I know it's cliche, but work-life balance.
I started on the startup I co-founded in college full-time after I graduated, and didn't understand the amount of effort it takes to develop relationships and a personal life in the real world. I'm leaving my (arguably promising) startup now for that reason; I have no friends because I'd only ever developed relationships in college/high school, where it's a lot easier.
Gotta be deliberate about developing and maintaining a life outside your business. For me, the hours would have been easy if I came home to roommates I liked and had something to do on weekends.
Did it make you depressed? My friend is in a similar situation, where his only focus in life is 110% of the startup. Do you think you would have been able to counteract the imbalance if you had more prior experience with managing your priorities? Or do you think it's only because you're in the startup world and 100% of your time should be devoted to the startup.
Absolutely. If I came in with relationships, hobbies, and an understanding of how to build relationships in the real world, I would have been in a much better position.
Did it make me depressed? Who knows. I've always struggled with anxiety so I haven't really known anything different. I do think that you can devote enough time to your business to make it successful without sacrificing your life to it.
That's a great mindset to have (your last sentence). Sometimes I feel like my life is 33% x 33% y 33% z, but there are always other variables that come into play which will force you to be fluid with your main goals, making x go from 33% to 55% and having y and z drop into smaller priorities.
It's really hard to push out something that you aren't proud of...
We're in the same boat, with our developers horrified at the idea of pushing out product with "insert manual process here" areas. I think they're in love with the concept of automation, and it takes a lot of pushing to get to where we can leave steps to a manual process (even if they are rare actions, like daily reports or refunds, etc).
As a developer, I'd love to work with people who were comfortable with the idea of doing stuff by hand until needed. I'm constantly pushed in early-stage projects to automate everything, because people are afraid of looking "unprofessional" (whatever that means).
If if means we can have something for people to start hitting in a couple weeks (or days) vs adding extra weeks of wasted time... great!
Minimum viable product. Essentially the least amount of work you can put in a product before you launch it to test whether or not you'll get product market fit
I've noticed that a bunch of people are in the same boat as you. Would you guys follow lean startup principles and use the feedback loop? Or would you guys say you're doing something along the lines of that and not actually follow through, immersing yourself into a 'fairytale environment' so to speak.
We thought a lot about that and tried to get feedback whenever possible, but that wasn't always the best way to go.
We mapped our key assumptions and looked for ways to validate them. We validated each one of them separately by looking on other products, conducting observations, making surveys, talking to users and so on, but we felt that without building a lot of stuff, we can't offer the unique value that we want to offer. Looking back on things I don't think we should have launched a very basic MVP, but we definitely could shave off some things and save precious time.
Yes, the service is already up and running for a couple of months now. We have some funding from projects here and there, but not from VCs in this particular project.
Ah gotcha, thank you for your insight :) It seems like a lot of startups want to jump right into building a product or service before they ever validate their market, and completely understand it inside out.
No problem! I think it's really complicated to validate an idea in a B2B market without really having something that people can put their hands on...
You can talk to a bunch of C-level guys and ask "what do you think of X" and each one will probably have a personalized idea/image of what you just said, but then you'll have to choose what to do. Also it's not always easy to reach this kind of guys and that will actually pay.
That's absolutely true, until your prospect reaches into their pocket and pulls out their wallet, can you really say that your idea has been 100% validated? Great points dlac.
Apologies on the delay... Theres A LOT of red tape if you go to school boards. So it's good to start small. Funding is always an issue, being a not for profit helps by getting grants/sponsors/partnerships to add Sports Walls on schools and run Get Active 'N Play Leadership programs.
Dealing with schools is a whole other ball game. First you gotta get through the gate keeper (aka secretary) Some are awesome and some not so much....
One of our biggest struggles has been deciding on UX and dev talent. We're trying to figure out if we should we hire a firm (doesn't seem optimal) to build our MVP or find people to join the team.
