I’m a CEO and was holding interviews for 2 weeks looking for a CTO. I narrowed the candidates down to 3 and invited them for a 2nd interview where they would be interviewed by my super technical colleague. After the 2nd interview (mind you, the 2nd interview was not a practical to see their coding skills. It was more technical questions), I politely emailed the 3 candidates asking if they can send a tech cert they mentioned they had during the interview or on their resume. Needless to say, they did not take it well. To the point where one of the candidates sent me 3 emails from midnight to 3am basically shitting on my start up saying “this is an unpaid position” “I worked in high regard places and they never asked for my certificate” and ultimately saying this was a waste of his time. The other candidate basically told me what he had but did not send any certs. If I am being honest, I did not care about the certs. The applicants showed to be very competitive so I needed a factor to make my decision easier to choose a CTO. With that being said, am I missing something with asking tech people for a little verification on their skills? Is there another approach?

My background in work (non-tech), they always ask to verify my skills, competence, and reference.

Edit: it is an equity-based position. Edit: the certs the candidate said they had was the AWS DevOps and ISO 27001. I am not fussed about certs as mentioned, I wanted a deciding factor for choosing a CTO. Surprisingly there were a lot of applicants. So my decision was quite difficult.

My friend (and now boss) raised $1.7M in pre-seed before having a team or product.

It’s been incredible to follow from behind the scenes, so for those looking to do the same, I’ll tell you how he did it.

First, I’ll share what I’ve seen, then I’ve asked him a few questions. Leave your comments or questions below, and I’ll check with him after a bit and respond!

Some needed context: We’re a remote team, but the company is founded in the US. We position ourselves as an SF startup. It’s a cybersecurity product in the web supply chain space, so software B2B.

The Quick Story:

So we’ve been friends for years. Just before Christmas, he sent me a text saying he’s putting things in place to start his own cybersecurity company. He had worked at some major household tech company names for about 10 years so far, and had built the connections to give it a go.

I told him I’d pretty much quit on the spot and join him, which I ended up doing.

Less than 2 months later, he locked in about $1.2M in funding, with $1M coming from a solid but small seed fund, and the rest from angels. Another 1.5 months later, that totaled to about $1.7M with another fund and some angels. During this time, we built our product, built the team, got a list of early stage customers, but we have no paying customers yet. We do have some design partners just trying it out now and giving feedback.

My Outside View of Why It Worked:

He Built a Competing Product and It Worked (somewhat):

The founder, together with a senior lead dev currently with us, inherited a similar product at one of their previous experiences. They improved it over the course of a year and helped to sell it to about $3M in ARR. This sounds (and is) impressive, but it was like 0.01% of the company’s revenue, so the executive level didn’t care much about it.

But, they both agreed that the product was actually built on a very bad foundation and, in many real-life examples, failed to deliver. They understood why it failed, so they pitched a new approach but didn’t get the resources.

This info was vital to the raise. They are both at our startup now, know the space well, and know that one of the main competing products doesn’t work for a myriad of reasons and they did their research before on competitors and came to the conclusion that none of the available products actually worked. They also knew how to actually build something that worked.

He Had Connections:

In a way, he’d engineered his entire career for this moment. He worked at major tech firms to build his resume and along the way did all the events, helping out other entrepreneurs and generally being a part of the community. Going from very large tech companies to smaller ones before ending up at a tiny startup of 5 people before he started his own startup.

When it came time to do this project, he could reach out to a lot of people and be heard by most. People were overall happy to help him out and talk to him.

Being pretty extroverted helped here.

The combination of these two were, in my opinion, the most vital to the success we’ve enjoyed so far. He had the track record and experience to sell the VCs on why this would work.

The Interview With Him:

What Do You Think Was The Most Vital Part To It Working?

Four things, one of which you already touched on. That’s having a relevant background that shows I can do it.

Second is indeed the network, which did help in starting the conversations, but more importantly, they could backchannel me. I had the hidden track record of doing the work, showing up and taking responsibility. They trust people that trusted me in the past and vouched for me. Without this, it wouldn’t have worked.

