I don't think this is the greatest advice. That said, it can be exactly like this and worse.
You really need to evaluate who you're receiving money from. Are they the right person to invest in your company? Will they support you in the low times and not try to screw you in the high times? If you think this will happen if you take money from your particular friends and family, then inuhj's advice is solid.
But it sounds more like expectations weren't managed. If you haven't told your investors how you're going to spend their money that is your fault for not telling them and treating your investors how they should be treated. Every investment dollar should have a purpose. (Yes, treat your friends and family like investors. Not like family. If you treat them like family who gave you money, they'll treat you like family who took their money, as in inuhj's example.)
The golden rule of raising from friends and family: If you're trading on relationship, then you put the relationship at risk. If you're trading on merit of the investment, then the relationship is separate.
This then allows you to at least somewhat evaluate whether the investor will freak out if you lose their money. As with an angel investor, they need to be willing and ABLE to lose every penny they put in. TELL THEM THAT. If they have a problem, or you sense a problem, don't take their money.
This then blur's the line between "friends & family" and "angels." VC's or VCs-in-angels-clothing are a separate category. This is not a firm that "does angel investing" this is an individual high-net-worth individual. Could be friend, family, or other.
And this is coming form a guy who will never have a relationship with his Godparents because a business deal between my parents and my Godparents went south when I was a baby.
When I was a musician we had a saying:
"Playing and performing are like food and water. Writing is breathing."
- You play, you promote. You maintain, you sustain.
- You write, you build. You create, you grow.
Buffer will succeed by building and improving, not maintaining and sustaining.
There's the rub. All due respect to Leo and the guys at Buffer. It's a wonderful product. And he's sharing his learning process. I'm not dogging on them.
However
The email exchange with Noah Kagan is shows the mentality that so much of startup culture is stricken with: "how can I sell my soul to hit it big" not "educate me on building a sustainable business."
Happy to see this name in the news again, and excited to see them blossom out of YC. Good luck guys. Any metrics on total users?
Are you guys monetizing yet? Would love to talk re: clinical trial recruitment.
Last question: Can anyone provide the citation behind the giant prevalence numbers thrown out by TC?
I work for a startup in drug development in IBD and those numbers are the biggest I've seen. (1.2m US and 2.5m worldwide are biggest I've come across). Would love to know if they have merit.
This is one of those "wow, so perfectly obvious no one has never done it." This could (and probably should) the hiring process at many retail and service jobs. In my teens I would have been all about proving myself by taking whatever quiz or prescreening training available to get the job. This could have micro impacts on allowing the most tenacious to get the job rather than the most experience, which for the level of jobs they're focusing on initially could be a positive force. Just imagine if Wal-Mart was filled with the most proactive, not just the one with 6 months more of register experience. Certainly many caveats to these statements, but with some evolution and execution this could have really important impacts on the way low-level wage employment is conducted. The interesting aspects would be to see it move up the org chart.
Also love the customer development of them walking the unemployment lines to understand the market.
vladd, while I completely agree that "HN is mainly goodwill for YC," I think potentially your subsequent parenthetical statement shows misunderstanding of a different business model, the VC model. Or, maybe it was just ambiguous language easily misinterpreted by me (and, I'd assume, others as well).
Many content-based companies would love to acquire HN and its audience (e.g. Conde Nast's Reddit acquisition). VCs would love to invest in an HN spin-out to reap returns from said investment via a sale of the entity. However, "VCs would pay a fortune to have HN and its audience," reads more like VC-as-owner/PE rather than VC as investor.
Maybe I'm digging too deep in the semantics here, but this seems to be a point that is often lost and VCs vaunted (or derided) as less investors-cum-advisors and more private equity slash-and-burn corporate raiders.
Agree with other commenters, re: more important things to spend your time on than this list, but WHOA.
I'm borderline offended that this article would claim that getting social media accounts for your Startup would come after ANYTHING. For me, checking availability and reserving social media accounts comes all the way back at "what should I name this thing" and am searching for domain names. Sure, some are vastly more important than others (Twitter, FB), but holy moly. And of course, picking a name comes WAY down the list after finding a business model and some customer development. But, when you get down to picking a name...
Getting/reserving FB/Twitter accounts should be part of the process in choosing a name and domain (Branding!). I've heard of bots that will try to grab your Twitter handle as soon as a domain is registered with that name.