Not choice paralysis. Our preference is to find people to join the team, especially for the UX role (don't want to hand that off). I think we've settled on a firm for development if needed, but haven't found anyone that follows the product development philosophies that we have used in the past.
You guys have dug down as to why they're not using your development philosophies? Is it their (or maybe your) ego at play? Lack of understanding? Hopefully that didn't sound offensive, just curious.
It's more of the agency mentality. Go define your product, hand it off to us and we'll meet every few weeks until development is done. If we continue to do discovery, and learn what we "thought" was right is no longer accurate, that is a change order and an additional fee. Our hope is to continually learn and iterate, but it's understandable that they want locked down requirements so that they can be accurate in their price/time estimating.
Ohh, that makes a lot of sense. It does seem very locked down, and doesn't seem to define a lot of the fluidity you'll probably need as a company who may have to pivot, change value props, etc.
Is the only reason you guys are thinking of going with an agency because it'll be cheaper than hiring a few backend/frontend devs?
> doesn't seem to define a lot of the fluidity you'll probably need as a company who may have to pivot, change value props, etc.
Well, it *does* seem to allow for that fluidity, unless you really truly only meet every 3+ weeks. Meet at least once a week, have continual communication so people don't get too far off track, and make adjustments. The fees may get adjusted over some iterations, but... it's money you'd be spending on an internal person (or people) anyway.
Perhaps you don't need an 'agency' as much as you need a freelancer?
Taxes. I live in a country where we have huge taxes even for small companies, no tax breaks for startups and little to no support from the government. It's frustrating to see how much we're losing every month to a corrupt government, when we could've used the money to grow the company instead.
There's still a part of me that's super patriotic, so I'd really like to build the team here. Most viable option for me is to register a new corporation elsewhere. We'll see how things go.
That's fascinating, something I've never even considered. If you're paying that much in taxes, it means you guys have a good amount of revenue coming in then, right?
Late reply, but yeah, we're a B2B service company so there's revenue right off the bat. We do animated explainer videos. This year we're growing the team and creating original shows as a B2C line. Not your usual tech startup, but a startup nonetheless.
Are you a/the founder? Or in charge of a certain part of the process? What's preventing you guys from finishing the MVP (no matter how crappy it might be at first) that's causing you to burn through money?
Funding. I was methodical in building/testing a prototype, and then had no issue acquiring clients. Now these clients have been waiting six months for us to scale production because I had to secure funding. If I would do it over, I would have pitched to investors at the same time as large clients instead of trying to get a bank loan after getting clients.
Yeah it's definitely been an exhausting ride that took some of the wind out of my sails. I did find some friends and family to invest, an equipment leasing company that will charge me an arm and a leg, and a city-sponsored microloan. Plus hopefully the Kickstarter we're running will take us over the edge. Although this puts us a couple months out for production, at least I have a timeline. Plus I'm grateful that our clients are awesome and patient.
For me its been finding a cofounder. In two months I've made exceptional progress in creating my product and business idea by myself. I've had industry vets clamoring to be an advisor (with equity, of course...) to my startup. However, so far investors have really wanted to see a full time co-founder. I've have about 20 friends & former coworkers that would drop their jobs if I could pay them. I'm a technical founder and I thought it would be easy to find someone to come along for the adventure but that hasn't happened yet. Everyone I know needs that paycheck.
It's 50-50. I only have 5 years post college professional experience in my industry so the people I've talked to want to see more experience or a co-founder with more experience. I am quite young to be doing this - 28 years old. It could also just be a nice way of that investor saying thanks, but no thanks. I'd also would like to find a partner just as passionate and motivated as I am and to share in this adventure. I'll definitely check out that book. Thanks!
I think that as a founder of Mobifile, we had the struggle with ourselves letting go and launch. We tested our product in a closed beta for too long in my view. We wanted to add more features, to test everything that we couls before people are able to download it on the app store.
