a business type person (inc finance). Sales, marketing and product will also be fairly early depending on the idea and your skill set. Don't fall into the trap of thinking all you need to do is make a cool thing and everything else will fall into place. Its a cliched adage but mcdonalds dont make billions because they make the best burgers.

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

guidoanselmi posted:

Launch day for https://www.nanaya.co and we have far more users than my wildest expectations. of course that means our server is not coping well. I guess that's the best way to fail if I have to pick a way.

Otherwise, >10k users so far and haven't spent a dime on marketing (besides publicists for this launch) and a substantial amount of traffic is coming from social media sharing. We have a strategy to keep the more users coming after the rush that will hopefully work. I'm pretty content.
"The server"

Hope you have enough success to discover the wonderful world of operations!

guidoanselmi
Feb 6, 2008

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

:words:

So it's been about two and a half months post launch and there's been over 200K users who have signed up (a little over a quarter who have actually completed the assessment). I did nothing for marketing besides having a local story in the newspaper that went on AP newswire. The site is breaking even at the moment pending an agreement with the company I'm licensing a personality test from.

But:
- I'm totally out of funds and focusing on my PhD. Haven't even kept up social media, done analysis on the data, or written blog posts because I need to finish my PhD. That's my 100% time commitment at the moment until my dissertation is complete.
- 80-90% of the users are Brazilian.
- It was free until about three weeks ago, as soon as I started people stopped doing the assessment. I think in the three weeks I've figured out a decent price for the meanwhile ($4.99, one time) and UX so I should see the ratio of customers increase. I figure after a month I'll have sufficiently stable metrics on cost/revenue to show but unfortunately it's for a market that's less willing to buy things online than US consumers.
- There's no repeat users because the MVP wasn't set up to generate new content.

With where the product is and how it'd grow, I don't expect the revenue to really be anything attractive and the whole point of the company is to branch the brand into other markets that are much more reliable and open after the romance brand has been well established in the US market. Of course, whenever I've laid out these plans STL business people think I'm defocused, etc rather than my professional background being doing multi-decade plans for my day job with ~<$1M budgets to get things done.

I'm planning a trip to CA to hit up LA and SF to meet potential investors for the next steps (list is 0 now). I'll be moving back to LA for my old job in January and will be researching local angels, but if anyone here knows anyone who'd be interested in big data/consumer market research plays I'd be tremendously appreciative. I'm also halfway tempted to court some Brazilian VC to grow the product there given how many users exist. Apparently online dating isn't successful in Brazil but this brand seems to have caught on, so a dating site based on the theories I have might not be unreasonable.

I guess the lessons I've learned over the past two years are:
- Investors are more interested in easy, fast exits than trying to tackle emerging markets for something much, much larger down the line - even with relatively low risk. At least locally in STL.
- Investors are really fast to try to put you in a box without actually listening in a conversation. Coming from science/engineering/government and personally dealing with major figures in the various fields I can't express enough how unproductive this culture is. I get there's a lot of half-baked ideas out there and it's an instinctive thing, but this sort of arrogance is really shooting yourself in the foot. That said, I'll just continue dumbing things down until everything's in crayon. :smith:

guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 17:26 on May 5, 2016

Crazyweasel
Oct 29, 2006
lazy

Honestly Ive been lurking this thread since the beginning and had a lot of the same thoughts your detractors did throughout your development and launch; however, having just finished my first year of a professional MBA focusing on Entrepreneurship... You went out there, you did something, it may have taken a little while, but you aren't deep in debt and have I'm sure a ton of lessons learned.

That's a lot of personal success!

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My Rhythmic Crotch
Jan 13, 2011

So this is just my unsolicited smattering of thoughts, questions, and opinions about Nanaya.

- if I were in your shoes, the only thing I would be focusing on is "how do I get acquired by, or license this IP to, a large dating site?"
- facebook integration is a great and obvious fit, so nice job on that. You might want to clarify if using the site will cause visible changes to your facebook profile.
- I found the personality test plus number of other questions that come after it, way, way too long.
- I found a lot of the questions to be really hard to parse. "Keeping score." "High speed." What is that supposed to mean exactly? Being binary choices, I felt like the answers I gave were made up since I fell into neither category.
- I was occasionally getting some glitching when moving between screens. The education popup kept becoming visible in my browser (chrome OS X).
- The "pay now" at the end could be a lot more enticing. Viewing and connecting with people could be the key, and it's not mentioned. You could show how many "connections" they have, or a blurry version of their report or something. Anything to entice them with the results.
- As it stands there is no way I would pay 5 bux, mostly because I felt like my answers were sloppy due to the wacky and lengthy quiz; I don't know exactly what I'm getting for the 5 bux.
- Regarding investors and feeling like they want to put you into a "box". Okay, I get the frustration. But honestly how many people per year can you see spending $5 for this experience? That's 200,000 new customers per year to make $1M in sales.

My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 20:27 on May 5, 2016

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