Hey guys, let's found a startup thread!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Hey guys, let's found a startup thread!

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

the posted:

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?

Based on the way you're speaking very vaguely about what it is that you're trying to produce, it sounds like you're trying to play this close to the chest until you get either a patent or some substantive prior art. This suggests to me that doing a Kickstarter, and putting your product idea out there in the open, probably isn't what you want unless you're very confident the campaign will succeed before someone else can get funding and get your idea off the ground.

Where do you live? That will determine your funding options more than anything else.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2013 16:52

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 6, 2024 18:25

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FateFree posted:

The first is a product based business called QuikCallus (https://www.quikcallus.com), which is a non-toxic glue used to create calluses for musicians and the like. I started out with adwords, which was successful in the sense that I made back the money I put into it and no more. I eventually ran out of stock which means its not sustainable going forward. I've halted ads and sell about 1 bottle a day - but I'd love to get the product into stores, I'm just not sure where to start.

You start by meeting with people who own stores! If you can get it into a few local music shops, that will confirm or disconfirm your belief that business owners are interested in your product as something that will sell to a general music store clientele. If small business owners aren't interested, you're going to have a much harder play on on bigger chains. Use people who don't count for much as a way of figuring out which sales pitches and angles work and which ones don't. Worry about the big players once you've got that down.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 04:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

CraigMcDermott posted:

Sup guys,

Figured I'd jump in here. Just started working for a Y-Combinator (W14) backed company called Ambition. Was founded in Jan 2013 by three of my old fraternity brothers (3rd attempt at launching a startup) and it's just really starting to take off--I'm in charge of all of our marketing efforts at the moment.

Basically, we do enterprise data analytics/gamification software sales. Our product takes your company's employees' productivity data, then measures and scores that data, like they are fantasy football players. We put the employees on teams that compete against one another each week. Here's a couple links to give y'all some more insight.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/06/04/ambition-systems-raises-2m-for-new-ways-to-gamify-sales/
http://www.logisticsbusinessit.com/tech/article.aspx?tid=24&aid=708
http://ambition.com

Down to field any questions about what we've (or really, they've) done to get this far, and also solicit input about best practices for our marketing efforts going forward.

If W. Edwards Deming was still alive, this poo poo would give him an aneurysm.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2014 19:43

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Devil's advocate: if your idea is unimportant enough that giving potential competitors 3 years to be first to market is totally okay, maybe there's no market for you after all.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2014 18:55

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

lunatikfringe posted:

Id like to give some constructive criticism so don't take it in a negative way. Your UI design definitely needs work. You may want to bring in a dedicated UI person to really jazz things up. Working in media you need to have really vibrant but fluid design. As a comparison, look at the Ustream and Vimeo sites. They are pretty good examples of a modern website layout and design aesthetic.

http://www.ustream.tv/

http://vimeo.com/

It doesn't take a lot of money or technical resources to design a good UI. Just have to have someone with really good artistic vision and know how. You might even want to explore outsourcing your UI design work if you don't currently have the expertise in house. Your idea is promising but needs better presentation.

For OmNom: the advice in this post I quoted is bad advice. Don't bring on a UI person and start burning cash (and even more importantly, your own attention span) before you've even validated the idea and seen whether the business plan will gain traction. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose by spending money putting lipstick on a pig if people are completely uninterested in the idea. Outsourcing or hiring a part-timer at minimal hours would be a good move once you move past the "would people pay for this?" phase to "will people pay for this?"

Working to drive traffic to the site at this stage is a bad move. This is not a business that will function in an "if you build it, they will come" capacity. You need to identify your prospective content creators, figure out if this is something they would ever use, and then build something to their needs. The fact that you have near zero content in the system suggests that you either haven't done this or it hasn't been resonating. Either way, it doesn't seem that you've validated that you have an idea even worth building yet. The site's concept is a mess: your front page is centered around content discovery, but you haven't built any of the key features that let people get content into the system and get money into their bank accounts. Follow?

I'm not sure if you've ever built something in this vein before, but if you haven't read it, please get Steve Blank's book on customer development, and skim through Eric Ries's Lean Startup book. Unrelated, I would also recommend reading Patton's developer-oriented book on user story mapping for perspective on some ways you might want to work with content creators to identify your minimum viable product as you find people who are interested in your idea.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Feb 16, 2015

# ¿ Feb 16, 2015 05:51

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

OmNom posted:

All goo advice, and it isn't falling on deaf ears. I have read lean start up and I will revisit it. I am gathering all of this information for the founder, it is not my first time at building a business but it is his; I came on to help a friend out and clean up the small mess he's made. There is a bunch of cart before horse stuff going on with the site, I know. He's taken it this far, and is out of budget to do much more at this point. The "Field of Dreams" analogy isn't lost on me either, I threw it at him early on, didn't stick. Since he did build it, we need to find a way to make them come...sounds just a little dirty no?