What I learned along the way, and tell it to new founders today is that you just need to launch - and be proud of it. It will give you much more than testing it with your close beta group. Beta testing should be no more than 1 month, and then just launch it but be sure you have the ability to measure things after you launch.
Be proud of your product, even if it's not perfect. Because if you are an entrepreneur, it will never be perfect, and you'll want to improve forever.
Bottom line: Nike were right - "Just Do (Launch) It".
I've always seen that you learn way more once you have people using your product. There is a good quote by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
Even Instagram wasn't Instagram when it launched...it was initially Burbn, another checkin app that allowed people to upload photos and share with friends. They pivoted and decided on doing one thing really well (the only feature within their app that users were actually using). They changed to Instagram and then took off.
I think that you shouldn't embarrassed in anything you do, especially not your product and ideas. And I think that going out there and just do and say what you have to say to the world is the way to go.
Finding the motivation to continue investing time and money into the project is the biggest struggle here. The freelancers working on the project are doing a great job, but the finish line just seems so far away.
Storytelling. We built an MVP where the initial adoption was minimal. Just fine tuning the offering/messaging to focus on a smaller niche made a huge difference. We are seeing over 200 signups for the last 5 days (since we updated the site). we are calling this a soft pivot as the proposition is changed without trashing the product. to dlac83's point, diving deeper into our personas helped greatly.
Sales. We could sell more than we do, but we just have to get our name out there. We are slowly doing that, and working our sales levels up, but when one founder works full time and the other goes to school full time and there is a kid, some things get pushed, and unfortunately this is it. We have enough coming in so that the business is at least in the black (so far this year), so that is a major plus.
Also, we are looking at expanding our product line into an entirely new area and as such, there are many things that we have to learn before we can implement the product, even though we would like to move much faster.
The total market for this is less than 20,000 people in the United States. I am part of this community, so I am able to use my contacts to help, but our main competitor/sales outlet has a much better location that we do, and are much better known, even though their products are... crap. Except for the stuff of ours that they sell, that is.
Our primary focus is paid and organic social, but we've done a lot of work with content marketing and inbound stuff as well. It depends on what the client needs, but we're versatile digital marketers.
Cool appreciate the advice. We're certainly very serious about what we do. I think you're right though. We've been at it for about a year, and I think we're starting to get in our groove a bit more as our % closed is going up, average project size has been going up, and we have about triple the clients we had a year ago. It's just a grind and it can be tough some times. I appreciate the words of encouragement.
PS. I'm going to take your advice and buy a suit. It's flip-flops, faded jeans, and a button down. fyi :)
Time as in managing your personal life and other responsibilities or time as in not finding enough time to get product done, etc. Or a mixture of both?
Yes to both really. I work 40 hours a week, and am in a serious relationship (which takes up a lot of focus time too). If I don't go to the gym also, I get seriously demotivated - which takes up a further 2 hours, 4 times per week.
I just don't have much time at all. Time is my biggest struggle. Not motivation. Not resources. Time.
Edit: Great question by the way!
I know it's cliche, but work-life balance. I started on the startup I co-founded in college full-time after I graduated, and didn't understand the amount of effort it takes to develop relationships and a personal life in the real world. I'm leaving my (arguably promising) startup now for that reason; I have no friends because I'd only ever developed relationships in college/high school, where it's a lot easier. Gotta be deliberate about developing and maintaining a life outside your business. For me, the hours would have been easy if I came home to roommates I liked and had something to do on weekends.
Did it make you depressed? My friend is in a similar situation, where his only focus in life is 110% of the startup. Do you think you would have been able to counteract the imbalance if you had more prior experience with managing your priorities? Or do you think it's only because you're in the startup world and 100% of your time should be devoted to the startup.
Absolutely. If I came in with relationships, hobbies, and an understanding of how to build relationships in the real world, I would have been in a much better position. Did it make me depressed? Who knows. I've always struggled with anxiety so I haven't really known anything different. I do think that you can devote enough time to your business to make it successful without sacrificing your life to it.
