Remove Customer Remove Hiring Remove Seed Money Remove Software Review
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Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Both Sides of the Table

If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. So your Q1 results will be $180,000 less profitable than if you hadn’t hired them. Hiring more people isn’t always the right answer.

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How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

It says that selling an airplane ticket for $500 and getting paid a $5 fees by the airlines (1% gross margin) is not the same thing as selling $500 of software that you built (>90% gross margin). Most of this advice boils down to an argument in favor of basic planning before starting a company or raising money.

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The Legal Side of Entrepreneurship

YoungUpstarts

Startups need to understand how to manage the seed money they receive from investors and VCs. Debt also has a due date and interest rate to negotiate. A startup may need to hire a lawyer to understand what the best strategy is given its particular technology space and to guard against being seen as an easy mark.

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How to Fund a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

I wassurprised recently when I realized that all the worst problems wefaced in our startup were due not to competitors, but investors.Dealing with competitors was easy by comparison. It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though. Custom work doesnt scale.

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From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

techcrunch.com

Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I need money for the servers. No raising money. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like.

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The Future of Web Startups

www.paulgraham.com

We could hire employees, but we want to be forced to figure out how to scale investing. We think of the techniques were developing for dealing with large numbers of startups as like software. Sometimes it literally is software, like. It will probably involve writing some software, but fortunately we can do that.

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The Series A crunch is hitting now. Have we even noticed?

pandodaily.com

We know this: As many as a thousand companies who’ve received seed rounds won’t be around in a year — maybe six months. There simply won’t be soft-landings and acqui-hires for all of them. The number of seed and angel investors has exploded in recent years, buoyed up by a number of factors.