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Startup

  • Mentality
    • if all needed is to develop and make something beautiful, then it's better to go get a job that will pay for it. To be indie is to first and foremost be a businessperson 1
  • Funding
    • VC
      • Prioritize your own team and their performance, then users then customers with good strategies. 2
      • Taking VC = committing to an exit or a failure 2
    • Bootstrapping
      • Get real customers to pay and re-invest the money into the project 2
      • Early days may be tough to make long-run decisions due to financial pressure 2
  • Get into business
    • Make something to ubiquity before anything else 2
  • Making Money
    • popular ways of open source projects 2
      • Services. Good for long run. Raising money will be more painful since the margin is low
      • Hosted. Cloud providers can be competitors where its license is potentially helpful to prevent it, but harms the adoption rate, especially in large companies. Anything that goes into the free version will help the paid one.
      • Open core. Build community version as free to use and then add premium features for paid ones.
  • Software
    • Investor CRM: Google Sheet
      • Firm name
      • individual partner/associate
      • potential check size
      • interest
      • next step
      • type
      • status
    • equity management
      • captable.io
  • Caveats
    • companies that have the outside appearance of a startup but that aren’t moving that quickly and that are likely to always stay small, kept alive with sub-optimal sources of funding (bad angel investors, subsidies, grants, etc.)3

Footnotes​

  1. Pleco: Building a Business, not an App, Zotero ↩

  2. how we raised $3m for an open source project - posthog, Zotero ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Avoiding Zombie Startups, Zotero ↩