Totally get this. This is where the email screen can be a lifesaver. You fill the social obligation, maybe even lend a hand or get done what you need to get done, and you can prioritize it -- meet now, meet later, meet never.
When you're an entrepreneur, you can easily get up to 50% of your time meeting people outside of your company -- sales, hires, partners, help, funding. It can get tricky real quick. My basic guideline has always been no more than 1 a week unless I'm doing something that specifically requires me to meet external people.
Thanks for the feedback and the extra points you listed.
#2 is intriguing. I started a "rant" on this but it made the post too long so I cut it. What do you do with no-shows? I mean, it's on me for not seeing it coming in the first place, but I've never figured out good etiquette for dealing with them.
No-shows usually go to the bottom of my list and I’ll only engage with them via email after they’ve burned me once. I don’t lecture them because I understand life happens but further engagements are on my terms.
No-shows don’t affect me now because I have all meetings come to my workplace or to my small business office if I’m working from there. Once they’ve arrived if necessary we’ll then go to our intended location TOGETHER (ie. lunch, coffee).
When I’m traveling I rarely have meetings outside of the hotel I’m staying in.
I got burnt twice by a founder of a local hot startup a few years ago and made this change after dealing with him. It’s made things much easier.
Thank you. You bring up a great point and I really debated over the title. I think the mechanics for D&R are pretty well known and most people are aware that it's a marketing effort that needs the extra work. I also think that once we connect the mechanics of Investment Crowdfunding to traditional fundraising, those steps become clearer too. So I didn't want to rehash a lot of what was already out there. The questions I get all the time come down to "How do I get started on this?" So I tried to couch it as that. Hopefully, an entrepreneur who is interested will then choose their Kickstarter or whatever or find the right IC platform like the one I linked to. I will write more on the subject. Thanks again!
Good points. I hope I addressed them in the post, but thanks for the chance to summarize them here.
So the difference is this: Most companies, the vast majority, including startups, fall into a salary schedule based on ranges and grades, which serves nobody except the books. It's my belief that job-hopping is so prevalent when companies tell talent they can't pay them anymore because they've hit some sort of artificial ceiling. I'm calling for an individual assessment in salary, from the very beginning (i.e. startups) to be able to get max value. IOW -- pay the employee what they need and make sure we get value back for that money.
Nothing wrong with being a merc. I've been a merc. But I don't do what I do just for the money. If you do, that's great, that's your motivation and you probably return that with tons extra in your output. So when your employer comes to you and says, "Hey, we can't give you more money but here's a fancy title." That's NOT you, right? They should be aware of your motivation and pay you accordingly.
I’m a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. Building Spiffy, sold Automated Insights, sold ExitEvent, built Intrepid Media.
Your history for starting businesses is to sell them and to make money from them. There is nothing wrong with that but don’t pretend that you’re doing this to feed starving children in Africa.
But yes, after being the dev lead at a previous company. I negotiated at my current job not to be a team lead. I have no interest in titles or official leadership positions. I would rather mentor and advise from within a team.
No, please, be blunt. This is all honest. Let me put it this way. In my 20s, I was 100% money driven. In my 30s, probably 75%, now in my 40s, about 50%. I'm not saying I want to feed starving children in Africa. That'd be a good thing, but my thing is different. I get offers, not a ton, but some, that are for more money, but I'd have to give up things I care about more. Time with my family, doing what I love to do, working with people I might not want to work with, etc. Everyone has these.
So now why is this a thing and not just me-- If you look at millennials, they're nowhere near as money driven as my generation or the one before mine. I've seen it time and again. It's not black and white -- there are some that are mercs, and the ones that aren't are not 100% saints, but the mean is shifting away from money.
Even so, from your side, your motivation from being in business is for your own work life balance and to further your goals - which are not necessarily financial.
But unless I as an employee think that I’m doing something for a higher calling, what motivation do I have to work for your company besides either making more money now, or to learn skills where I can leave and make more money later? In other words, I may be willing to make less for a non profit but not for a for profit business.
And that’s not meant to be judgemental. You would be hiring me because you can arbitrage my talents and pay me less than you can profit from me. On the other hand, I would work for you to get the most money I could and at the same time understanding that you are profiting off of me in exchange for me not having to worry about all of the headaches of running a business. I think negotiating is about coming up with a mutually agreeable amount.
I think we agree on those points. Most people don't get to negotiate, especially younger people earlier in their careers, especially when it comes to things like incentives, base/bonus, and milestones. If you negotiate, you're the exception. I know I am.
If you can plan on how you're going to spend that $60K and those plans will get you to a new level of revenue that will provide a good return on the $60K and you're not giving up more of the company than you're comfortable with, then consider the investment.
What I'm saying here is that deciding to take investment should be weighed on the merits of the investment itself. It's part of the equation, not the whole equation.
