Assuming you are US based and raised angel round at $5mil post money valuation. First employee (talented or experienced or super smart) for marketing will get a salary of $110K average in the market for Director of Marketing role. So, you will have to make sure that
X + Y/4 = $100-$125K/per annum and some more equity for being an early employee
where X is a fixed salary and Y is equity with 4 years vesting and 1 year cliff. If you pay him 80K salary, give him around 2-4% equity. And may be 1% equity as options for staying more than 2 years in company.
When you say "nicely designed handmade website", what does handmade means here? What about other billion websites including bootstrap, were they machine made or something? Please clear the confusion. Thanks.
There are online website builder where you have select the template and you have to fill in the content and the software generate the website for you, so in-order to avoid confusion we used the word hand-made.
I guess it is still confusing..
1. Go to google keyword suggestion tool and check how many people are searching for something you are building. Say, you are building Employee Evaluation Tool - close to 74K searchers are made every month in US and 135K globally. Competition is medium, so there is still some space for new player. So, yes there is some demand for problem I m trying to solve.
2. List down top 10 blog post links which talk about Problem your product will solve and post comment on all those blogs in 3-4 lines : first two lines about the post, next two about your project & link. So, you will start getting some traffic atleast say 20-30 users daily from all those 10 blogs combined.
3. Start creating good relations with people who have given you these emails. Tell them something like : "Hi, Thanks for giving me you email. I am building this product where you will be able to choose pre-made Employ Evaluation forms or will be able to edit them too. What more do you think you will need to solve your problem of Employee evaluation. Thanks."
So, with in 2-3 weeks, you will have really good idea if this thing gonna work or not.
I have been a single founder 2 times (one of the companies got sold and other one is doing good) and 2 times with co-founders. And I personally find starting up a single founder.
You mentioned you have good ideas more than 2 times i guess, you will have to take that thing out of your mind. When you are onto something, burn rest of the ideas for atleast 6 months.
If you can't find co-founder, surround yourself with team members, start with hiring people remotely china,india,bangladesh.
Build prototype, no full fledged product. Try to fail fast if things doesn't pick after few months to save some time and fatigue. By prototype I mean, that one feature that separates you from others.
Learn to delegate work. As a programmer first, founder second - I used to micro manage things which gave me really bad time with my first startup. But as you start delegating work to your remote workers / employees, you will start feeling better.
I would advice you to build something with atleast some business model. Its tough to create instagrams or tumblrs of the world.
Its good to hear from another single founder. I'm at a stage now where I have a product running and I'm looking to grow and/or seek VC help.
What puts me off is the fact that they are less interested if you do not have a co-founder. But surely I should be in a good position if my site is already monetizing itself??? It means that my business model is working.
@infogaufire, how did you manage accounting and marketing? Did you delegate that too?
I actually managed that myself for sometime. Accounting can easily be managed if you can dedicate just one night on building a simple app for that with even a bad UI. All you have to do is:
1. Create a table Money with id, name, money, credit/debit (1 or 0), date&time
2. Create a form to enter these values
Below the form, just print values from database order by date&time
This simple thing will take you very long - believe me. Its that easy.
For marketing @ very early stage, you just have to be a hustler. This is something what I do whenever I float some random new project (just posted this comment on HN) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5836395
Exactly how I feel. I've coded like a headless chicken for the last 9 months, its what I enjoy and what I'm good at.
When I show the product to VC's and tell them I need help with marketing, accounting, establishing as a [already profitable] company. They brush me off and almost laugh. "Thats the easy stuff" they say.
Most business ideas will work eventually, if given enough time. Good ideas, on the other hand, tend to get traction quickly.
For me, I test a lot of ideas. Most of the stuff I do takes minimal time and resources so that if it fails, it doesn't hurt too bad. I'm always testing.
Quickly is unscientific but very intuitive. It's determined by things like my energy levels, my finances, how well the launch is going, any new information I've received since launch - many factors. I can always go back and revisit the project later if I want.
Whenever lightening strikes you with a new idea. Same lightening hits 100 others in different parts of the world with same idea #realstory #universalfact
Ok thank you for taking the time to reply. I was just wondering if I should find someone to work with or focus on learning programming so I could make a prototype myself - just not sure where to start
Learn programming to make a prototype. I recently hired a girl programmer who learnt programming by herself in just 10 weeks and built really good product while learning programming.
If I feel this is not my bestest ever idea and I can come up with better ideas in future, I will sell it for sure. Have done it twice before, not with google although, for the same reason.
Any music (beats are must), anywhere (bed or desk or couch), Mac Air, sitting, preferably in company of other coders(& friends). And I am a big time night person 11pm to 4am works the best for me.
Started with Stanford classes - did the first/ second lecture probably 10 times. Then went to the Big Nerd Ranch iOS programming book. Built a few throwaway apps based off code from both. The pinnacle was building an app far betond my skill level with a senior programmer. If you can find a mentor who's willing to code with you, ask them to build something. You'll learn much faster.
Awesome. Just to make this more useful for me & other readers who have been doing web developing with php/python/ruby etc, what will be your advice regarding how to get started with iOS development to build our first working app?
Big Nerd Ranch Guide: iOS Programming -- This book was well worth the investment. Go through the chapters and do the exercises. After you start to feel somewhat comfortable, try testing your creativity by taking some of the code you've written and making something unique.
Example:
The book teaches you how to make a quiz app where you store questions and answers in two arrays and use two buttons to display each.
My variation on this was an app that helped me measure how much water I was drinking each day. I had an increment and a decrement button. The goal was to get to 8 glasses. Each time I got closer to the goal a motivational message popped up.
This enabled me to use some of the code I was familiar with, but also change it slightly enough to where I could venture into new territory. -- To me this is the best way to get your first apps going.
Neither you are crazy nor you are the only with such feelings. I am a 3x entrepreneur, have sold 2 companies and 25 years old. I am working for the acquirer of my last company for last 14 months and I am already tired of writing code for someone else. I am all set to leave my six figure salary and keep hacking & building products that inner me wants to build. Believe me, getting a job at the same pay scale will never be a problem for you. Go ahead and start working on your own ideas full time.
X + Y/4 = $100-$125K/per annum and some more equity for being an early employee
where X is a fixed salary and Y is equity with 4 years vesting and 1 year cliff. If you pay him 80K salary, give him around 2-4% equity. And may be 1% equity as options for staying more than 2 years in company.