Hi! I'm pre-revenue but there's a buzz in the corporate events industry about my AI Agent MVP. Who do you recommend to help me get my slide deck and financials ready for fundraising? What is the best way to fundraise for seed capital when pre-revenue? Family Offices in the Middle East (because the US is sluggish on startup investing right now)? "Go Fund Me" type sites for B2B products? Something else?
SOLO FOUNDER; OVERWHELMED, BUT ON THE BRINK OF SUCCESS AFTER THREE YEARS
You are coming in to the organization at a fantastic time. There is a lot of buzz in the events industry about our new AI Agent, GotchaFinder.ai. GotchaFinder, operating on the freemium model, spots hidden fees in dense hotel contracts and advises users what to do about it. Users who sign up for gotchafinder are also signed up on eventnation.com. The business model is to build a community of event planners on eventnation, ultimately selling event vendor and venue subscriptions on the back of that success. We are 6 months away from a traunch of seed funding, with the goal being sale of the company within 5 years.
You would be working 2 hours a day as a community manager and a social media marketing person.
You would work for equity. Upon sale of the company, the estimated value for the hours you accrue in 2026 will be between $50/hour to $100/hour. Please contact founder, Faith Keiser, at [email protected] to apply and for more information.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! I agree that being a senior startup founder is extremely efficient. It's also more fun. You just don't care what other people think anymore. Thanks for your reply. Agreed that all the women probably won't be tech founders, and that it may take me awhile to locate them. Thanks again.
I am a professional photographer who began taking photos in the days of film. For point of reference, it was 2007 when I switched from shooting film to shooting digital. When shooting film, I would carefully meter the scene, make sure the proper lens was on the camera, compose, shoot, take the completed roll of film to the lab and.....wait. One week to ten days.
Today's cameras embedded into this mini-computer/talisman we carry around, that we insist on calling a "phone", are incredible marvels of modern engineering. So incredible, that people are tempted to document everything through them, until it seems like "me" is the image that is projected to the world, not the identity you share with intimates.
You're not limited to reducing the complicated, dynamic aspects that define "you" to the flat, small image that comes from the camera that comes with your phone. You're welcome to pick up a Nikon or a Canon camera at any time, and see how much richer life looks through its horizontal frame that adheres to the golden ratio.
I have such mixed feelings about cancer research. I don't often share this, because gifting cancer non-profits with lots of money is considered heroism of the first order in our society.
When I read of these large gifts, I can't help but think about a purely economical model of human generosity.
How many lives will be saved with this large gift, vs. how many lives could be saved in the developing world with the same amount of money?
It makes me cringe every time to think that all lives are not valued equally. Otherwise the gifting of large sums of money to possibly save people at some point in the future, who have enough money to afford expensive cancer treatment vs. definitely, absolutely right now saving large numbers of people who have no potable water, little sanitation and need basic care like vaccines and public health education.
Try artists' studios. There are buildings that rent reasonably priced spaces meant for making art, but they are private yet in a building with funky, creative people, so that environment might suit you. Good luck. I have often thought of starting an AirBnB-type marketplace for just such an office as you are looking for. Especially post-pandemic, there are so, so many offices with empty desks.
It strikes me that you're very clear on the problems with each person. That's a good place to start. You're not confused as to the problems.
I would have coffee with each of them, and give each person concrete examples of where you think they failed the mission, and why.
Speaking of mission, does your team have a mission statement? I know this sounds like it doesn't matter, but they're truly amazing.
Get everyone together to come up with a mission statement, keep repeating it, and let everyone know that everything they do every day has to contribute to the core mission. If it doesn't add anything to the core mission, then don't do it.
There are so, so many distractions. I don't know how anyone in Gen Z gets any work done, frankly. I'm in middle age, and our brains are wired in a quieter, pre-social media fashion that allows for more clarity of thought. I am not saying this brag, but really to say it's something that needs to be studied now that Gen Z are taking critical positions in the workforce.
This is not an either-or question. Start-ups are a "fast and furious" game, so you can go in and out of them. Successful start-ups only last for 5-10 years before exit, and unsuccessful ones last for even less time. I'm in late middle age. I've decided to found another start-up after a long period of stability while I got married and raised 2 children. During this period of "boringness" I made money so that I don't need a "friends and family" round, since I have the money myself to get the new business off the ground. Additionally, I developed skills that will make me much more likely to be a success at the start-up, since I know better what problems exist in my industry and have some ideas about how to solve them. The period of "boringness" will go quickly, especially if you have children, and will make you a much more effective start-up co-founder later on.