Did he establish MVP before building the site? I don't think he fully grasped the concept. So here we are, site in hand and have to make it work with what we have. At this point I'll do what I can to help him, stranger miracles have happened. There is nothing for me to lose on this but a little free time, I'm not in it for money and I have a night job; but I do want to help my friend succeed if I can.

I appreciate the advice, retraction of the advice (which when I passed it to him, I vetoed a push to bring on a redesign before we have cash flow), and then more advice. The was built to suit the needs he perceived the market to have, so we'll work around that for now.

You don't need to work around anything. Start from square one with paper prototypes and customer conversations, not this thing. A product that has no potential customers is a sunk cost, not a starting point. It's an anchor on your feet right now while you're trying to keep your heads above water. You're doing something that potentially can fit a real market need -- I can't think of anyone out there besides Pivotshare that simply and generically handles hosting subscription video channels for artists -- but it's being approached completely wrong. Do not put the technology first. Get the founder on board with the idea that he needs to stop playing web designer and get out there, talk to potential customers, and figure out what the gently caress it is that he's actually building. Do not write another line of code until you flesh out an idea with a human who says "yeah, I'd use that" and has a community around their work that says "yeah, I'd pay for that."

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Feb 16, 2015

# ¿ Feb 16, 2015 17:20

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Seriously, don't lift another finger until you've read The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This is the Holy Bible of customer development for startups.

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507

# ¿ May 2, 2015 21:28

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tautologicus posted:

They did hang it up. I am just surprised because I thought this was the way in which the web made big leaps forward. Must be something I'm missing.

Here's something about it :

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f105fd56904428bca9da44a82&id=3612bf8367&e=7bc6e275f1

The Internet is built on slow iteration, and the entire thing is held together with duct tape and glue. There is no such thing as a big leap forward for the Internet. Every "revolutionary" network concept attempting to stretch beyond the boundaries of a single datacenter has brutally, brutally failed. In the year 2015 we're still struggling to get IPv6 supported and adopted, and have you ever even seen an SCTP packet in the wild?

e: The only place this would work is the DoD

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Aug 27, 2015

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 18:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tautologicus posted:

Edit gently caress i erased the other part of the message, which was just asking you to explain why you thought it definitely wouldn't ever work.

You're asking equipment operators supporting a worldwide infrastructure carrying 7 billion people to all replace their equipment, at tremendous cost, to speak this totally new, completely incompatible thing that literally no one uses because reasons. Then someone needs to pay your stepfather's research group for it.

You need to find a local use case that you can sell someone on which does not depend on literal worldwide buy-in. "It makes the Internet better" is good news for egalitarians and literally no one else.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Aug 27, 2015

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 18:21

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tautologicus posted:

K i am aware of all this, so basically there's no good reason besides inertia, which is what I thought all along. This protocol is cleaner faster smaller and more secure than TCP/IP. Not sure why you're exaggerating things to make a point either, that's not necessary. "Literal world buyin"? Only good news for egalitarians and literally no one else? Come on.

Your optimism is really cool, but seriously, look at your financials. People aren't buying this. You can dress it up and play the denial game on your strategy however you want, but you need to look at how the technology adoption cycle actually works and what problem this is actually solving for people. It's not "inertia." It's "figuring out how to replace the entire Internet is your job, not your customers'."

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 18:43

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

tuyop posted:

It sounds like "startup" just means "tech company" for the purposes of this thread.

The Eric Ries definition of a startup is "a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty." By definition, a startup is a company doing something new, or doing something very different. There's a lot of uncharted territory in tech, and automation makes it a lot easier to scale software companies than other kinds of startups. A hamburger stand or a plumbing company probably isn't a startup.

tuyop posted:

I'm working on starting an educational services/out of school care company and I'm not sure if it fits in with this thread, since there's no tech we can sell and no big exit that we want other than a good wage for implementing our pedagogical approach...

