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For those who find this story interesting and are unfamiliar with it, or would like a deeper dive, I just finished the book <em>Bad Blood</em> which tells the story. Highly recommend.
EDIT: Finished reading the book, not writing the book. Author is Pulitzer-Prize winning John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. I am very much not him.
Plug for the excellent book Bad Blood which chronicles the Theranos story by the reporter that broke it. They’re also making it into a movie with Jennifer Lawrence starring as Holmes.
Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions
>"advertising my goods"
Be very careful with those words in social media. Gary V has a book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Hate him all you want, but the concept is clear: spend at least 80% of your posts providing value to your fans, and 20% on advertising (more or less).
- Jab (Top 5 reasons X is better than Y)
- Jab (Our Guide to XYZ)
- Jab (How to start X)
- Right Hook (Need help? Here's our X product)
Accounts that just sell sell sell can turn people off. It's good if they're new - but in the end, you want to build a community, or tribe, of followers.
You should make a 30 sec animated explainer video. Video needs to be much simpler and end with a call to action. People don't need to understand the science: "Get paid to poop and help people." That's enough. https://www.fiverr.com/categories/video-animation/whiteboard-explainer-videos Also hire someone on fivver to do the voiceover.
You should also contact everyone again and ask them why they didn't respond. Otherwise you'll only keep guessing as to why. And actually a 2 to 5 % response rate for cold emailing isn't that bad. You need to treat this like a startup. Look up startup marketing tactics. https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369 Recommended book.
I'm a big fan of the book about the Theranos debacle, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. It's a great case study on messiah complexes, bad leadership, and organizational dysfunction.
Amazon Link - can't recommend it enough, hard to put down and very well weaved together
Carreyrou owns the story - it's hard to describe just what he was up against. All the big names in SV didn't just love Holmes, they praised her, and then they trashed John and the WSJ for going after her.
It took a lot of courage to go against these people and to pursuit the truth in this story. Not to mention that the owner of the WSJ, Murdoch, was a huge personal investor in Theranos (and to his credit didn't intervene to kill the story when Elizabeth asked him to)
What is the current setup like? What is everyone else holding? Is it shared? What classes of equity are there? Preferred stock? Options? How long will it take you to get fully vested in your 1%? Are there kickers? Can you buy in or lock in a per share value? Hit your library and read this book to start with. https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalist/dp/1118443616
At the end of the day an equity play only for something with no product, market , fit or paying clients is a suckers game.
> Decline in SolarCity installations
> TSLA is abandoning solar energy!
Solar is one of the most essential components of their renewable plan (solar + storage = renewable grid) and they aren't going to abandon that because SolarCity's contracts came to a halt, unsurprisingly after TSLA tightened every facet of their spending belt due to this horse-fuckery quarterly analysis.
SolarCity was a stop-gap to penetrate the market with solar before a viable mass-scale solar option came to play (the roof, which is on the backburner while TSLA is scrutinized every Q for automotive deliveries).
lol, come on man. If you can, read a VERY BASIC BOOK on tech investing, and reevaluate how you're perceiving this entire market sector. Try thinking 5Y, 10Y ahead, and not 1 or 2 Quarters ahead.
If you think TSLA's end game is to prove the electric vehicle as a concept then let the international market take from that, you're in the wrong frame of mind and it's no surprise TSLA valuation or longevity doesn't show. Doing so would be like getting lost in an Amazon valuation as a bookstore years ago, claiming they just need to grow into Barnes & Noble's valuation.
Every time this is brought up, I repeat my suggestion for the same book to get someone started on this concept:
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296
You can disagree with the book, but if someone read this book in 2012 and went to the markets, they would've been balls deep in FANG before it even became an acronym. The book doesn't say "Buy FANG" ...but covers socioeconomic and modern-market theories that might offer perspective on how to truly look at companies like T/FANG, and what sets them apart from things like GPRO and Yahoo and why their slow starts usually have unexpected big yields.