Netflix showed this importance of this with the weed-smoking Elmo and the @Quikster fiasco.
“We started at the very top with these outliers like Facebook and Twitter, but the aim is to work our way down to much less high profile companies.”
I don't see how SecondMarket is going to fill the void left by FB, Groupon, and Zynga with long-tail trades. But that doesn't mean I don't want to see that happen.
But all I've heard is the headache caused by these types of trades on the company. Sure, disproportionately on Facebook, but if I or one of my coworkers posted and actually sold shares on SecondMarket from our little company, it would be a major annoyance, and spark a lot of internal hand-wringing and tension.
I see it difficult for SecondMarket to create a long-tail market in the smaller, non-SV/NYC, non-consumer internet startups. I can't imagine them doing trades in small middle America biopharma companies (such as we are).
What epxerience does anyone on HN have when SecondMarket trading started happening with Founders/employees/investors at their companies? Was it noticeable? What impacts on employee morale/focus/work did it have, if any? It would drive me nuts if I was CEO and all the water cooler talk was about employees selling shares/options/RSUs (if even possible to trade options/RSUs) on Secondmarket and what they got out of it, etc. Seems like a horrible, distracting idea at a small, <25 person company - not to mention the impacts on your valuation/investor perception in future raises, other externalities.
Thoughts: I dig it, but don't know why I should use this more than just testing it out.
Rating: Meh. I'll play around for a bit but probably won't stick around.
The good:
- Homepage Design: Great. Reminds me of a Pinterest for content (not just pretty pictures)
- UX: Great signup, almost madlibs-style
- You don't make me confirm my email before actually signing in
- you don't make me have to join before browsing/adding value
The fail:
- Value proposition? The about page is fluff
- Why the landing pages for each article? Are you trying to instapaper-style redress the content in a more readable form? Then why just a part of the article? Are you rewriting the content via NLP or seomthing? You never tell me that.
- Community: Why the social network aspects? Do I need a social network to consume my news?
- New articles. How do I add new articles? What if I want to bring in an article I found elsewhere? I'm sure you can do it, but the UX doesn't make this intuitive.
- After signup: Great. I have no friends except the founders. No content. Don't see that there is anyone else using the service. I'm supposed to be munching content. But after logging in I don't see any. Take me to content consumption or the community!
- Design Fail: The user control box in the top left is hanging over my article using Google Chrome.
All in all... What's the benefit to this versus one of a million other ways to consume content? The value isn't shown implicitly or explicitly. Not better designed than Flipboard. Not more configurable than Pulse. Not more content breadth than Reddit. Not more "grab and read at my convenience on any device" than Instapaper. So what do I use greybox for? Is it just another pretty face? All the product descriptions are fluffy and nondescript, which is a turnoff. The design is great. From the about page is seems like you guys use this specific CMS and wanted to show that you could make a news aggregator with it. Cheerio! But why would I use this every day?
Is this a serious "let's build a business" launch? Or is it a "look what I made, it shows what I can do with this CMS, but we don't intend to really drop everything and pursue this full time and think we'll actually build a business."
You really need to evaluate who you're receiving money from. Are they the right person to invest in your company? Will they support you in the low times and not try to screw you in the high times? If you think this will happen if you take money from your particular friends and family, then inuhj's advice is solid.
But it sounds more like expectations weren't managed. If you haven't told your investors how you're going to spend their money that is your fault for not telling them and treating your investors how they should be treated. Every investment dollar should have a purpose. (Yes, treat your friends and family like investors. Not like family. If you treat them like family who gave you money, they'll treat you like family who took their money, as in inuhj's example.)
The golden rule of raising from friends and family: If you're trading on relationship, then you put the relationship at risk. If you're trading on merit of the investment, then the relationship is separate.
This then allows you to at least somewhat evaluate whether the investor will freak out if you lose their money. As with an angel investor, they need to be willing and ABLE to lose every penny they put in. TELL THEM THAT. If they have a problem, or you sense a problem, don't take their money.
This then blur's the line between "friends & family" and "angels." VC's or VCs-in-angels-clothing are a separate category. This is not a firm that "does angel investing" this is an individual high-net-worth individual. Could be friend, family, or other.
And this is coming form a guy who will never have a relationship with his Godparents because a business deal between my parents and my Godparents went south when I was a baby.