I am wondering how you go about gathering data for a business plan, though. I have no idea how big our market is (there are 135 000 children in the age group we want to work with in my city, does that count???), what the current trends might be, current products and services that exist, all that. How do you guys usually fill in that info so you can get loans and poo poo?

If "loans and poo poo" is your only reason for having an actual business plan and market research you should probably just quit while you're ahead, but I'll work off the assumption you're just being facetious here.

Hit the bricks. Find people whose problem you want to solve and talk to them. (As a rule, if the market research you need for your product is readily available, you're quite probably entering a really saturated market.) Your goal is to find a market before you start to develop a product. As you find out their needs, you can find out what other products and services they've looked at but don't quite fulfill their need. Start there. Quantitative research on other companies' market share and bookings doesn't help you until you understand what information you'll actually need to make good decisions. (Until you identify the correct direction for your product, you don't even know who your competitors are, right?)

Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany is the canonical startup book on customer development, but it's a messy read and Blank cleaned up a lot of the ideas in The Startup Owner's Manual. Talking to Humans is another quick, approachable read on the topic. Bottom line: do not try to develop a product without a market, or you'll end up like that Internet 3.0 guy above. Develop ideas, talk to people, and find at least one person who says "I would pay you money for this." That interaction is your starting point. You're just spitballing until you hear those words.

As you learn what people need, you'll need some way of organizing those ideas, estimating work required, and prioritizing them so you know which to actually start getting done. Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping is tailored towards agile software development, but the approach to organizing work can be easily adapted to any kind of product development.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Sep 3, 2015

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 20:45

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

moana posted:

Oh my gosh, I just went to one of these in San Jose (Kuma) as an anniversary present and it was so fun! We've been talking nonstop for the past two weeks about the cool puzzles we could make if we opened our own in Santa Cruz. I don't know if it's a fad that will come and go but I feel like the hardest part would be repeat customers - the one we went to only had two different rooms and I can see running out of clients eventually since it's not a thing you can go to twice (for the same room, anyway).

My take: this fad is gonna die harder than murder mystery dinner theatre long before you worry about exhausting your customer pool otherwise, so just enjoy running a cool business with virtually no startup costs and get what you can from it

# ¿ Sep 22, 2015 14:04

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Vomik posted:

That doesn't sound right - and I also think you may be looking at real equity e.g. Trade able stock. Not sure how the federal government would get involved with appraising a private business. It also sounds like double taxing if true.

Should be a quick discussion with an accountant though which you'd hopefully do anyway.

Unless you live someplace like Sunnyvale, most accountants don't understand equity, or the tax laws governing it, very well. You'd be better off with a tax attorney.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 18:47

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.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 20:29

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.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 20:45

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?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 18:08

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

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 01:15

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

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 18:36

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.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 17:15

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.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 19:42

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

guidoanselmi posted:

As a quick follow up on Softlayer. Something came up where they gave me a RAID alert and they needed to swap out disks on our bare metal server - but they don't offer services to do disk cloning and said that'd be my responsibility.

I went through it - but things on both of our ends were bungled in the process. They were really responsive but not very good in providing clear support for something that should have been totally fixed on their end (if it was a true RAID, this should have been a simple swap).

So I'm now in the 3rd day of downtime...it's kind of unbelievable for something a host should provide or something that'd take me a few hours in person.

Finally responding to this. I wanted to make sure I had a clear idea of what was needed and what I might expect from someone else before bugging you!

SoftLayer really, really isn't good at these kinds of things. Let me know if you have a problem like this again once they make a hardware handoff and I'll walk you through it.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 18:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hypha posted:

Hi guys,

Thus far this thread has been very helpful, especially with the book recommendations. They have been great in having a common basis in talking to business people, since I come from a very specialized and technical background.

I have a challenge in realizing my MVP. Our technology uses molecular fingerprinting in an field agricultural setting for crop disease management. Scientifically, the concept is sound and has been demonstrated to work in a field setting across the literature. Translating that from a research model into a commercial product however will take considerable time and capital. The models that currently exist need a lot of love and care. I guess the capital requirement is nothing that isn�t already thrown around in SF but definitely something that requires a set up more elaborate than a standard web startup. Also I am not nor based within America. Laboratories can be expensive things and a garage has some very strict limitations to it.

Very early in the thread, there was a discussion about a paper MVP. I presume that corresponds to a presentation to throw at prospective investors. Is it worth creating a direct customer version or would it be better to wait till I have more relevant data and/or a more applicable prototype? Are there any specifics or tips that can make this pitch more convincing? I can bend a few ears and scrounge up more relevant data but it wouldn�t be very fair to my academic associates in this endeavour. My first impulse is to just stuff it with data and an exhaustive literature search but I don�t know if that is relevant.

