I'm sharing this because I'm looking for people who went through a similar situation. I went from "coding in my bedroom next to my university study" to "doing technical interviews with senior engineers" and "enterprise sales to c-level people" within a year. I do like to push myself way beyond my comfort zone (it's my go-to strategy for learning new stuff) but sometimes it is quite overwhelming. Sometimes, when I can take a step back, I realize how insane this situation is.
Luckily I have supporting parents and peers, who try to advise where they can, but none of them have experience running a fast growing company.
Anyway. If anyone has had a similar experience, please share. If you know a community/network with similar people, please share.
I went from "idea in my dorm room" to interviewing and hiring executives in their 40s and 50s within 24 months. The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than they assume. It's reasonable to reflect on your inexperience in order to prevent mistakes, but you should never feel intimidated by it, or let other people intimidate you. The world (and YC's portfolio) is full of "inexperienced" people like you who have built billion dollar companies that disrupted industries and became pillars of the economy.
If you post contact information in your profile, I'm sure at least a few people with relevant experience would reach out and offer to be a resource for more specific advice. I've done that a few times here with mostly successful results.
Isn't it like this?
* A great idea can succeed despite mediocre execution
* A mediocre idea can succeed if the execution is great
* A bad idea can succeed (for a while) if you're a con artist (WeWork, Solar Roadways etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917
IMO the discussion was at least as insightful as I'd expect from a top level MBA classroom.
Join a supoort community in your area. You are looking for something for entrepeneurs in holland ideally. These usually have a price of admission like $300/yr but can be worth every cent
For example, ecommercefuel is fantastic for ecomm sites. Mastermind may have something to offer for your geography. Its going to boil down to reputation and how much you put in too.
You need a forum of entrepeneurs for people that are dealing with the same issues as you: payroll issues, VAT issues, engineering best practices, accounting advice, dealing with fraud, chargebacks, churn prevention, sales , banking contacts, brand registration and protection, outsourcing copy, and most importantly, advice on how to hire key staff
As you can see, its a lot. You need a whole village to figure that out. I am not sure whats out there for EU virtual "villages" for SaaS, but HN may be able to help.
From one entrepr3neur to other: if you dont have a crm already for sales leads, and your sales cycle is not self serviced, try the streak plugin for gsuite.
Good luck.
Whatever is that you do, make sure you will always have your company to go back to, the following day.
In other words, always search for risks that can wipe you out, and be paranoid about them, work aggressively to mitigate them, even if the risk is borderline zero that it could happen.
I moved out to the Bay Area about 4 months before the lockdown and have been quite underwhelmed by the lack of community around entrepreneurship. I’m not sure if it’s the lockdown itself, the FAANG companies dominating the talent pools, or me just not understanding the dynamics out here.
Not really familiar with "villages"
About the Sales, here is our "stack": Hubspot free + LinkedIn sales navigator + unlimited minutes on your phone
I'd be very interested to learn more, things like: is it a B2B or B2C SaaS? What is your ARPU and LTV, are you spending on marketing, and if so, what is your CAC? (I do realize you might not want to share these numbers, just saying that this is what I'd love to know :))
To answer your questions: Model: B2B, mostly public educational institutes with 10k+ students. ARPU: would be dumb to shared, but just under the EU tender limit, so sales cycles are reduced to minimum. LTV: That's a hard one when you sell yearly contracts and less than 10months old. But from what we see, schools are very loyal customers. Marketing: Lol, we have a website that we made with a 20$ template. It's all word of mouth and cold calling
You'd have great luck with rolling seed stage funds like https://shl.vc/ and showcase events like https://mercury.com/raise
If you plan to not go down the traditional (go big or go home) VC route, then, check out these (go slow and go steady) funds: https://indie.vc/, https://tinyseed.com/, https://earnestcapital.com/
(not an endorsement)
Again, congratulations, I'm really happy for you and wish you all the best.
Where do these people find ideas?
Some of the best business advice I got was from pitching VCs. Even if pitching is not what you want to do now, it might be useful to open lines of communication and suss out who you may want to work with in the future.
A real problem is something that costs them money or prevents them from earning money.
I started a niche B2B SaaS company with a co-founder when I was 23 (www.gingrapp.com). We sold it off when I was 27 and I stuck around for 2 years after acquisition. By the time I left there were 30+ employees and 8-digit ARR.
I’m currently 30, married with a toddler and semi-retired. The last 10 years of my life have been absolutely nuts and like you I wish I had someone who’d been through it before to talk to. It can be hard to relate with others as a founder. A frequent refrain I encountered when trying to talk with friends/family was that I had “first-world” problems that weren’t worth talking about. Ugh.
