I feel like this only applies to a very specific kind of tech investor demographic.
I'm working on my own idea, and pitching directly to members of the industry that I've chosen to apply programming to. Surely this isn't a rare thing? It seems much less stressful, and given that you are speaking to the very people who are likely to use your software, I feel like it is substantially easier to communicate your value. You're much less subject to the Brownian motion of a two minute speech in a massive candidate pool.
I don't think I've ever come across a guide for startups in such a situation.
I don't think I've ever come across a guide for startups in such a situation.
Yep. I'm self funding a startup here in China. It's hardware but not a kickstarter-widget, it's necessarily relatively capital intensive to prove market-fit, the opportunity is large, it's not in the US, it's already multi-jurisdiction, it's not growing via an accelerator, and it's absolutely not an SaaS or similar. Getting any kind of current advice is really difficult! I feel your pain. Those of us who are outliers just have to learn to filter a lot of this stuff and keep what's relevant. On the plus side, being outliers we probably have greater scope for execution without early competition, and if we play our cards right potential investors are more likely to notice us.
> I'm working on my own idea, and pitching directly to members of the industry that I've chosen to apply programming to.
Isn’t this just called sales/bizdev/gettingcustomers? Ideally you can fund your business from sales to adventurous customers who are willing to put up with you still developing the software. This I think is sttictly better than selling to investors and then your customers.
Customers both provide more valid feedback and sttonger validation of your idea than investors ever could. They also have more skin in the game.
(Slightly off topic) Please add LLC support in Stripe Atlas! It's a much better fit for most businesses and if companies decide to raise money from investors, converting to a C-corp is easy. Not sure if you can answer, but what's taking Stripe so long to add LLC support? LLC support was planned from launch day and it's been 2 years since then.
LLCs also have better privacy than C-corps. No information is in the public domain if everything is done through an agent. For C-corps, name and address of the owners are part of the public domain and can be obtained by anyone by contacting the relevant authorities.
Also looking forward to the "Payouts only" feature in Stripe connect.
Another question : how many members are in the private Atlas community forum?
In the mean time is there something like Stripe Atlas for LLCs?
Our desired end state for LLC support is that it feels like you're just making a radio selection between C corp and LLC, and Everything Else Just Works. A core thing Stripe does is abstract away complexity. Unfortunately, this doesn't make complexity go away, it just means we have to have systems/processes/relationships/etc ready to deal with it. [+]
Making everything else work is substantially more complicated than implementing the radio button. We eagerly await when we're able to show it off.
There exist a spectrum of options within the United States for how public the owners of LLCs are. In many states, for example, the owners are a matter of public record. (Feel free to search Nevada for Kalzumeus Software, LLC.) I'd love to hear in more detail about what specifically you want regarding privacy; feel free to drop me an email. There are some points on the spectrum which are easier to offer (e.g. "I don't want my home address on the public records for my company.") and there are some which we are very unlikely to offer.
We've incorporated thousands of companies. All of them have access to the forum. We probably won't comment more specifically than that.
[+] An example which is near and dear to my heart: any Stripe user anywhere can trivially price a product in Japanese yen; you just change the currency parameter in your API call and your customer gets charged JPY instead of e.g. USD. There is no small amount of technical, legal, and organizational plumbing that makes that possible. You'll never need to think about it.
For example, to charge a Japanese bank's credit cards, one will need to staff a phone number which rings an office in e.g. Tokyo such that a bank's customer service representative can call to look up a transaction that the bank's customer had a question about. You don't have to be able to take that call. We do.
There's a lot of things like that in the world. (If you want a job with a very, very high rate of learning about how messy global financial infrastructure is and how its towering achievements can be improved upon, we're hiring aggressively HN.)
Re privacy: At least in Delaware, I can have an LLC without having my name and address in the public domain, so such a setup would be ideal and it's perfectly legal. Like you said, it varies by state, so here's hoping that Stripe chooses a state which at least lets owners keep their address out of the public domain if not their name.
Another suggestion : setup an email capture form for people interested in LLC support, I suspect the interest would be far greater than what Stripe ever had for C-corps. As a bootstrapper, you know that there are far more lifestyle business owners who will never consider setting up a C-corp, but will jump at the chance of setting up an LLC though Atlas.
