article thumbnail

Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Both Sides of the Table

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. 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. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418
article thumbnail

How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

Most of this advice boils down to an argument in favor of basic planning before starting a company or raising money. In many ways the fact that it has become so cheap to start a company and relatively cheap to raise angel/seed money that we as an industry have gotten lazy on basic planning. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses.

Startup 150
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Why the New Seed Might Be a Bad Seed

This is going to be BIG.

They''re at a similar stage to my investments now out of Brooklyn Bridge backing Tinybop pre-launch, Canary before their Indiegogo pre-sale, and VIXXENN with just an alpha site and a few stylists. in seed money instead of $1.5M You should target 18 to 24 months of runway post Series Seed." Yay, participation trophies!

article thumbnail

Do the Math

Austin Startup

The converse of calculating exactly how you will make the first sale, and then the first 10,000, and ultimately work your way up to 1.6 You want your valuation to keep marching upward; if you took in some seed money with the promised 10X venture return, you’ll hopefully be able to prove that you are proceeding on that trajectory.

article thumbnail

The beginner’s guide to valuing and selling your app

The Next Web

Selling for the wrong reasons might make you price it too high and not make a sale, or price it too low and make you regret it later. You can then use the $1,200 as seed money to work on a new idea. If you’re going to let money be your primary reason for selling you need to be emotionally detached from the app.

article thumbnail

Why You’re Not Getting the Most out of Your Board

Both Sides of the Table

If you’re a venture-backed tech company or even an early-stage business fueled by angel or seed money I assume you have a good group of board members or advisors who will give you time to be helpful and they want to be helpful. should we ramp up sales hires now or wait for more traction?