Thank you for your honest question. The short answer is yes. The more complicated answer is I know I'm doing small things to ameliorate inequalities in my corner of the world, so I feel I'm doing something in a world where injustice will, unfortunately, probably always exist.
An example: I used Google's "black owned business" feature to hire an African-American handyman from another part of the city. I gave him the time and money he needed to figure out how to re-do my bathroom, even though it was the first time he'd done such a complicated renovation. He was slow, and made some mistakes. My patience and ability to see past the mistakes will help him move from handyman to contractor.
I used to be among the class of people who work hard for little pay before I opened my own business. I always maintained my dignity. By not falling into self-pity or complaining, and working with others in politics and the community to right injustices, (when I could find the time-- being poor is time-consuming) I felt empowered despite my low station in life at that time. So the poor can be noble at heart, and that can sustain through the many indignities of their condition.
This is not meant to let the well-to-do off the hook. For years I had a business that catered exclusively to the wealthy. It was common for me to have clients with an insular self-centeredness and entitled attitude.
Since you recognize inequality and injustice, you are already way ahead of the wealthy people I dealt with regularly. It may make you feel better to take action on those feelings in small ways or large ways, such as through volunteer work with refugees or the poor.
I concur with others that this is the "new normal."
My husband is a cybersecurity professional. He says that in the past few years, hacking for personal information has gotten to be such a "normalized" business that hackers now purchase "off the shelf" hacking software that even comes with customer service support tickets! So it's opened up new opportunities for those with no programming experience. You can see how out of control this could get, and quickly.
What steps do my husband and I take, considering the risks that our personal information is probably already "out there", maybe dozens of times? The same as you - freezing credit at all 3 bureaus, using 2FA, using unique, hard-to-guess passwords that are updated on the regular, and being careful about what you send through gmail. I use mega.co.nz to store all personal documents, since that cloud service has encryption. So far, so good. My identity has not been stolen nor my bank or credit hacked.
-- Limit your time on social media to 20 minutes or less a day (LinkedIn/Facebook/Discord use that's related to work is an exception.) No studies exist yet to support this hypothesis, but it's my observation that longtime exposure to social media impedes overall focus.
-- Limit your TV watching to one or two hours on the weekends, per week
-- Limit video game use to one or two hours per week
-- Find an activity you like to do "offline" that you can do regularly such as walking, yoga, biking, etc, and do that more often. It will clear your mind and bring you back to center
-- Wake up early and try to accomplish something significant before 8am
-- Be kind to yourself when you lose focus and gently redirect your mind back to your tasks. If you get off track for hours or an entire day, wake up early the next morning and put your best foot forward without dwelling on the day before.
I don't like the title. The author didn't waste the money. He learned a lesson that cost $40k to learn. (Less than many failed start-ups.) He doesn't say what he learned and would do differently next time.
It seems to me this is a classic case of spending too much on the tool and thinking that users will just somehow come. Too much on the tool; not enough on the marketing. A more streamlined MVP would have sufficed to see if there was a product/market fit and to figure out how to monetize it.
I don't like the title. The author didn't waste the money. He learned something that cost $40k to learn. He doesn't say what he learned and would do differently next time.
Software that would be attached to your crypto exchange, and would easily and quickly figure out the tax reporting and implications of each trade or purchase for you personally. Also - Parth Balla here on YC already has this - a nickname feature for your crypto wallet to make sending money more certain and less of a hold-your-breath and hope you didn't get a number wrong moment
This is why I use mega.co.nz for all the sensitive files of my business. Google and Dropbox get the files that I wouldn't mind if they were on a bulletin board. But this is not a common practice, and the risks aren't well-known by users.
I agree with you, but, unfortunately, research shows that only 5% of customers care that their privacy is being sold off. The rest don't care. Accuweather, for instance, (which is so lousy with ads that it compromises the experience of using the app,) offered a deal where you could pay $5/year and not be tracked or have ads. I took advantage of the offer. But so few others did that Accuweather cancelled the service. I guess it wasn't worth their trouble to keep track of who had paid and so didn't get ads for less than 5% of their users to sign on.
I agree. I'm still "pre-money" in my start-up, so not making money at the moment, but I always have an agenda of things I want to accomplish to move the ball forward. Under these conditions, if anything else gets done outside of my agenda, it's got to be scheduled. It does seem off-putting to some people. For instance, I volunteer at some community groups, and people I meet there can sometimes make the assumption that I'm being stand-offish when I whip out a schedule on my smartphone just to have a short chat or to do a volunteer task, especially since it seems to them like I'm "not working". I just have a lot of competing priorities and have learned that I must be true to my own goals first, or risk losing sight of those goals.