I repeat myself: If TSLA was an automotive company ("product") with no moat or visible escape velocity, I wouldn't be as overweight on 'em. Fortunately, every member of the PayPal mafia well-understands the difference between a product and a platform, so I trust Elong to take us there despite quarterly noise.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is really good too.
They should do an episode about Theranos, there's interesting tinfoil theories about why the deep state (Kissinger, George Schultz, and many Silicon Valley people) were interested in a new way to quickly analyze people's blood with just a few drops.
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296
This is my long answer but holy fuck does it do an amazing job at explaining why that shit doesn't matter in the long run. And not just about Tesla, but Thiel explains it so damn clearly that if you read this in 2012 someone would claim you had a Crystal Ball on gainz.
The fluff / development / QC issues matter quarterly, but long-term, that's not what investors are focusing on. Their batteries are going to power the world, and I've placed my very...very...large bets on that accordingly.
Anyone who ever wants to invest in tech MUST read Zero to One. You don't need to necessarily agree with it, but it triggers a new perspective on how to analyze modern tech markets.
This is hardest thing after you find your target market to focus on.
Testing, testing, testing. I read somewhere once that "the best marketers are the best at experiments and doubling down on what works". Every company is going to be different. You might even find channels that work for you but don't work for your competitors.
Just remember that each channel has different feedback loops. For example, direct sales gives pretty quick feedback while SEO can take months to years.
This might be a little outdated for new bootstrapped SaaS's but this book gives you a good framework to work from: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369
To answer your questions... I think it's a solid yes.
The speed which new products and services are launched is so high, that "build it and they will come" simply doesn't apply. I'm still struggling with that as I'm a technical founder with no marketing counterpart. And I'm done building a great service (user's words), and it doesn't get any traction.
But speaking of traction, a book that helped bring some clarity is Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth because it explains 19 generic channels and a strategy to reduce the noice in every field and do some focused marketing on channels that actually work.
Your first build should be an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that has the most basic features possible.
A useful analogy is a hot dog stand… instead of building what YOU think is the best hot dog stand, complete with all types of up-sells and bells and whistles, you want to build the minimum viable product.
What is the “hot dog” of your platform? What is the most basic function that provides value?
Define what that is, then see if you can reduce it some more.
Start there, get it into the hands of users and let them guide you to create what THEY need the rest of the way.
This book is recommended often, and is worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898
Talk to your target audience / customer by phone or in person. 10 interviews will yield 80% of consumer insights.
Ask them what their challenges are when it comes to X (problem you solve) ; How do they currently solve that problem?
Get them to walk you through their day-to-day in regards to the problem you solve.
Find out what media they consume, where they hang out online (websites, news media, blogs, social media).
You may find out that they have other problems you can solve , or that your solution is the right fit for them.
Do not tell them about your solution first (it will ruin the results); Do not ask them what they WOULD do but rather find out what they already do (People are not good at predicting their own behavior).
Best of luck to you and your project!
This site has more tips: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898
Investment Banker here. Won't even attempt to speak to law but if you want to learn about the finance side of transactions this book is the go to.
It sounds like getting investment won't be the challenging part for you, but choosing the right investor will be.
As one of my previous investors likes to say "we look for companies that already have the fire going, just add a little bit of fuel and watch it grow" (mostly talking about existing team + product + traction and just missing some extra cash to grow the business)
If you're looking where to begin, I'd say it's
- figuring out how much you need (which you probably already know).
- figuring out which types of investors match your needs (angels vs VC vs PE).
- figuring out how much you're willing to give up, considering both equity and control. (voting rights, board seats, decision making are going to be a big thing)
- make your deck, practice your pitch and then reach out.
A couple of books I'd recommend are:
- Venture Deals by Brad Feld (finance stuff if you're going with VC or angel money)
- Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman (hr/operations stuff as your organization is going to shift with influx of capital and new hires/people)
It started as a slight varnish on top of what was Extreme Programming that was easily packaged and sold by consultancies. These focused on brining Agile to big enterprise aka "your Agile transformation", and honestly most of these were face-value only. The true power of Agile requires an entire cultural shift for the organization, not just Engineering.
