If you need funding for your business one way or another then I don't see anything being wrong with having your client on board as an investor. Not only do they already know about your business, therefore saving you a fair bit of time and effort that you'd otherwise put into pitching your busine...
Hi there! Best of luck as you complete your college degree. From experience I will try to give you some insight into the world of startups and mobile apps. First some things to consider: 1. You live in a world of social klout 2.Apps must (specially iOS) must be very well developed, otherwise th...
Type of shares are generally split into two: common/ordinary (depending on the jurisdiction) and preferred. The former are granted to founders and employees (most commonly as options with a right to purchase common/ordinary shares). The latter are generally issued to investors and include special...
I took a quick look at 500px who reported 1.5-million users in 2012 (source: Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/gorgeous-photos-in-your-pocket-500px-arrives-on-iphone/) with 10% as professional photographers. The article also mentions monthly growth of ~100,000 users. If your targeting t...
Mark is wrong. I personally know of a handful of companies in that exact same situation and most importantly that have good traction and the cap table NEVER came up once, and each of these companies have raised in excess of $1m in seed funding from great investors this year. Especially if your ...
No, it's not a good idea. Every successful or even somewhat successful venture I know of was started either because the entrepreneur had observed and then confirmed a specific pain-point in a market that was unaddressed or that entrepreneur was "scratching their own itch" solving a problem they ...
I think it is a good start. From my experience, people don't really know what they want -- they only think they do. An example of this is when Steve Jobs announced the iPad. There was collective confusion (more so than any other time Apple has done something). Now, we couldn't imagine our world w...
There shouldn't be any tax consequences for the founders if you've made 83b elections--the election meant you paid tax already on the full value of the stock at the time of the election (presumably zero) even though it was subject to future forfeiture. If you sell newly-issued stock there should ...
I vehemently disagree. I would recommend not following-up with any angel investor who asks you for a business plan. You yourself should be able to credibly articulate how you envision the next 12 months unfolding and especially how you intend on spending the money you raise, but that's about it...
A good deck doesn't sell a terrible story, but a bad deck can ruin a great story. Your primary goal should be to distill your story down to 10 slides max, with as *few words as possible* on each slide. Images, product shots and graphs are all more impactful than words. A good outline is as fol...