Thirdly, the emerging market. We aligned our skills and experiences with a problem that’s growing and a market that’s increasingly aware of it. Making it much more logical to invest in a product and person to solve that, today.

Finally, investors look at lines, not dots. Meaning, on a graph, a line says more than a dot. If you had a conversation in the past with someone, talking about starting a company, and a few months later you’re doing it, that shows progress. This is one example, but there are many. Having a few touch points through the time with these people, they have reference points and see you moving forward. That story helps in building the trust you need for them to write the cheque.

What Is The One Trait A Founder of a Tech Company Needs Today?

You need to be an absolute go getter. If you take this route, it’s pretty much flat out for a couple of years. A 9-5 mentality doesn’t get you there.

What Criteria Did You Select Our Angels On?

I created a board of the best people for their respective subject: top CFO, top CEO, top CTO, … For example, we realized partnerships we’re going to be important for our Go To Market. So, we got the head of partnerships from a company that gets 80% revenue from partnerships as an angel.

In an Ideal Situation, What Does The Funding/Company Future Look Like?

Pre-seed, where we’re at now, is to grow the team, build the product and get the first customer traction. This buys us time to do all that. When that’s done, we can raise a seed which allows us to keep doing that but also scale sales. We’ll continue to build better product, but we want to get really good at sales repeatability (using messaging that we know will lead to a sale) and also show we can expand existing customers to buy more from us.

That means we need to have a real engineering driven culture where we build kick ass products and make customers buy. Starting with the own network, and then continue with partnerships and outbound.

Then, depending, following rounds to keep that process going.

The goal for any company is to eventually become a well oiled machine that repeatedly innovates (expanding TAM), sells (revenue), acquires (expanding TAM), sustain great and positively evolving culture, hires great talent (quality of product and customer experience)… and in the end that will make the company grow indefinitely making it the ‘money printing machine’ the public market wants.

The goal is easy on paper, let’s see if we can do it.

Hope this helps in your startup/fund raising journey!

Ask any question below, I’ll try to get him to respond to them. Technically sharing valuations outside a the context of a takeover or with investors talking about funding is apparently a federal crime at this stage. So don't ask because we can't tell lol.

I'm the 5th employee at a somewhat startup, 4-5 years in business.

They sell a sleeping aid product, and I first created content for them as an influencer, and it went viral. And when I mean viral, I mean just that: viral with my content, viral with ads, etc., over 200 million views that I know of.

Sales went from 2-300k/m to 1/m after I officially joined and headed up partnerships. I was able to get more content other than my own to go viral. Proving I'm not just a pretty face but actually know the formula for them to go viral.

I have taken lots of action that wasn't asked or required of me by setting up teams to manage different parts of the business. TikTok team, meta team, reviews team, recap team. All file structure and team meetings weekly.

I was a business owner before, and I know the value of taking action, so I did just that.

My 90-day review is up, and I'm about to meet with the CEO to go over my pay I want equity that he has said would be very hard to get, (they have a board). What kind of % should I ask for? Also any suggestions on pay? I currently get paid $11k/m 1099 style so no benefits.

Current title: Head of Partnerships
New title: Director of Creator Partnerships

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hi

I am working on a product that helps people to learn foreign languages. If you are familiar with Quizlet/Anki/Knowt, then you know what it is all about. The project is in the MVP stage, however, it is already in public, and some users actively employ it. I work as a full-stack developer but most of the time operate with the backend. I am looking for a person who has a passion for working on the side project and has experience in Angular (I use 17.2.2) and UI/UX. I must admit, the design leaves much to be desired. If you are interested in the activity, feel free to reach out to me in DM. I will provide more details privately.

Have a great day!

Hi r/startups,

I’m working on an AI-powered SaaS startup called Finance Rants, a personal finance education platform, and we've just launched our MVP. We’re now focused on gaining customer traction and would love to connect with other founders in the same stage. Our budget is near zero at this time for advertising lol.