Thanks again for your help.

Investors want to be convinced, first and foremost, that people want to buy your product. The reason an MVP is important in a pitch is because it demonstrates, in a very real sense, that you at the very least sense have something that fills a customer need. Academic endorsements won't in any way substitute for this unless you're talking to other academics, but people interested in buying your product will help your standing with anyone. (If your approach is too complicated for someone outside your field to understand, it may be helpful to retain a few people who will say that you're not selling snake oil.) If you think you can have a product ready in a reasonable timeframe, and you're not just effectively asking lenders for grant money to do R&D, your best bet for a paper MVP is to hit the bricks and get some people in industry with buying power to commit to your project.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2016 01:04

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Doghouse posted:

I was looking at ways to do some more idea validation/market research on a software project, and I saw someone recommend talking to the customers of a competitor.

Is it appropriate to take a look at public reviews of apps on Google play store and get in contact with the person who posted it, like through Google+ or something, to try and talk to them about a potential similar product? Or is that totally creepy and weird?

More annoying than creepy and weird, but you've got very little to lose, especially if you already have very little name recognition. Any kind of customer development will have people telling you "no" an awful lot at first.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2017 04:46

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

How do I forecast sales?

I'm currently writing a business plan for a startup car enthusiast oriented luxury tour company. There are many such companies in the world, and they seem quite successful. I have seen significant growth in the industry over the last two or so years. As of yet there are no such companies in my country, and there's plenty of rich people who do not necessarily want to add the hassle of flying to a different country to start a trip, then flying back at the end of it. Plus, lots of people here have terrible English.

I can find statistical data on tourism, data on demographics and earnings. I can find data on readership of car magazines, and I can look for adwords searches.

My problem is I have no idea how to put it all together into estimating a market size, nor do I have any idea how to estimate market penetration. Every article I've managed to find boils down to "Don't estimate you'll capture 1% of the market - instead, math out a target demographic size, then make up a random number for the sales conversion rate".

A lot of articles I can find on the internet seems to be coddled Sillicon Valley bubble CEO types who give the most uselessly trite and hilariously optimistic (I literally found an article that said in the first year you should have $20-100m of sales or not bother ) advice. And easily 80% of things I was able to find just assume you're doing SaaS because that's the only business in the world.

If you don't have any sales, you do have to guesstimate your future sales conversion rate. The work you're doing to estimate market size, map out competitors, etc. is all extremely valuable and necessary work, but you can't forecast actual sales in a market that literally doesn't exist yet -- especially a luxury market where the concept of substitute good doesn't apply.

What's the goal with this data? Is this to get funding/investment, or is it for your own business use?

# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 16:12

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

You obviously don't have any lagging indicators to trend forward. What leading indicators do you have about your opportunity to generate and follow through on sales leads, and grow the quantity of those leads? What information are you missing that would help you guess at a conversion on those leads?

If you're absolutely unsure on conversion, you need to act like you have a product, go out and pound pavement, and try to get people to commit to giving you money. Your goal is to get one person to give you a "yes".

# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 17:12

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

I don't have any of that information yet as I'm in the very early stages still, but your post gave me a lot of food for thought.

Next month there's a fairly big motor show in the city I'd choose as my location. I plan to attend and do some polling.

Would the percentage of people who say in the poll they'd be interested be a reasonable indicator? Besides pricing and demographics, what are the main pitfalls of applying that percentage to the target market size?

It's better than nothing, but it's not an organic indicator. The best way to gauge organic interest, if you don't need to operate in stealth mode at this point, is to act like you have a fully-operational business, especially if it won't take long to actually bootstrap once you have funding. Set up a phone number for your business, even if it's just a Google Voice mailbox. Have brochures ready to go at the show you plan to attend. Put up a website with a clear call to action, like asking for calls or contacts through a form. All of these things will test the first stage of your conversion funnels. If nobody tries to buy your product, or find out more, there was no interest in the first place. You dust yourself off and try again. If you do get calls, those are leads you can call back once you're operating. If you've really cracked a good market, those leads may spread news about your business through word-of-mouth before you're even operating, broadening your base of leads.

e: and do not advertise that your business is "coming soon". Your goal is to gauge people's interest now, not to have them to stick a brochure on their fridge for three months and give you no useful information about your market.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Mar 13, 2017

# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 23:55

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hypha posted:

So I got a weird question, is there a way to tell if an investor is credible? A bunch of investors have been quite cautious and have pointed out some serious concerns that need some validation. Generally they are all good points and their unease I feel is justified at this point till I have more measurements. Agriculture can be a bit unfriendly if you are more "environmental" than usual. I have one investor though who is super excited and quite interested but hasn't said no to anything. His promises are too good and considering the caution of the other groups, I don't trust him. He has also been weird with phone calls, such as messing up the timezone for a phone call even though he arranged the time, losing documents and asking us to call different numbers than what is on his business cards or within his Email.

