4 ms·

Ask HN: Our Startup is falling. Should I fall?

• mc_hammer 12y ago
  i would check out the talks by patio11 he has some good insights to monitization, optionally: fire ceo, build another product, quit, dont work for a place that doesnt have a business plan/monitization strategy, sell it to another company on flippa
  • Crystalin 12y ago
    Thanls, I'm going to listen to those talks. Firing the CEO is too late :/ and I'm sure he had a good business plan otherwise the investors wouldn't have given us money.
• andrewchambers 12y ago
  What is the start up, or at least what does it do?
  • Crystalin 12y ago
    The startup is LiveMinutes, it is an real time collaborative platfom. We started as a video conference service then we thought it would be cool to store documents on it, to edit them, then to have a chat, then to have Evernote, Google drive integrations... but never considered finding real clients. We have a high traffic/users but not enough...
• manmeet 12y ago
  I advise not to take advice from random people on the internet who know nothing about your company or your situation
  • Crystalin 12y ago
    Taking advice doesn't mean to follow them but open up your range of choices I think.
• MalcolmDiggs 12y ago
  I think that decision is a very personal one, and only you can make it. With that being said, here are a few points that should (perhaps) inform your decision: 1. How much institutional support (and energy) is there to get the paid version shipped? Is everyone else burnt out and jumping ship, or could you realistically stay the course and get that product out the door? 2. Even if you shipped the paid version, would the revenue be enough to cover the burn rate? It looks like you guys raised 3 million over the course of the past year, and burned through it (correct me if I have that wrong, just getting the data from your Angellist page). At that burn rate, your premium version (at your stated price of $5 per user per month) would need to onboard roughly 50,000 paid users to be at the break-even point (though probably more than that since your costs would go up). Is onboarding than many users feasible? If you can ship the premium version and onboard a ton of users all before the rest of the team throws up their hands...maybe you should go for it; give it one last college try.
  • Crystalin 12y ago
    Thank you for your analysis and advice. Reaching the required number of paying customers is not possible at the moment, that's why the CEO is looking for other investments. The marketing we did was too small to reach that number and we are probably bad marketers anyway. We were expecting for a buzz that would make us famous and then become superstars. And that's why we tried to make a better slack with our chat. But I don't see that point coming. And I think it is the reason we are falling
    • brudgers 12y ago
      I don't see a clear market segmentation. Is it for 10 users or 10,000? Five bucks per person-month doesn't make sense in either market. It's $5 too much for people building their business on Drive and Evernote. It's too little for 10,000 screen organizations...they know you will go broke. And then there's an asterisk on the free plan and another deal for students, so I'm left wondering if it's worth figuring out the value proposition before I think about learning how to use it. If it was an enterprise product, it might make sense but that's not live fast. die young, and leave a good looking corpse business strategy compatible. Students probably don't need mobile task updates for group projects. In the middle, though, there are good user stories and price points. $400 per month for up to 20 users...that sounds like a way to qualify businesses and reduce the number of sales. And if you can't make the bottom line $5000 per year better for 2000 companies, then it's time to throw in the towel. Good luck.
• JSeymourATL 12y ago
  No paying customers, no cash reserves, no investors/buyers lined up: you're done! Your mission now, (based on your skills & expertise)-- identify someone who you can help and will pay you for your services. You can make this "pivot" either individually or as a group. Put your heads together as the sales & biz dev team. Get out there, start asking people what projects they might need help on. Do it now!
  • Crystalin 12y ago
    We already started to talk how to sell the team, but it is a slow process we can't afford. It is however our best option at the moment.
• AznHisoka 12y ago
  WOw, your customer list is impressive(looking at your homepage).. Apple, Starbucks, etc... If you can sell to those companies, why do you have trouble selling to other businesses? is it more of an entreprise product rather than consumer, and you're not charging enuff?