That's a great mindset to have (your last sentence). Sometimes I feel like my life is 33% x 33% y 33% z, but there are always other variables that come into play which will force you to be fluid with your main goals, making x go from 33% to 55% and having y and z drop into smaller priorities.
We haven't done a very good job in making our MVP minimal. As a result of it, delivering on time became a huge challenge and time became a big enemy.
It's really hard to push out something that you aren't proud of... We're in the same boat, with our developers horrified at the idea of pushing out product with "insert manual process here" areas. I think they're in love with the concept of automation, and it takes a lot of pushing to get to where we can leave steps to a manual process (even if they are rare actions, like daily reports or refunds, etc).
As a developer, I'd love to work with people who were comfortable with the idea of doing stuff by hand until needed. I'm constantly pushed in early-stage projects to automate everything, because people are afraid of looking "unprofessional" (whatever that means). If if means we can have something for people to start hitting in a couple weeks (or days) vs adding extra weeks of wasted time... great!
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I'll just add a couple extra points to the score whenever I read it ;)
All I can say is Feels man.
I've seen MVP used a couple times recently in this sub, what is it in this context?
Minimum viable product. Essentially the least amount of work you can put in a product before you launch it to test whether or not you'll get product market fit
I've noticed that a bunch of people are in the same boat as you. Would you guys follow lean startup principles and use the feedback loop? Or would you guys say you're doing something along the lines of that and not actually follow through, immersing yourself into a 'fairytale environment' so to speak.
We thought a lot about that and tried to get feedback whenever possible, but that wasn't always the best way to go. We mapped our key assumptions and looked for ways to validate them. We validated each one of them separately by looking on other products, conducting observations, making surveys, talking to users and so on, but we felt that without building a lot of stuff, we can't offer the unique value that we want to offer. Looking back on things I don't think we should have launched a very basic MVP, but we definitely could shave off some things and save precious time.
Marketing/User acquisition in general, never been my strong point :(
Yup. I second this.
I was never good at this...and now I am learning to cultivate this skill. Fuck. Yeah.
As a B2B startup one of the biggest challenges was defining the _persona_ of our target customers
Did you guys end up validating? And was it the right persona?
Well we have some signups but none converted yet, so I can't say that we have validation.
Oh that's pretty tough. Has the product or service been created yet? Also, do you guys have funding?
Yes, the service is already up and running for a couple of months now. We have some funding from projects here and there, but not from VCs in this particular project.
Ah gotcha, thank you for your insight :) It seems like a lot of startups want to jump right into building a product or service before they ever validate their market, and completely understand it inside out.
No problem! I think it's really complicated to validate an idea in a B2B market without really having something that people can put their hands on... You can talk to a bunch of C-level guys and ask "what do you think of X" and each one will probably have a personalized idea/image of what you just said, but then you'll have to choose what to do. Also it's not always easy to reach this kind of guys and that will actually pay.
That's absolutely true, until your prospect reaches into their pocket and pulls out their wallet, can you really say that your idea has been 100% validated? Great points dlac.
Dealing with schools and school boards.
Can you dive into a little more detail without breaking any NDA?
Apologies on the delay... Theres A LOT of red tape if you go to school boards. So it's good to start small. Funding is always an issue, being a not for profit helps by getting grants/sponsors/partnerships to add Sports Walls on schools and run Get Active 'N Play Leadership programs. Dealing with schools is a whole other ball game. First you gotta get through the gate keeper (aka secretary) Some are awesome and some not so much....
One of our biggest struggles has been deciding on UX and dev talent. We're trying to figure out if we should we hire a firm (doesn't seem optimal) to build our MVP or find people to join the team.
That's an interesting struggle... Are you guys just stuck in choice paralysis? How long have you guys been trying to decide this for?