Scrum shops and scrum consultants typically peddle this watered down mostly-broken Engineering-only version, and well it sucks.
The best book I've ever read on distilling the true heart of Agile is actually a business book. I highly recommend it: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898
Design engineer who went down this process. Injection molding this will be 50K+ with first production runs. Read this, changed my attitude on product development. True adopters will pay money for a 3d printer version and you will learn the most from them
If it has anything to do with a social media marketing agency, stay away.
Other than that, Zero to One by Peter Theil is my suggestion, having done multiple successful startups and known people who also have.
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296
I have no idea what YC's preferred methods are - but as someone thats been in marketing/startups I can give you my two cents.
I’ve come down to are either risking it with a $1500 budget to conduct a/b tests for automated marketing strategies with google ads etc, or the other method would be to just cold mail prospects for the B2B product and affiliates for the B2C product.
So it sounds like both deals you are trying to close are effectively "B2B deals" (even the B2C you are talking about an affiliate deal) - typically the sales cycle for most B2B deals are longer so I would account for that (i.e. the deals we start today we're going to not get revenue/close until 3 to 6 months from now)
The second thing I'd say is that doing outbound, it can work, but inbound is always reliable, repeatable, and most importantly it validates theres a demand. If you are convincing people via outbound, its never as good as someone searching for a solution to a problem. If you can stomach the acquisition costs of someone signing up its a much better strategy, $1500 is probably not going to get you there but it would be a start (the typical CPA might be up to $1500). Knowing this should also help to make sure you are pricing appropriately. You might think your product is $100/mo - but you should shoot for 70% to 80% margins because there are so many costs you dont know of yet. Theres a book called traction its got a really good framework called the bullseye framework to rank order the marketing initiatives you should do.
YC has a startup school that sounds like you'd be a good fit for
I'm highly recommending this book for you OP https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s/dp/0061452068
I loved inspired - the biggest takeaway from me was the '4 big risks' and how product must own value and viability, and UX owns usability risk, and tech owns feasibility. I use this concept a lot at work to draw boundaries, hold other accountable, and mentor new PMs on my team (I find that this is the best way to wrangle in the 'super hero' PM who tries to do everyone's job, without hurting that PM's passion).
Anyways, when I read a book, I expect to find 2-3 good things; I don't expect every page to be filled with wisdom. The only Product/Business book I've found to be an exception is The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
The book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares outlines a number of different marketing channels and how to use them. It's pretty solid.
Here’s a link of the book. https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898
And a summary video https://youtu.be/RSaIOCHbuYw
As a product owner i always try to incorporate this methodologies to help choose what to do next.
It's about setting smaller goals, meeting them as best as you can, and getting consistent feedback. As a one-person team, you're simply not going to be able to ship a AAA-length game, so scale back your project scope. But even competent AAA studios follow a similar model. Valve recently said for Half-Life: Alyx that their design methodology was to design a room, get feedback, refine, and design another room until you have a finished game... It's a little more complicated than that for a large project, but it's fundamentally the same.
:) Parte din poveste e ca au vrut sa faca analizele din cateva picaturi de sange. Intepatura in buricul degetelor in loc de IV. Cantitatea prea mica de sange/plasma i-a fortat la niste smecherii de care sigur te-ar distra sa afli. https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X
Elizabeth Holmes. I strongly recommend the book Bad Blood, it's all about her story. Even if you're someone who thinks reading is boring, it's an excellent read.
The person she is accusing is Sunny, her partner. Having read the book, it is obvious to me she is a oure blooded psychopath and is lying. Although that said, I find it hard to be sympathetic towards Sunny, as he was equally willing to lie and hurt people for profit. Neither of them are sorry for what happened, they are just sorry they got caught. There's a certain stupidity of the psychopath's brain, an irrational arrogance. Too stupid not to see how obvious it was they would get caught in the end. But they fooled many high profile people.
If you want to prep for technicals, Rosenbaum and Pearl is a must have. Damodaran's Investment Valuation is also a great resource if you're interested in learning technicals from a more academic/theoretical perspective.