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Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

medium.ikuznetsov.com

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Re: Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

#51

Post by ivankuznetsov11 »

Paddywack wrote: post #32
listenallyall wrote: post #30

> I’ve been a product manager/CEO in fintech You talk about hiring developers, all kinds of marketing strategy... do you know anything about mental health? What makes you qualified to run a mental health company? Where do you discuss bringing in doctors, or mental health specialists, instead of FAANG devs? Is the "health" part just an afterthought? > investors may not be impressed by the quality of your product yea,…

Yep - I am curious as to where the mental health subject matter expertise and validation of outcomes fits into your budget (unless it is more a directory or something more “benign” not requiring that).

I have trials planned and I hope I can push the product to these plans. Research part is the most interesting for me personally.

Re: Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

#52

Post by ivankuznetsov11 »

version_five wrote: post #42

The 300k thing is interesting because it speaks to how the concept of a "startup" has evolved. Everything he says is correct in the sense that qualified developers aren't going to come to your startup for below market wages or equity, and if you're going out into the market to hire, you have to pay. This is from personal experience. Otoh, going into the labor market and trying to buy a team is not really a traditiona…

Technology is becoming increasingly complex. Customer expectations from the products are rising. 10 years ago, I single-handedly coded all the web components for a brokerage startup. Now, it seems impossible, perhaps only achievable with no-code tools.

Re: Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

#53

Post by ivankuznetsov11 »

pxue wrote: post #26
JimtheCoder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You don't need 250k to 300k, and if you had it you'd wish you had 500k or 750k anyway." Spending a quarter mill on a prototype seems like a horrible decision, TBH...

Do things that don't scale is really an absolute truth. If you can use Excel spreadsheet or Google form to build your product. Do it for your first 100 users. Obviously if you're in deep tech then this doesn't apply. But with deep tech and moonshots the value isn't the product, it's your arbitrage opportunity and expert patentable knowledge.

"If you can use Excel spreadsheet or Google form to build your product. Do it for your first 100 users." I did, what's next?

You need to have a MVP in the target market. You need to demonstrate that it can scale. Therefore, if your business model works for 100 customers on the web, it does not necessarily mean that it will be successful on a larger scale on mobile.

Re: Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

#54

Post by chiefalchemist »

paulcole wrote: post #20
chiefalchemist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that you have to buy that is nonsense. Time === money. If you're doing it, or someone else is doing it. You're paying.

I think you have to realize that time doesn’t equal money. You can sometimes choose to sell time for money or use money to buy time, but not always. If nobody’s willing to exchange their money for your time then your time doesn’t equal money.

Nothing is free.

Opportunity costs are real.

So if you're executing the mundane and the outsource-able, while the heavy lifting sits idle...that's foolish. It's the road to ruin.

Time is money.

Re: Things I wish I knew before founding my mental health startup

#55

Post by ivankuznetsov11 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #14

Bro wants to have a 20-person team on pre-seed funding. I feel like pre-seed funding should support or be for 4ish people tops. Around the max number of co-founders. If you're pre-seed you basically have no product yet. Should you really be hiring biz dev, PR, 3 programmers and other team members at this point?

I don't want (

The market wants me to have )

Typical pre-seed in our space is 1,5-2,5mio. Pre-Seed!

I remember good old times when 100-150k was a decent pre-seed round. This inflation is crazy.

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