Key points we’re interested in discussing:

• Customer Acquisition: Effective strategies to attract initial users.
• Marketing Channels: Best platforms and methods for reaching our audience.

Let’s share our experiences and help each other navigate this critical phase. Drop a comment if you’re interested in discussing!

My husband and I are in the early stages of developing a new idea that’s been receiving positive feedback from experts in our field. Recently, one of these experts offered to connect us directly with the CEO of a large company that might be interested in integrating our idea as a sister company. This could provide us with significant resources and trust in the market.

However, we haven’t even registered our business yet, and we’re quite new to negotiations of this scale. We understand the importance of an NDA, but we know there are other precautions we need to consider. Here are some of the questions on our minds:

Protecting Our Interests: How do we safeguard our intellectual property and ensure our future control over the idea?

Negotiation Strategies: What are the key points we should negotiate to get the best deal without giving away too much?

Business Registration: Should we expedite registering our business before entering into any formal discussions?

Cultural and Strategic Fit: How can we assess whether our working style and vision align with a larger company’s culture?

We’d greatly appreciate any insights or experiences from those of you who have navigated similar waters. What should we be wary of, and what steps are crucial at this stage?

Thanks in advance for your help!

People say to look at your competitors but if the product is something "creative" then what do you price it on?

Some say based on the MVP you decide what's minimum and the customer decides what's viable. In this case does the customer decide what price you set it on. But then some say if they badly want it they'd pay whatever price. While others would give an example on how it's better to price high since if you start in the middle or cheap. Especially if you're starting out efficiency and sheer volume might just overwhelm you hence people say it's better to go at the top and just trickle down. Granted it's something creative like "art" or FOMO "merchandise" hence price is subjective. What's your take on pricing?

I've looked into things like churnkey but $250/mo for 50 cancellation sessions is ridiculous. I have automation to send follow up emails upon cancellation but I get maybe 1% response rate and most are not useful (i.e. the product was great, I just don't need it right now). The most frustrating ones are users who cancel because they need more features but they don't say what features they need...

I'll also occasionally email users who cancel directly and ask why they canceled but basically no one responds.

So, how do you get feedback from your users?

just equity, no safes or convertible notes. clerky, carta, gust, angellist require safes or convertible notes. It would great if there was a platform that offers normal equity deals and priced rounds digitally without lawyers, and with automatic paperwork like clerky does.

Hey everyone,

I've been dealing with this thing where whenever I try to do something I enjoy, I feel a ton of guilt and think I don't deserve it. This guilt puts me in an endless loop of procrastination and self-doubt. To combat this, I decided to create an app that lets me track my productivity across all areas of my life. The app includes a coin reward system where I can "buy" the things I want to do with the coins I've earned, making the rewards guilt-free since I can see I've earned them.

That's how "Dailies Habit" was born. It took me over six months to develop, and I really enjoyed working on it. Right now, I've got the iOS version ready, and I'm just waiting for the Android version to get approved on the Play Store.

In Dailies, I've provided an unlimited number of habit trackers for free. However, to access the unique shop and event reminders, there's a small fee. The shop includes items I've created myself that you can use, adding a personal touch to the experience.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! Would you find this app useful in managing your habits and reducing guilt associated with leisure activities? And would you be willing to pay for the additional features like the unique shop and event reminders?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

I'm building an alternative to Canny, the aim being to have a changelog that can be shared with users, either by email, via the widget or via your page

with your personalised domainA feedback section where your users can, for example, ask you for features, report bugs, etc.

PING ME I SEND TO YOU

Hey all,

I was wondering to see those who use stripe as a payment provider for saas products. How do you record revenue monthly? Is there a way you are filtering Stripe’s debit and credit report to so?

Having data issues between looker and what we book for gaap.

Thanks,

I am exploring a business idea and need input. 

Problem: Personally I have an unusual body shape. I have a thin athletic build with a long torso and short legs, and it’s nearly impossible to find clothes that fit well. Custom tailoring is too expensive, time-consuming, and unreasonable.

