A place for startups to share stories and ask questions anonymously
I started my own design and marketing business over 7 years ago. I have been a 1 woman band ever since and it has been more than successful, which I am really proud of! In order to enhance and grow my business even more, I decided to get a business partner that evidently has social…
We’ve just launched our company and the offering is really broad. I’m finding that my co-founder is very much taking it in a direction that I don’t agree with. It’s coming up on six months now – I’m tempted to scale back and not close the company but just re-group for fear that we’re going…
I understand money is paid back to the investors – but how much money are early employees supposed to get in the pool that is left over – say they owned 2-4% of the company
I have two senior managers in my company. (Hesitant to say co-founders as I started the business and have since brought them onboard). One who is a great project manager (our business) but turns out isn’t right for a strategic role in the buiness (being a partner, strategy, overall mgmt etc). We initially agreed on…
To start with, my co-founder thinks that he’s GOD. Apart from being married and being in a committed relationship, he is having an affair with an employee. That employee looks after marketing. Now she is supposed to look after most of the departments. In the last 2 years, she hasn’t been able to achieve anything…
I have a start-up with 2 partners. One year in. All 3 of us have been full-time on development. Pre-revenue. One more person has planned to join us since initial planning began with the plan to be 25% equal split. The three existing partners put in $20k each, no salaries paid. Q1: What would be…
My wife and I are thinking of starting the entrepreneurship journey. We have a great idea (SaaS in LegalTech), we’ve done market research, we’ve talked to potential clients, and we’re about to hire a developer to create an MVP. Currently, we both have full-time jobs. We live in a very high-cost city, have over $3k…
The investment he has put in to the company has gone in to his directors loan to be paid back to him through the company but he also requested he was paid the same wages as me and my business partner from his first day of investment. Is this normal? He’s basically getting 30% of…
Not sure how to phrase things (or maybe I’m asking the wrong questions), but I’ll ask it anyway to at least get the conversation started. On Feb 2, I joined as the CTO of a 2yr old startup that had very limited tech capabilities. On April 2, the CEO called me into his office and…
So I just noticed the insane amount of “total compensation” of programmers these days. From 200K for fresh grads to 500K at Facebook for Sr Software Engineers. At that rate you’d easily clear 1M in over 4 years which is the median time it takes for any company to be successful. If you were a…
This question is for software devs who have had multi-year employment gap & returned back to employment after the gap. I am wondering if you had to pad your resume with fake experience or what approach did you take to get employed again after a multi-year gap? After more than 5 years working as a…
I have an extensive background in Sales / Sales Mgmt / Management / Bus. Dev. / Operations and want to work for a startup. I’m not a 20-something, but want to be part of a company ready to grow. How do I position myself to be looked at as a viable contributor rather than someone…
In 2016, immediately after graduation, we co-founded a crowd-farming venture with my classmate and friend. The idea was to raise cash from friends in cities around Kenya, farm with it and then share profits after harvest. When we started in 2016, it all went well, we did large scale potatoes and peas. In 2017 the…
In the process of launching a retail business. So far, I have done all the paperwork, research, marketing, accounting, social media/account setup and paid for all the inventory and supplies. My co-founder seemed to really want this business until we actually got started. She’s on the LLC with me, but now the state is saying…
We’re 2 years old with a team of 10(3 co-founders and the rest 7 engineers). Being a CTO, the majority of my time goes into dealing with tech projects and their timelines, directing the team to align with the product vision and execute it- I am good at this and have been delivering projects mostly…
I had five businesses that were very interested in partnering with my startup they just needed to see more on pricing … I sent them it and then no response. I let it go for two weeks and then emailed with a follow-up and still no response. How do you get people to just respond…
Six years ago I started a new company to provide services locally. I had started with a partner but he died 3 months after we started and I was left as a solopreneur. Fortunately, after 4 years it was at a really good state and I was comfortable with it. Since my partner died, I…
So in order to produce some valuable data, I (a developer) partnered up with a data science guy at my local university. This guy has all the academic credentials you can wish for. He spent his entire career so far (early 30s) in academia and is attributed in a decent amount of publications relevant to…
