HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

Hey Kevin and Sam,

Pitch: We're ATLAS, we plan to launch extremely small cubesat payloads (x1) How much calculations/numbers crunched would we need to convince angels to invest? Rockets of this size aren't something we can bootstrap without a little financial support.

More Background:

Right now, the only way to get a cubesat into orbit is by ridesharing on bigger rockets as a secondary payload. The problem with this is they're not assured to reach a preferred orbit and are at the mercy of the scheduling of the primary payloads. NASA currently has a backlog of ~50 cubesats that need to get into orbit, as well as the many upcoming launches (including SpX this Sunday). We are currently working on the RFP for the Venture Class Launch Service however we may not have the resources to fully complete it by the deadline (13 July). We plan to market this service to Universities as well as hobbyists and government space agencies.

Hi Kevin and Sam,

We're from Mise. We are an online marketplace and meal delivery service for the signature/best dishes from professional chefs in the Bay Area. There’s a face and a story behind each dish. We do free weekly delivery to SF Bay Area, including San Jose & the Peninsula.

We operate on a revenue share model. Chefs source their own ingredients, pay for kitchen rental, cook dishes, and earn 70% of everything they sell. We apply our 30% towards delivery, personalized packaging, copy, and kitchen administrative fees.

We'd love to talk about obtaining that 10% week over week growth. We're launching in 2 weeks and have a lot of orders (but a good amount are on us and going out to influential members of the community). How do we grow that into paying customers? And is it too risky to keep giving out free product that when you have to also balance the returns of the suppliers/chefs themselves?

http://www.eatmise.com

Thanks! :)

I wanted to know how you would structure a profit sharing plan as an alternative to equity options for a small, bootstrapped company with virtually no IPO option. What would be fair? How would it work? How did WooFoo's program work? Consider this a blog post option too!

10% weekly growth for a year will certainly get investors' attention.

However, for a company like this, I think the most important consideration is how you plan to build a monopoly. There are lots of companies proposing to build automated food growing units for families with very similar plans; what stops this from being a race to zero-margin pricing? Why will a customer buy your product in 5 years and not one of the many clones?

People refer to this in lots of different ways--Warren Buffet as the relatively benign sounding "moat" and Peter Thiel directly calls it a "monopoly". Whatever you want to call it, how do you plan to do it?

When will you have the first unit in customers' back yards?

How are you going to price it? If it pays for itself in 5 to 6 years, have you thought about going out with a leasing program? I think people almost never do enough on the financial innovation side.