| I try to raise money from time to time for my small biz/startup. Here are a few things I've learned: Pay attention to the unit economic model. The lifetime value of a customer ($9.95 in your case) minus the cost to a acquire a ew customer. This requires you to show an investor how you can use the money to acquire new customers via ads, cold calling, PR, etc. Market size is important. Can you make a rational guess as to who will buy your product and how many potential buyers there are? Delegate. If any part of your job can more effectively be done buy a junior person, do that. As a single founder, it will help if you show you are capable if this. Cash is king. Good people will join you for cheap if you can sell the upside for them, but they rarely do quality work for free. 5,000 bucks can go a long way! Do you have an unfair competitive advantage? What makes it hard to copy what you do? Take advice only from successful people who understand why they were successful. What sounds like a good idea and what actually works are often different. In my case, you might use some of my ideas in this comment, but you want to validate them yourself. Talk to your customers. That's a frikkin' gold mine of information. Learn to stop working when it isn't working. Try it, fail, stop, step back and look for an easier way or different way. One book I found useful is the Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. Pitching Hacks buy the guys at Venture Hacks is a good read, too. |
I have a great dashboard for showing sales, revenue, time to upgrade, etc. I love analytics. Luckily as well, the lifetime value of the customer isn't $9.95 as while I have only had paid options available for 1 month, already people are coming back and purchasing again, which means my lifetime value of a customer keeps getting higher.
As for est potential market I can say that just by looking at Google searches over 20k+ per month search for the product / thing I am offering. Obviously I don't rank #1 for all of these search terms plus it doesnt calculate the other methods. Honestly I wouldn't know any further on how to estimate the potential buyers, only that I am in a growing space and other companies worth millions are already in there.
Delegation, 100% agree with there :)
An unfair competition advantage is always a hard one to answer. The advantages I have at this point in time (but can be copied) are freemium model, feature set and future feature set. I am focussed on one particular aspect where as other companies in the space are spreading out to other areas, diluting their focus. As time progresses it will be harder to catchup to code wise but not impossible.
I put customer service above all else and due to this receive so much praise and recommendations which is why I am getting repeat sales and increased users. Again repeatable but they are unlikely to take customers as loyalty is certainly being built.
I love talking to customers, you are right they give such an incredible amount of information and I have tailored and improved my product because of this. Someone actually contacted me due to bugs in the software. After she was so blown away by the customer service she is setting up a rolling purchase order to use our service for their 17 local tv shows. I didn't even know but it shows that you should treat each customer with the same amount of dedication. She wasn't even a paid customer at that point either. Obviously once that is setup my income increase significantly but larger corps take so long to get these things rolling. (I know, working in them for so many years)
Haven't heard of pitching hacks but will certainly check it out.
Thanks again.