First off, I don’t think age matters per se. I’ve known founders in their 40s and 50s to flounder just as often as founders in their 20s, just usually in different ways.
The first piece of advice I’d give is that this whole experience will be a roller coaster and you can’t always control what happens next. It helped me to remember that I’m but a passenger on this journey.
I think I’d have a lot more to share with you privately. If you ever want to chat, my email is in my bio. Would be happy to talk further.
Isn't this somewhat true from their perspective? They have just as much difficulty relating the other way
I assume it's ok that I post this, it was easy to find (2 clicks from your profile snerual)!
Good job, I think it's cool what you're doing! If I may ask: how do you prevent students from cheating on a test by using their phone for example? Or is your service for in-class tests where phones are forbidden?
I don't know why other disciplines have been so resistant (forget textbook publishers, I mean the professors, deans, and other administrators themselves.) It's not clear to me there are any reasons to be against it, so perhaps it's simply the inertia of large, bureaucratic, conformist institutions.
If you want to know what not to do, I'm happy to chat, email in my profile. I've made almost every possible mistake in the last 20 years ;-) Despite all the mistakes my current company is a couple of stages past the 250k ARR and I'm on the right track.
In the end most advice in this situation is not rocket science, like for example:
- reserve time to work on your business, not just in your business
- build a team, not a group of individuals
- leadership becomes important in this stage, start reading on the subject, there is a ton of information available.
And most important, try to enjoy the ride. There is not one big moment you are working towards, it's all the little moments that mather.
8 killer sales agents. Part salary say: 24k commission 25% of new contracts or
2 killer sales agents. 95k 2% commission or
1 marketing person 75k and two killer sales agents 75k plus 10% commission
50k+ could pay for everything else provided no rent is involved.
This means that the next 12 months one of the priorities will be building a stable team to support the growing customer base. Depending on the vision and the pace they widh to grow, this can be focussed on more sales, more engineering, more support, etc.
Mainly struggling with expanding the technical team. We have some freelancers, but developers in NL are harder to find than diamond.
How did we find the idea: actually came up with the idea during a meeting with teachers in high-school. They were complaining about the chaos the newly introduced laptops caused during classes. Then I learned the hard way that people that put money were their mouth is are your only real customers (yes, I got screwed over by my high school). Luckily, higher education is more willing to pay.
LinkedIn recruiting is your friend here, especially in places like India, as you can post jobs for very low INR prices as compared to recruiting in the West or in more affluent countries.
Do not join any communities. You are a 19 year old who is at 250k ARR at 10 months. You are Bella Hadid. You don't have peers here, among IG influencers pretending to be important at 12K followers. It is lonely there, where you are. There's a reason for that.
P.S. You will make it.
As far as I understand students need to install your app and the app requires users to log out and when they log in, it's launched automatically in full screen mode and users cannot escape until they submit their answers.
What if I install your app in a sandboxed environment (like a windows box in a vmware virtual machine)? While the app is in fullscreen mode inside it, I think there would be nothing preventing me from using host machine's functions (like accessing internet via browsers or opening documents). Have you considered these kind of risks?
I'm from France, 18yo and founded a SaaS with a friend when I was 16 (https://kaktana.com). It's been doing ~$800/month for the last 1.5 years as I had to stop working on it for a very intensive school program (la prépa for the Frenchs). Currently thinking of building a v2 next year when I have more time.
Would love chatting with you, see my page: https://alextoussaint.com
It can be a weirdly lonely place at times.
Im UK based so TZ should work well, plus I’m a frequent visitor to NL (Pre CV) so it would be great to chat over a beer when we can.
Incredible work, but also remember you are certainly not the norm. Be humble, acknowledge that your work has paid off and try to give back to any communities that got you to where you are today ;)
We started both of them a decade ago to connect folks in your situation to one another (as a multi-time bootstrapped SaaS founder myself).
Happy to share learnings and just be there as a sounding board if you need it. Email in bio :)
Congrats on the progress!
Not a founder myself, so no tips on that. Not super clear what your website does (if it's the one in your profile).
If you're ever looking to security / pentest your platform reach out to me. For the rest good luck and keep it up!
Yes, it's insane (and I've been to less overwhelming situations). But hey, if people were perfectly rational and risk-averse nobody would start anything.
Interested to know more and see where it ends up, alstublieft.
Best of luck and share some tips with us
