Just keep doing the same thing until everyone working on the business is earning a decent, regular paycheck and the business has built up several months worth of operating expenses in savings. Then you can start to thinking about investing in expanding elsewhere. Start by streamlining your processes and keeping your expenses down.
Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think 1 student-employee per school could do it. You're only going to get 20-100 advertisers per school.
Lots of programs/companies have "student advocates" on their payroll for their very role. :)
This. Build students as channels. Find regional sales managers - Junior Business Majors will love this. Have the regional sales managers bring on part time sales executives in college who go to landlords, apartments, businesses, using your marketing tools and methods. You have a good chance of succeeding!
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you- somewhere it became lore that filing in Delaware is a necessary step to running a successful business. Most businesses that are cited as examples didn't start in Delaware, but did so after they had much to lose and on the advice of their highly-paid counsels. If you have $1k in revenue, congrats, that's a great accomplishment, but with all due respect, nobody is going to file suit against a group of colleg…
The advice to just get an LLC going first then convert to a C corp is fine for their stage, I won't argue against it. However, what you're saying in opposition to forming a C corp early doesn't feel very rigorous. From my limited experience as a founder, forming a C corp early has made some things easier. The time we had to convert a California C corp to a Delaware C corp became messy and I imagine converting a {what…
Worry about the lawyers and corp and tax stuff later, when you have some success behind you. Put together a clear written agreement among founders, but don't throw money at the lawyers until you have the money to throw.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha don't worry about the harshness--comments like yours are why I posted here. The point I wanted to make with needing to hire people is that it becomes more cost-effective to have one "listings manager" maintaining 35 schools (we've budgeted for four "listings managers" total, once we're fully operational at the 150 campuses--the job mostly a lot of calling), and one sales person handling multiple schools, etc. Th…
Ok, that makes it easier and harder. Start here: "We've calculated revenue per campus as well as cost per school/cost per student/revenue per student and all that..." There are some businesses where the economics get better with scale (search advertising for example) and some where scale doesn't have nearly the same level of impact (a lot of service businesses, grocery stores, etc) Yours would seem to be more of the…
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Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#105Just grow the business. You can "take it to the next level" by just making money and reinvesting it in the company.
Another way to look at this is that you can meter and invest in the risks and opportunities regarding your upside and your downside. If you over-invest in your upside optionality, you may risk big downside. If you are too conservative, you'll limit your upside. Only you can figure out the right risk reward balance.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#106Choose your own adventure: 1) You currently have approximately $500 to $2k in revenue. That's great, because it is $500 to $2k in revenue more than the vast majority of people will ever achieve. You need to work the numbers on whether the founding team can solo-close $100k in revenue in the next twelve months. If that appears achievable, you tighten your belts, perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than…
> perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than usual
Strongly, strongly, strongly disagree with this. The only balance you should ever run on your credit card is $0. Treat it as cash.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our roll-out process involves having people getting and maintaining the property listings (a fundamental component of our business involves vetting properties to make sure they will take students, as about 60% will not), then building traffic at the school, and then securing advertising placements. We've successfully rolled out to three separate, unique campuses, and yeah, we've definitely learned a lot from each one…
If your current cost structure doesn't allow you to fund the addition of a single campus rep for the fourth campus out of the revenues from the first three , you may need to rethink things, as that doesn't sound like you've found a scalable growth engine yet.
Agreed. Get 1 campus profitable, prove the model. Then expand to your closest 5 campuses. Prove the model there. Find a way to make a lean profitable business. Then, the world is yours.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#108Choose your own adventure: 1) You currently have approximately $500 to $2k in revenue. That's great, because it is $500 to $2k in revenue more than the vast majority of people will ever achieve. You need to work the numbers on whether the founding team can solo-close $100k in revenue in the next twelve months. If that appears achievable, you tighten your belts, perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than…
Hi Patrick, Thanks for the advice! I'm an avid reader of your blog, so it's cool to get feedback from someone I admire in this industry. A lot of the comments here are bringing up the question of if and _why_ we need to raise funding, which has been something we've asked ourselves (and are asking ourselves even more in light of these comments). Essentially it's a combination of necessity and validation. We're college…
> And a lot of people are critiquing our business plan/strategies--which I am grateful for and do actually appreciate--but I didn't really intend for this to be an elaboration of our business and I didn't really write my OP in order to explain how everything works and what all our financials/projections are, rather I wanted advice about moving forward from here.
In order to properly provide advice about the next steps, this context is necessary. If it is costing you $10,000/month to pull in $500/month revenue, then you must begin to consider its viability in its present form and come up with a different revenue model before you go from broke college students to indebted college students.
It sounds like you have already made up your minds about the way you want to go. I would recommend really reading all of the commentary here, because these are all questions that anybody with any money is going to ask, so you should have good answers.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#109Choose your own adventure: 1) You currently have approximately $500 to $2k in revenue. That's great, because it is $500 to $2k in revenue more than the vast majority of people will ever achieve. You need to work the numbers on whether the founding team can solo-close $100k in revenue in the next twelve months. If that appears achievable, you tighten your belts, perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than…
> perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than usual Strongly, strongly, strongly disagree with this. The only balance you should ever run on your credit card is $0. Treat it as cash.
Why on earth would you say that? They're just about the cheapest form of loan you can get, and are perfect for OP's needs.
Re: Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than usual Strongly, strongly, strongly disagree with this. The only balance you should ever run on your credit card is $0. Treat it as cash.
Why on earth would you say that? They're just about the cheapest form of loan you can get, and are perfect for OP's needs.
> They're just about the cheapest form of loan you can get
In what sense? Unsecured credit has the absolute highest interest rates, especially for college students. They are no doubt the most convenient, but cheapest is a bit of a stretch.