Hot answers tagged micro-startup
56
http://www.killerStartups.com is a good website but let me share some other good sites that can review your website/business for FREE and have a great number of readership as well that you might need to promote your services.
http://www.makeuseof.com/
http://startupnews.me/post-a-story/
http://startups.alltop.com/
...
18
Breaking even after 4 months of concerted effort (i.e. post-dev marketing) is actually pretty good. Many business take 1-2 years to break even.
Is the market big enough that it's possible to have 100x this number of users in 5 years? If yes, and if the marginal cost of each additional user is far less than the revenue you get per user, then you're right ...
11
Seems like a problem with your "Target" customers. Use the free accounts as leads, and try to up sell them through email, discount coupons, promos, refer 3 friends get a free account, etc.
Then take a hard look at your Paying customers. Find out why they chose to subscribe. Find out where they came from. Once you have that forum ala you can better apply ...
11
This is not a comprehensive comment -- but a general point to provide some direction --
Stop focusing on how you are unique -- and focus on how you are the same. Make it comfortable by downplaying how completely revolutionary it is.
Think about all of the ways people connect on social networks with other people. Emulate as many of the design and ...
10
No one can honestly give you an answer to this question based on zero details, but I can say that this was essentially where I was in the first 4-5 months after releasing my SaaS application.
Now is the moment that decides whether you are going to make a go of it or if it is just a hobby -- I believe Seth Godin calls it 'the dip'. You need to honestly look ...
10
Not because of amount of work alone, but because I don't have enough incentive to put enough time and sweat in it.
These are your ideas. If you don't have incentive to put time and sweat into them, how are you going to convince someone else to put their time and sweat into an idea they didn't even have? Usually, you can do this by paying someone money ...
9
I've been doing the MicroISV thing since 2003 and full time since the start of 2007. In this time I've had two moderately successful desktop products, one flop and one winner which is still doing well to this day. And to be honest I can say that it wasn't until 2008 that I really had a handle on what was working in my biz and what wasn't. By that time I ...
8
When your company's business requirements have expanded beyond the scope of what many of the open source CMS platforms can provide you will have sufficient revenue to pay to have a custom solution done properly.
A open source CMS platform is a custom site. there are 1,000 of templates to choose from: as an end point or a beginning. There are thousands of ...
7
Sorry to hear of your situation.
I'd be concerned about the company flipping its assets into a newco and wiping the slate clean - difficult with a pre-existing investor, but theoretically possible.
I'd also review the shareholders agreements regarding drag along / tag along rights - they could be used for not so favorable purposes.
6
It's worrying that you focus on irrelevant things like registering a company. Your first and only priority should be building the project and launching it. There will always be time to register a company.
First piece of advice: focus on launching a minimal version of your product.
As to founding, you can apply to http://ycombinator.com/apply.html. If you ...
5
publish a website or selling a software product, is it mandatory to register a company?
Generally speaking, it is not mandatory to incorporate and many people run a personal blog or very small lifestyle business without being incorporated.
But a incorporating is very important, because it can shield your person from legal liabilities (lawsuits etc). ...
5
This answer is not meant to contrast with Genadinik who I think is spot on.
But-- there are scenarios in which doing your own advertising might make lots of sense.
This is so dependent on the nature of your website and the relationship you have with your visitors. It is depends on the demographic profile of the visitors.
For example -- if your niche ...
5
I heartily recommend KillerStartups
Our submission was reviewed within 24 hours (for free).
The review for our application was actually better than the promotional text we provided.
Most importantly: once the review was out, a lot of other similar startup review sites that were "listening" on KillerStartups' RSS feed, were quick to review the app as well.
...
4
PayPal and Amazon are some of the best ones if you have no budget.
If you get to the point that you have a small budget you can move to a higher service level with PayPal and integrate a payment form into your website. This takes a little programming knowledge so you either need to be a techy, know a techy, or be ok reading lots of articles.
So I would ...