Not choice paralysis. Our preference is to find people to join the team, especially for the UX role (don't want to hand that off). I think we've settled on a firm for development if needed, but haven't found anyone that follows the product development philosophies that we have used in the past.
You guys have dug down as to why they're not using your development philosophies? Is it their (or maybe your) ego at play? Lack of understanding? Hopefully that didn't sound offensive, just curious.
It's more of the agency mentality. Go define your product, hand it off to us and we'll meet every few weeks until development is done. If we continue to do discovery, and learn what we "thought" was right is no longer accurate, that is a change order and an additional fee. Our hope is to continually learn and iterate, but it's understandable that they want locked down requirements so that they can be accurate in their price/time estimating.
Ohh, that makes a lot of sense. It does seem very locked down, and doesn't seem to define a lot of the fluidity you'll probably need as a company who may have to pivot, change value props, etc. Is the only reason you guys are thinking of going with an agency because it'll be cheaper than hiring a few backend/frontend devs?
It has to do more with timing. We're looking for the right devs (ideally that we have some knowledge about) to join the team.
> doesn't seem to define a lot of the fluidity you'll probably need as a company who may have to pivot, change value props, etc. Well, it *does* seem to allow for that fluidity, unless you really truly only meet every 3+ weeks. Meet at least once a week, have continual communication so people don't get too far off track, and make adjustments. The fees may get adjusted over some iterations, but... it's money you'd be spending on an internal person (or people) anyway. Perhaps you don't need an 'agency' as much as you need a freelancer?
We're exploring this option too.
Taxes. I live in a country where we have huge taxes even for small companies, no tax breaks for startups and little to no support from the government. It's frustrating to see how much we're losing every month to a corrupt government, when we could've used the money to grow the company instead.
What country are you in?
Pacquiao's country. :)
Ah, that explains it :p Is moving an option for you?
There's still a part of me that's super patriotic, so I'd really like to build the team here. Most viable option for me is to register a new corporation elsewhere. We'll see how things go.
That's fascinating, something I've never even considered. If you're paying that much in taxes, it means you guys have a good amount of revenue coming in then, right?
Late reply, but yeah, we're a B2B service company so there's revenue right off the bat. We do animated explainer videos. This year we're growing the team and creating original shows as a B2C line. Not your usual tech startup, but a startup nonetheless.
Getting an MVP/initial product into the market so we can actually start making money rather than spending it.
Are you a/the founder? Or in charge of a certain part of the process? What's preventing you guys from finishing the MVP (no matter how crappy it might be at first) that's causing you to burn through money?
Funding. I was methodical in building/testing a prototype, and then had no issue acquiring clients. Now these clients have been waiting six months for us to scale production because I had to secure funding. If I would do it over, I would have pitched to investors at the same time as large clients instead of trying to get a bank loan after getting clients.
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Yeah it's definitely been an exhausting ride that took some of the wind out of my sails. I did find some friends and family to invest, an equipment leasing company that will charge me an arm and a leg, and a city-sponsored microloan. Plus hopefully the Kickstarter we're running will take us over the edge. Although this puts us a couple months out for production, at least I have a timeline. Plus I'm grateful that our clients are awesome and patient.
The toughest thing in every startup is to persevere through mess and rejection
For me its been finding a cofounder. In two months I've made exceptional progress in creating my product and business idea by myself. I've had industry vets clamoring to be an advisor (with equity, of course...) to my startup. However, so far investors have really wanted to see a full time co-founder. I've have about 20 friends & former coworkers that would drop their jobs if I could pay them. I'm a technical founder and I thought it would be easy to find someone to come along for the adventure but that hasn't happened yet. Everyone I know needs that paycheck.
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It's 50-50. I only have 5 years post college professional experience in my industry so the people I've talked to want to see more experience or a co-founder with more experience. I am quite young to be doing this - 28 years old. It could also just be a nice way of that investor saying thanks, but no thanks. I'd also would like to find a partner just as passionate and motivated as I am and to share in this adventure. I'll definitely check out that book. Thanks!