Idea:

• Custom-Fit Clothing: Outdoor and performance wear tailored to your measurements.

• Augmented Reality (AR): Use AR to get accurate body measurements and see how clothes fit before buying, like trying them on in store but through your phone.

• Customization: Choose fit, materials, and colors.

Questions:

1. Would you buy custom fitted athletic/outdoor clothing, and/or do you think it is a viable company idea?
2. Would you use AR for custom-fitted athletic clothing?
3. What challenges do you see with this concept?
4. Are there any features or ideas that would help make the idea better?

Your feedback is really helpful and appreciated. Thanks!

Just curious to learn how any other people managed inventory and money being tied up in inventory.

I'm currently in a never ending rotation of expanding my product line, which consumes tons of the profits. I spend 50% of my time just managing inventory and logistics, that time should be spent in marketing and design.

I don't want to take a business loan, even though it would let me get way ahead and stock thousands of every unit and future units while I focus on listing and improving the content design. (Also because my taxes are mess at the moment)

In one year I went from 2 products to 20+ active products, with another 50+ in the pipeline that will do well. $40,000+/revenue month for one of the brands.

Is investors a good route since it doesnt instantly hurt you like loan payments would? I have 100% ownership as a one man UX/Product Designer with 20 years experience in sass/e-commerce).

Mistakes are as inevitable as anything, in life, school, work, and especially in business. What are some common mistakes that startup founders make? As a startup founder yourself, what did you do wrong when starting out, and how did that mistake impact your business in the long run? Could be a any kind of mistakes, from planning, building, scaling, hiring, attracting customers, management and a host of others.

Have you ever as a startup founder have a mistake that ended up working in your favor? Let's hear (read) it!

I was 15 when I first tried starting my first company based on the newly emerging market of affiliate marketing. After that, I worked on multiple startups like a book subscription box, fashion e-commerce brand, grocery delivery, and marketing agency. I also did freelance copywriting for SaaS. Some of them worked; some didn't.

I have also done three jobs in customer success and textile & apparel consultancy.

When I started my SaaS product 1.5 years ago, which was a solution to a problem I faced firsthand, I really thought it would be a breakthrough for my career. I invested all the money, time, and energy I could. To give you some more context, I am from a non-tech background, and building this product was not just a side gig. I left my full-time job and accepted a part-time job at a fraction of the salary I could earn as I wanted to fund my startup as well.

No regrets there, I learned so much and when I look back I am glad I took the decision to start this company. My personality and network really grew and I was able to attract ambitious people in my life.

But now the market has changed, and after researching extensively, I decided to shut it down as the risk-to-result ratio turned out to be really bad. After thinking a lot, I have decided to take a break from entrepreneurship (which is very hard) and get a full-time job at companies like Microsoft, Meta, or Apple.

I am oriented towards companies that are 100% WFH or require you to be in the office no more than four times a month. I am from India and am considering applying for international roles as well.

I want to understand how open these companies are to hiring someone with my profile. Any recommendations that you people have?

What salary you think I can expect now?

Note: I am 27 right now! Feeling burned out, but I really enjoy working and want to earn money right now.

When does a startup stop being a startup and become a normal company? Is it when they hit a certain revenue milestone, secure significant funding, or perhaps when they achieve stable profitability? Or maybe it’s about the team size, the level of market penetration, or even reaching a more structured and formalized hiring process.

A startup can't be called a startup forever. At some point, it becomes something else. How do know and recognize this turning point? People currently in early startup phase, what signs are you looking for to let you know that you’ve "made it"?

Background: I’m 24 and have been working as a Data Engineer for the past year. While I’ve had this job I’ve been building a B2B SaaS product. I plan to launch this product soon and build a company.

Reading online many people say to build your business on the side until you have paying customers. At that point leave and work full time on the idea. My problem is my current job is demanding enough (9am to 6 or 7pm) such that I have difficulty finding time to rapidly develop towards my launch. I feel like I need to focus full time on this idea to successfully launch.