They are supposed to be set up in Vancouver, right in the middle of downtown in a quite expensive building. All things considered, I didn't expect the building to sound like a child's birthday party in the background during my conversation. I was thinking of playing 20 questions with them to confirm that the location they say they are set up in is real and not just a nice facade they have going. My other thought was to call their other supposed clients and see if they actually exist, though they haven't gotten back to me yet. I have no idea what their angle is but everything just feels wrong. Maybe they just REALLY don't understand the industry or are a level of techbro I have never known to exist?

Any other ways to find out if they represent something credible, like some kind of angel network agency? I'm in Canada if that helps at all.

I'm not super good at this, but start at Skype if you're really concerned about the location. People move around all the time, have multiple phones, use conference bridges/services and Google Voice, etc. Nothing you've said so far stands out as a terrible red flag besides the loss of documents. That said, trust your instincts. Don't tether your business's future to someone who doesn't inspire 100% confidence.

Having said all that: if the other investors have concerns that this one doesn't, raise them. If they're competent, they've thought of them already and have a good answer about why they're willing to take a chance that the others aren't. If they're not competent, and they haven't thought of them, they're not someone you should be doing business with.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Mar 13, 2017

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 16:09

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

What are some very low cost ways to get traffic to the site? I'm operating on the assumption that social media is the only real way, and the plan is to start putting in work to build brand awareness through that channel once I get some graphics finalised. Are there other avenues to explore that I'm missing?

AdWords is a good way to drive traffic cheaply, especially if you're geotargeting, which it sounds like you are. Social media is an extremely difficult play if you don't have a product. One of the reasons crowdfunding tools like Kickstarter are so successful is that they combine pre-launch marketing with a clear call to action.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

And lastly, a perhaps somewhat naive question. I don't get how not to advertise it as coming soon. Surely, if it's a landing page rather than a fully fleshed-out website it's very apparent it's not ready? And if I can get around that, wouldn't advertising it as ready when it's not create a negative customer experience?

I'm sorry if those questions are all basic. I really appreciate the input.

This is a pretty specific marketing question that I'm not totally sure how to answer tactically in your field and market. At a high level, your goal is to get people interested enough to call or email you for more information. A big call to action in the middle of the page that says "call for more information" with a phone number should be your target. At this stage, you want people to be disappointed that you don't have a product. You want to be able to go up to investors or lenders and say, "Here's all my transcripts of phone calls with people who are pissed that my business doesn't exist yet. This is my market. These are my first sales leads. This isn't a hypothetical go-to-market plan. These are actual people interested in paying me money to do this thing, right now, today." Sure, it might sting to disappoint a couple of people, but this is going to be the cost of doing business in the early stages. And most importantly, you get to talk to people and figure out what they want. Learning is the most crucial thing you can do at this point.

If you actually sell anything at this point, great. You're basically going to be making things up as you go. That's fine. The dirty secret of most early-stage startups is that they all do this. There's been more than one electronic concierge service that launched where the "electronic" part was just a human working on the back end until they got their technology stack in order. Think like that.

And if you don't get any phone calls despite your best efforts to tweak and tune your messaging and drive traffic to the site, that's good too. You have, as cheaply as possible, tested yourself out of your business plan without putting any actual money on the line. You want to succeed, but if you're going to fail, fail fast.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Mar 16, 2017

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 05:09

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 6, 2024 18:25

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

bee posted:

So this leads me to my question - how critical is it for our startup to have a marketing strategy, in particular in regards to social media at this point in time? I'd really appreciate some outside perspective, thanks!

Always have a marketing strategy. Understand how social media fits into your strategy. (Unless you're Pinboard, this should be about customer care and community management, not about tweeting dumb stuff.)

# ¿ Mar 28, 2017 19:11

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Hey guys, let's found a startup thread!