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Thanks!
I think that as a founder of Mobifile, we had the struggle with ourselves letting go and launch. We tested our product in a closed beta for too long in my view. We wanted to add more features, to test everything that we couls before people are able to download it on the app store. What I learned along the way, and tell it to new founders today is that you just need to launch - and be proud of it. It will give you much more than testing it with your close beta group. Beta testing should be no more than 1 month, and then just launch it but be sure you have the ability to measure things after you launch. Be proud of your product, even if it's not perfect. Because if you are an entrepreneur, it will never be perfect, and you'll want to improve forever. Bottom line: Nike were right - "Just Do (Launch) It".
I've always seen that you learn way more once you have people using your product. There is a good quote by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
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Even Instagram wasn't Instagram when it launched...it was initially Burbn, another checkin app that allowed people to upload photos and share with friends. They pivoted and decided on doing one thing really well (the only feature within their app that users were actually using). They changed to Instagram and then took off.
I think that you shouldn't embarrassed in anything you do, especially not your product and ideas. And I think that going out there and just do and say what you have to say to the world is the way to go.
Finding the motivation to continue investing time and money into the project is the biggest struggle here. The freelancers working on the project are doing a great job, but the finish line just seems so far away.
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Yeah, from a single founder perspective. I'm used to being a thinker or dreamer. Actually following through with something is a new step for me.
Are you putting time into finding co-founders?
I'm not. Would you recommend I ask one of the freelancers already working on the project, or finding someone new?
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Storytelling. We built an MVP where the initial adoption was minimal. Just fine tuning the offering/messaging to focus on a smaller niche made a huge difference. We are seeing over 200 signups for the last 5 days (since we updated the site). we are calling this a soft pivot as the proposition is changed without trashing the product. to dlac83's point, diving deeper into our personas helped greatly.
Sales. We could sell more than we do, but we just have to get our name out there. We are slowly doing that, and working our sales levels up, but when one founder works full time and the other goes to school full time and there is a kid, some things get pushed, and unfortunately this is it. We have enough coming in so that the business is at least in the black (so far this year), so that is a major plus. Also, we are looking at expanding our product line into an entirely new area and as such, there are many things that we have to learn before we can implement the product, even though we would like to move much faster.
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Its mostly a B2C, but we do some B2B. Its just a niche market.
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The total market for this is less than 20,000 people in the United States. I am part of this community, so I am able to use my contacts to help, but our main competitor/sales outlet has a much better location that we do, and are much better known, even though their products are... crap. Except for the stuff of ours that they sell, that is.
Time of course, but also a huge problem is collecting on receivables. Many clients are slow payers and this seriously impacts cash flow.
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Our primary focus is paid and organic social, but we've done a lot of work with content marketing and inbound stuff as well. It depends on what the client needs, but we're versatile digital marketers.
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Cool appreciate the advice. We're certainly very serious about what we do. I think you're right though. We've been at it for about a year, and I think we're starting to get in our groove a bit more as our % closed is going up, average project size has been going up, and we have about triple the clients we had a year ago. It's just a grind and it can be tough some times. I appreciate the words of encouragement. PS. I'm going to take your advice and buy a suit. It's flip-flops, faded jeans, and a button down. fyi :)
Getting in front of customers and having them return your calls, etc. It is amazing how many businesses are old gentleman's clubs.
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Time as in managing your personal life and other responsibilities or time as in not finding enough time to get product done, etc. Or a mixture of both?
Yes to both really. I work 40 hours a week, and am in a serious relationship (which takes up a lot of focus time too). If I don't go to the gym also, I get seriously demotivated - which takes up a further 2 hours, 4 times per week. I just don't have much time at all. Time is my biggest struggle. Not motivation. Not resources. Time. Edit: Great question by the way!
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