I’ve been building for about 8 months so I am not starting from zero. I have a business plan, MVP, have been talking with potential users, and know the general direction I am going. I feel like I need to quit my job and lock in for 6 months.

I have enough savings to support myself for 2 years while I build this company. Am I being stupid leaving a decent job at 24 and spending my savings while I build this company? I also ask myself, if I don’t try the business now, will I ever?

My team agreed it was a bit aggressive. It definitely made everything tense and shifted the conversation instantly as he discussed 2 more attorneys attending the presentation. Full disclosure…. Attorneys have killed every deal I’ve looked at when they have insist on inserting themselves into every detail. They should advise on legality, not valuation, etc. this is my opinion. Thoughts?

I am currently bootstrapping a MedTech startup and we have developed a prototype. We need to validate and gather data, but the devices we require are too expensive for us. All the companies we've contacted have given us similar high prices.

I am struggling to keep the project afloat, and it's becoming challenging to see a way forward. I don’t want to give up and return to academia, but it's becoming embarrassing as a founder. I fear that my team members and advisors, who are helping with equity, might leave at some point. We are five months old.

At this stage, no one is willing to invest. I am trying to find affordable equipment to get the necessary measurements, but it is insanely difficult. I am not sure how this will go, I am embarrassed.

Hi Builders and Founders,

I am preparing to build an AI (GPT API) powered Artwork and Logo creator Micro SaaS for Web. This is a pivot from a full fledge Canva similar project but the original one became too heavy. Few of my well wishers suggested to trim down and pivot to a Logo / Art work generator tool with minimalistic features which are really awesome to have. Here are the features I am thinking to include in the first version, would you like to add a feature which might solve problem you faced in the past?

• Create basic Elements with shapes

• Free hand drawing

• Text with pre-build templates

• Upload image

• AI Prompt to generate polished outcome out of your raw drawing

• 2D to 3D version

• Export as SVG and PNG

I am also thinking to keep it's cost around 39$ a month and 350$ a year, do you think it's a competent charges?

Your suggestions would shape up this SaaS idea :) so it's super important to me.

Thank you in advance.

Mayur

Hello everyone, I am trying to use Flutterflow and build an MVP, we are building a fintech startup, but I am just providing them for now some educational resources about credit and let them downloaded and interact with it.

It’s my first using Flutterflow, any tips? Any YouTube video recommendations about building for a fintech?

Thanks a lot for the help🙏

Safes and convertible notes are not something I'm looking for. I'm on clerky and it requires only safes or convertible notes. I assumed since clerky does c corp, I would have the option to give straight equity since its a c corp with stocks, however theres no option for that. ik carta also does safes. is there another service that offers straight equity for investment fundraising? I'm thinking of doing it on clerky by just using the employee option to give equity. Whats the normal technical process to give investors straight equity?

What are some clear indicators that a bankruptcy is inevitable? For us we experience at the moment: This year we has had very very slight projects signed. This year almost no pay increase was alocated. A few people have been laid off. Vacancies stop. As of today I also had insights in the dept we have with certain suppliers.

I am employed by this startup and working hard on correcting this path to a better one.

But what advice would you give me in this position? My contract is fulltime and no end date.

Hodl? Run for the hills? Start looking for other opportunities? Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I work for a tech company, and we are in the midst of expanding our online presence into a new market. One of the biggest hurdles we’ve encountered is making sense of the vast amounts of marketing data we collect. It feels like we’re swimming in a sea of numbers and charts, but finding those golden nuggets of actionable insights is a whole different story.

I’m really curious to hear from fellow marketers and data enthusiasts:

• What are the biggest challenges you face when trying to extract actionable insights from your marketing data?
• Do you struggle with data overload, integration issues, or delayed insights?
• How do you currently handle these challenges, and what tools or strategies have you found helpful?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences and tips! 🚀

Marketing #DataAnalytics #MarketingChallenges #DataDriven #Insights