4
What ad sizes and formats should we use, and what other factors should
we be thinking about before setting any prices? Also, what is
acceptable in terms of raising prices as our traffic increases?
If you are thinking about getting into the business of selling adverting, the place to start is the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) website. Certainly, ...
4
Lot's of SaaS companies have been successful with "Lite" versions (like SurveyMonkey and anything from 37signals) by not calling them "Lite"
I think you have to avoid calling it "Lite" and just have different levels of user experience. That way, you can get a good cross section of users that pay for your service at different levels -- all without losing ...
4
It depends.
What information are your customers looking for on your web site? What are you trying to let them know with your about page?
The number of people doesn't really matter. For example our whole team is just two full time people - and we have both of those people up on the home page - let alone the about page. Because what we sell to our clients is ...
3
In germany you need to differ between "company" and "freelancing". The latter one is a bit more difficult to get, you need a university degree at least. Tax offices in germany are very picky. If you run a company, you need to pay IHK fees and a special tax (gewerbesteuer).
You also should know that not all your services can be invoiced as freelancer. For ...
3
This question is presented as a binary choice but that isn't really how it is. You can use an open source CMS as your base platform and do custom code on top of it as needed. Chances are your needs are largely met "out of the box". The problems of content management that you face are the same as everyone else's. Systems like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress have ...
3
It really depends on the specifics of your website. If the site itself is the startup you might be well suited to spend the time on something custom.
However, I've personally found that for a basic corporate website for a new startup a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or the like works fine. As your company grows, you'll find yourself redoing the website anyway ...
3
Wow - there are a million things like that - welcome to the soft, seedy white underbelly of the internet!
There is a whole world of what is called affiliate marketing. Do a Google search for it and you'll find that there are companies that will pay you for obtaining a zip code, an email address, getting someone to sign up for a trial offer of something, ...
3
When you read Inbound Marketing, you'll learn it has five steps: creating remarkable content, optimizing it for search, promoting through social media, converting visitors to customers and analyzing everything. The first three are designed to drive traffic to the "top of the funnel" (ToFu) while the last two concentrate on obtaining and improving results in ...
3
What you've described sounds like a system where the size of the network of participants is the determinant of the value proposition. So how do you build a critical mass (start a fire)? To start, you're going to need to create an incentive for the initial pool of people to participate that does not rely on the network effect, and you need to figure out some ...
3
Be realistic and work hard towards something.
It is definitely hard to juggle a venture while pursuing another job. The last thing you want to do is both things poorly.
You should consider where you want to go in the future. If the job is doing something you love doing, it's worth considering.
As far as the startup, you need to evaluate if it is a ...
3
Taken from SoCalCTO website - CTO or lead developer:
A good Startup CTO will naturally address these.
How much will it cost to build what we need to build? How can I control costs but effectively get stuff developed?
How can we phase development to balance cost, features, risk, etc?
What options do we have? How do we balance those options? What makes ...
3
What are the key topics or areas that you must have a vision for once
you pitch your prototype to an investor, or assist the CEO in
successfully pitching?
In my experience none of this "overall system architecture, technical roadmap, how to scale the system towards a certain market goal in the next 3 years, how the technical architecture will serve ...
3
If you're a B2B business i would strongly recommend not to do so:
it makes you look small and unreliable.
if your personal backgrounds are less than very attractive, there's no point in doing so because your customers might look you up on linkedin or something of that sort.
your competitors may check your backgrounds and connections and learn a lot about ...
3
Yes, you should include team information on your website. In fact, I think most companies should.
I'm a lot like you - a tiny technology startup in the B2B space. I've done a lot of in-person and recorded user testing of my website, and was surprised to find that many people specifically looked for the company and team information. Some people even said ...
2
even at the level of just one employee (i.e., the founder), having EL insurance is sometimes necessary because when doing work for big companies, their standard contracts require say a million pounds of EL cover, and generally also a level of public liability (PL) insurance cover.
Note that if you have any equipment at your office (even at home) then you ...
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