It's not a full equivalent to Stripe Atlas for LLCs, but you'll find a nice range of "a la carte" options for forming and running LLCs from this registered agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/
Hey Patrick, I have one for ya. What are the biggest mistakes you've seen early, seemingly unimpressive founders (and teams) make during a pitch or through running their company that turned you off - only to discover later that they were able to build impressive businesses? Conversely, what signals do you think you've perhaps over indexed on (positively) in the past that have potentially been "yellow" flags in a founding team you've invested in (or recommended) and led to a failure to thrive? Are there things new startup founders can learn from either scenario?
Startups have a really long lifecycle associated with them. I have answers to the question with respect to startups I was not professionally engaged with. I don't have many data points regarding ones which I was, because the jury won't be in for a few years on the numeric supermajority of them. My set of data points where I have reasonable confidence in terminal outcome is very small relative to e.g. a professional investor who was active over the same length of time I've been on HN.
This is not a new insight, but the thing pg says about successful startups often looking like a toy appears to me to be true. One benefit of having a searchable archive of my written thoughts going back 10+ years is that I can see what I thought of e.g. Facebook or Airbnb back in the day. In both cases, I thought they were unlikely to find a business model. I was very clearly wrong about that. I am, accordingly, very careful around the fact pattern "it's clearly something people love but is there really a business there?"
Within my specific interest in B2B SaaS companies, a thing I have historically overindexed on is amazing product teams without demonstrated success in sales in the appropriate model (low-touch, high-touch, etc). I have sometimes been wrong about "Ahh, clearly they will figure out enterprise sales; how hard can it be if they can clearly ship a good product?" It is, in fact, possible to be a great product owner and not successfully build a sales organization strong enough to take a company to the sort of trajectory successful funded startups want to walk down.
What would you recommend for someone who is starting a B2B SaaS business with a lot of product experience, but virtually no enterprise sales experience. Obviously, hiring someone with enterprise sales experience/connections is our main priority, but how would one go about learning? There aren't really bootcamps & online resources for learning sales.
I've already incorporated and have revenue; can you unbundle incorporation from the other services in Atlas? I would probably be happy to pay $500 for templates, bank account, aws credits, access to legal and tax professionals, and personalized pitching advice. The landing page makes it sound that it's only if you use Atlas to incorporate.
IMHO the Stripe notes and YC perspectives are especially useful when the pitch deck has a first draft. Founders and teams write the first draft faster (and better) when they use the notes above.
It's interesting that the 6-slide pitch deck doesn't have a "team" slide. Maybe was it used in the idea phase?
PS: Thank you. I was looking for something like this.
You're welcome. You're correct the 6-slide pitch deck doesn't have a "team" slide. It's deliberate. This is because it's higher priority to focus on the product and customer; the concept is still touched on by slide 6 and the "teammates" item. The 6-slide pitch deck can take an hour or so for a first draft.
In practice I use the 6-slide as a first step, akin to a simple sketch, suitable mostly for internal discussion. Then I work with the founders to expand the 6-slide deck into the 12-slide, which gets sent to external people. The 12-slide pitch deck can take a week or so for the first few drafts.
Sidenote: The "Heroku for PowerPoint decks" bit is exactly what I am working on as a side project, and I'm very close to launching a private beta. Patio11 - has someone else launched that already? It's scarily close to my idea and value prop!
Suppose, hypothetically, that this product existed in the world, but that it was so poorly distributed that even a person who wanted this product so much they went out and built it hadn't even heard of it.
What would that set of facts change about how you executed on your idea and value prop? My guess is that the correct answer is "That should change my plans not one iota."
If you are too early-stage to have functioning software, mockups will at least let you show that you have good design and product sense.
I want to know if this is really the case here. I have a feeling that YC only accept established working prototype, not just mere interactive mockup that look plausible.
Can somebody vouch in a mere mockup application that has been accepted?
It is my impression that I've accurately captured the sentiment of YC on that issue. Previous public expressions include e.g. Sam Altman here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594615
If you are asking about YC program acceptance, then many, many startups are accepted pre-product, pre-prototype, sometimes even pre-idea. If you only have mockups, then there will be weight on your team background and history.
Harjeet (Taggar?) known as Harj on this board was accepted to YC with a cofounder. Neither of them knew how to program at the time. I think he went on to be a YC partner before he left to found Triplebyte.
I'm working on my own idea, and pitching directly to members of the industry that I've chosen to apply programming to. Surely this isn't a rare thing? It seems much less stressful, and given that you are speaking to the very people who are likely to use your software, I feel like it is substantially easier to communicate your value. You're much less subject to the Brownian motion of a two minute speech in a massive candidate pool.
I don't think I've ever come across a guide for startups in such a situation.