Thank you. I will take any advice i can get. I have to make a decision like this week. ;-) merit of his investment is he expects an ROI or a piece of sales OR both. I'm not sure i understand the part of the equation vs the whole equation. :-(
So if you think of $250K as the cost to get the business to sustainable, then $60K is part of it, a bunch of your own money is part of it, and your sweat and and anyone who works for you for equity is another part. Think about time too. It could be $250K up front sourced by investors, or $250K over 3 years combining all the sources. Or somewhere in between. There is nuance. Good luck!
Actually I didn't say I did it for $10K, I said I'd DO it for 10 dollars.
I get you. I'm talking about the difference between calling something a company and building a sustainable company from zero. $250K is arbitrary because any number would be arbitrary, as you note, but it's also a good minimum baseline to shoot for.
Any one of the caveats I discuss in the article could change the number or how that money is aggregated or how long it takes to spend it.
In between Automated Insights and my current startup Spiffy, I built Teaching Startup with $10,000 out of my own pocket, 60 hours a week of sweat equity [...]
Past tense implies that you did it (and it's awesome that you did)...
More to the point, if "$250k is arbitrary because any number would be arbitrary" then it's not a good minimum baseline to shoot for, it's just a random number. Better to actually think through how the business will work, what resources you can draw upon, what your expenses will be, how your revenues will come in, etc. And then estimate your financing requirements based on the specifics of the business.
You can't say 250k is a baseline unless you know what sort of company you're building. For a services / consulting company where you're getting revenue upfront, it is probably more than enough... For a product company, it may be way too little.
You missed the black hole called marketing or an agent.
Landing page alone will get you nowhere real quick.
You might get a lucky client or a few by posting samples. Maybe. But would that even be sustainable? It would you just end up hired and not really a consultant?
Network effects are also unreliable on a small scale. Plus networks need a bit of care that takes time and work.
I would recommend (as I fell for that once and never again) never starting a consultancy/services company unless you already have the network to give you a 3 year runway and growth path. Starting this and going out to market your services without having a good pipeline set up before your start (for instance from your previous job / company) can be an extremely painful way to burn out your money and possibly yourself.
If you have no network and only $250k and skills you think that are marketable, you'll have a good chance of that 250k being gone and you having done nothing but talking with 'potential clients' which end up in your pipeline at 30-60%. With your runway gone, you have no time to close these prospects and no money coming in. I see it happen so often...
I could see myself outsourcing that. I’ve worked with plenty of local recruiting companies from both the hiring side and looking for a job. I would probably setup a win/win partnership with them. I can guarantee them qualified developers, and they can find clients and get a cut. Recruiting companies usually will do either 1099 Corp to Corp contracts. Of course as you build your own clientele, you hope you lessen your need for external recruiters.
In the US or countries like it. We grew (a few times I might add with different companies) to a substantial size (millions euros of profit / year) without any lawyer interaction at all.
And you can easily (again, I speak for where I am from, so YMMV) grow to millions of revenue without an accountant. You probably wouldn't because it's cheap until you get to many employees and larger amounts of rev or unknown business territory, but you can and people do.
Yeah, I kind of meant without any of that. The only thing I spend money on related to legal these days (used not to) is legal insurance which is cheap anyway so why not.
To be fair, you don't really need that. I did software consulting without any insurance for almost 20 years. At one point, I had a client who required it as terms of a subcontract, so I had to get it.
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Aw crap. So the link says "friends_link" right in the link itself. Maybe they turned it off because it's already got like 4K views. I'll send an message to support. Thanks.
Yes. A lot of people miss #2 and that's my point. Like I said, my first answer was I can start a company for ten bucks. Great. I've started a company. To truly stand it up and make it last, whether it's technology or gardening, takes time and money, all of it equivalent to about $250K. Whether that comes from investment, sweat, or out of pocket is what I'm elaborating on. Thanks.
Then it's all throw away because noting makes sense, nobody understood what he has been doing, and a proper company that would have to host, manage and maintain the said software would simply ask to re-build the said soft from scratch because it would be cheaper.
These people would have better time building up sweet and clean prototypes ; at least they would have a professional competency at the end.
Because yes, hacking shit together is not a job. Those little hackers that existed 10 years ago all went on to college to learn architecture and what not and are now recruited either for data job, management, or devops / security.
I get the point, I passed trough this "phase" ; but let me be clear : everybody told me it was pure bullshit and shitty software.
Iterate on architecture rather than feature. At some point you gotta be lucid about what you are doing, and hacking sh*t together doesn't help you master the service you are going to expose.
ps : Hacking stuff together is still a lot of fun for newbs or "fun" prototype ; nothing professional or client worthy can get out of this kind of mess.
When you're an entrepreneur, you can easily get up to 50% of your time meeting people outside of your company -- sales, hires, partners, help, funding. It can get tricky real quick. My basic guideline has always been no more than 1 a week unless I'm doing something that specifically requires me to meet external people.