Great situation you have found yourself in! Good for you! What your friends are doing and putting you through is common. When I have given out shares I calculate several things: 1. time they will be involved in the company. 2. the value they provide in the scalability of the business - not th...
I have become a Stripe convert. The simplicity and straight forward pricing is great. The platform works seamlessly. Previously I was a big proponent of Paypal but now after a few months with Stripe I am not ever going back. I have not had one issue at all compared to having at least a dozen issu...
Q) What info would a buyer need in order to make an offer? Unsolicited offers rarely start out as offers. They start as conversations. Cold inbounds from potential acquirers are usually done to establish some facts and also willingness to entertain an offer. They need to have enough informatio...
Typical pre-seed (100-500k) is 5-15% Seed (500k-2M) is up to 25% And over depends. The "potential of the next FB...." is just that, a potential. Don't fight over equity early but make sure you never give up more than 15%, don't offer board seats too early and no "right of first refusal" or "ri...
This is an important question. Knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to not give up (it allows you to to save your time, money and efforts for other projects which may be more lucrative/profitable). That said, anyone who actually gives you an answer without taking a look at ...
I use tier marketing strategies to attract new clients. Simply stated, I use the other members of my team to work collaborately to circulate marketing materials by simulating increased traffic and tricking the algorithms of media platforms to keep circulating the content. A giveaway may be adde...
The ideal way would be to hire the engineer while the project is still under development. You and the engineer should follow up with the outsourced partner in the process. This will give hold to the engineer and later more staff can be trained in upgrading or follow on versions of the product/ser...
Hi! First of all, keep going. There will always be dark days, no matter how well funded you are. In fact, once you accept growth capital for equity, you bring on a whole new set of expectations and challenges. Running a startup, as you know, is never easy and it's never as smooth as people m...
Having done over 35 different financing rounds over 7 companies I've built in Silicon Valley - you should be giving up 15%-25% dilution in each round with a plan to never raise beyond a Series-C. Investors get equity for money invested, don't start doing "special deals" or it could poison the we...
Generally speaking, Yes. I say this for a couple primary reasons. 1) If you do not place value in your product, why should the customer? And if you are not charging for it you are not placing value on it. 2) the customer will be more "invested" in the success of something that has cost them s...