50% of Wefunder's team of 22 are women. So we're passionate about helping more female founders, particularly inspiring very early-stage ones that this path is possible.
We're open to any ideas on how we can make this better!
Typically, the investors are the startups own customers. For our most successful $1m raises, we estimate over 70% of the funds are their own community.
This makes sense. One good signal of whether you should invest is whether you love the product.
A Republic works nicely. Many issues are too detailed and complex for referendums. That's why we elect people whose only job is to study those details. Otherwise, we make policy decisions based on who has the best propaganda that incites fear or hatred.
Agreed. That's exactly our plan at Wefunder. We're using Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A+ to create a new secondary market for riskier ventures.
With a few minor Congressional fixes to current laws (including one being voted on soon), we expect this to be workable in 2017.
That would be a cool idea. But I'm not sure the numbers of founder-CEO companies are large enough to make any conclusive determination. If you are limiting it to tech, I'd think the outliers of Apple, Amazon, and Google would destroy the competition.
I'd argue nearly any .com reduces friction, adds more credibility, and therefore increases the likelihood of answering those questions.
"Why would people come back?" is usually correlated with recruiting awesome co-founders, talented employees, great mentors, influencers to talk it up, and top tier investors. Then, the company has the time and resources to discover the best answer to that question.
Maybe once in a decade there's something like Facebook, which just explodes out of the gate instantly (and just buys the better .com later). But I wouldn't want to bet my company on that... especially when I can just spend an hour and brainstorm a .com to address the problem. Anything less is a failure of creativity.
That's fair. But the question here is: "Do even 10% feel a different way? Followed by: "Is the tradeoff worth it?"
For instance, the author's own web site is standupti.me. It's actually something I might consider trying out. But it comes across as someone's side project by a solo developer, not a company. As a potential customer, I might still get around to trying it out at some point in time, but I do have a slight negative connotation in that it might just disappear tomorrow. It would be 1000x worse for a larger enterprise customer.
The author did not address pg's point that lacking a .com has the potential to signal weakness... such as among potential investors, potential employees, press, and other influencers (like pg himself).
(Yes, there are always exceptions - like angel.co - and hacks like getdropbox.com also work).
But perhaps the tradeoff of retaining your "perfect" .io domain is not worth the extra friction of convincing influencers that you are credible company, when an hour creative brainstorming session for a .com might solve the problem?
Sure, if you have a hockey stick growth chart growing revenue 100% month over month, it doesn't matter, but it's rare that most startups have that right out of the gate. So why add to your burden?
Thankfully, I can guarantee that no one who visits will be subjected to high-pressure sales tactics. Because that would be just lame on both sides - founders want to hire people who are excited to work for their startup.
Thanks! I actually think someone should make a business out of this - that would be a cool recruiter! But we're just doing it as a free service to the startups we've funded over at Wefunder.