paulsingh

We left DC last March, nearly driven 40,000 miles and visited 51 cities so far. Sadly, no big PR wins for us. We write checks though! :)

Thanks Arturo - glad to have you folks onboard!

Just email me directly and I'll get your private community setup.

Glad to have you guys onboard!

500 Partner here: there wasn't any plugging going on here. I'd bet folks at the other firms mentioned will say the same thing as well.

IMHO, the other founders and mentors related to the accelerator program are often the best part of it. Take advantage of that mentorship as much as possible.

Disclaimer: I run the accelerator program at 500 Startups (and we've invested in a handful of Startmate companies) and this is the same advice I give our portfolio.

+1 for DC and the growing startup scene there.

(I'm from DC and am on the investment team at 500 Startups.)

Dude -- definitely get on the phone, it's hard but you'll find that the conversion rates are usually way better than email. :)

Feel free to email me directly if you need anything -- should be in my profile.

I've built a few niche products and managed to try enough stuff to get some decent traction with two of them: notarycrm.com and mailfinch.com

tl;dr - if you're selling B2B, you're not going to get anywhere unless you can reasonably convince someone that you'll save them time, money or (ideally) both.

In general, I spent a lot of time cold calling the first users and gave away the product. There was a lot of back-and-forth about what sucked, what I had recently fixed, etc.

In both cases, the first users helped me understand quite a bit about how I was going to have to scale the sales operations... for example:

With MailFinch, one of my original assumptions was that real estate agents would want to use it to send out all the weekly flyers that they usually send out. So, I first asked all of my friends in the DC area to send me their local newspapers -- I spent a weekend circling all of the real estate ads that were larger than 1/2" (if they're advertising in the newspaper, you can reasonably assume they have money and have some understanding of marketing). I then cold-called the hell out of these people and learned two things:

1. I was right -- they send an average of ~100 flyers each week. 2. They would usually hand me off to their assistant (!!!)

That second item was important -- I didn't need to sell to the agent directly, I needed to call their office and talk to the assistant or office manager instead. I talk about this in detail in my Mixergy interview last year (which is now behind a paywall): http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/

With NotaryCRM, I actually convinced one notary (my mom) to start using it for her side work. Then got my wife to use it. Then one local notary that I cold called. From there, I learned pretty quick that notaries talk... a lot. If I had a bug, everyone started bitching simultaneously. As the product got better/prettier/more useful, everyone started loving it simultaneously.

The big breakthrough was realizing that there are two good channels to reach this market:

1. Cold call the notaries (there are huge directories for this now) and convince them to signup for a free account -- this is generally hard, but I did a lot of it early on. 1a. Make sure you ask for referrals on each call, email, meeting, whatever -- "do you know any other notaries that might find this useful?" Notaries are regular people. And regular people want to seem "in the know" with their friends. If they loved NotaryCRM and referred it to their friends, they generally looked good. Totally serious about this. :) 2. SEO works... especially in niches like this. Checkout notarycrm.com and click on the "Find a Notary" link. I could probably write a huge blogpost about this but the gist is that notaries are searching for their own name -- all the damn time. It also helps that they usually suck at SEO... so it didn't take long for me to put together a directory that came up at the top of the SERPs for their own name. Once they click through, there is a big call to action that says "claim this account" if they haven't already. Again, lots more I can say about this but it might be offtopic from your original question.

So... I hope that helps. :)

Great points -- I've got some serious work ahead of me. :)

Near-term plan is to spend this week building out the reporting interface and spreading the word.

For #1 & #2, I'm hoping that using Dave's AARRR methodology will allow me to apply a somewhat consistent framework across a variety of startups.

For #3, you're absolutely right -- it's a big problem (and I haven't even thought about it yet).

So, any chance I can get you to try this on geckoboard itself? :)

yep, coming soon. :)

Actually, I don't see them as competitors at all. If you really want flexibility/configurability, go with them. I just wanted this to provide a baseline and put some of McClure's stuff into an actual tool that anyone could use.

Someday, I imagine that I'll have a set of public pages where you can actually see "baselines" of what basic conversion rates look like for saas/hosting/consumer/whatever companies.

Fundamentally, I just want to see a bit more transparency. Startups shouldn't have to operate in the dark.

Yep, Google's benchmarking is cool but doesn't help much when you're trying to figure out how you're doing as compared to other startups in your space.

I'd like to fix that with this.

best. comment. ever. :)

seriously, thanks!

We're still figuring all that out -- for now, we just wanted to focus on making something that people want (ie, use).

Beyond that, we've got a couple of ideas that we'll be testing out -- maybe selling a brandable widget-based version to businesses, affiliate links, etc.

Not sure what will end up working but I can assure you that we'll be iterating pretty quickly. :)

This definitely sounds like a cool idea -- I'm adding it to my "have to do this sometime" list right now. :)

Thanks for the heads up. Apple won't let me edit the keywords until we submit an update (which, actually, is coming soon)... I'll definitely get this fixed on the next release.

Ah, sorry about that - I'm working on cleaning things up as we speak. We hammered out the MVP pretty quickly and have been hustling to make the service more reliable, scaleable, etc.

Polish coming soon, promise! :)

So, there's definitely the possibility that you might pick up and hear nothing (maybe the operator hung up, we got a bad connection, etc)... but we've got a bunch of stuff working in the background to "gracefully" recover from that scenario. Regardless, we're going to get you an operator one way or the other. :)

On a somewhat unrelated note, is there any publicly available information on how the split might have been structured (cap table, etc) ? (I'm right in the middle of splitting off a new startup from an existing company...)

I realize that both of these companies are private, but is there a way to learn more about how company "splits" like this are structured?

The article implies that Hammerbacher left Facebook before starting Cloudera... is that actually true? I imagine that Facebook might have said, "Whoa, hang on now -- you wouldn't have gained that experience anywhere else. We want a piece of Cloudera!"

I've been using brandstack.com for ny side projects.

I'm using MailChimp's API for my app, though I'm anxiously waiting for Aweber's API (it's read-only right now) -- they allow you to segment lists in a much more sophisticated way.

You'd be surprised. :)

I'll post a note term sheet that I raised money on last year once I find it but notice the prepayment clause here: http://startuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/convertible-note-...

When you're raising on a convertible note, you're essentially taking a loan from the angel. You're promising to "pay them back" at the next financing by converting their money into stock equal to the principal + interest they've accrued on that note. If you really wanted to (and the term sheet doesn't preclude a payback), you could pay them back for only their principal & interest instead of converting them to stock.

Yes, in theory, you could pay the angel back upon note maturity (which would probably be principal + interest).

However, most angels may not be too happy if that was your plan all along. They're putting money in on the hopes that your success will somehow multiply their money. If you're just planning to pay them back their interest, they might as well have put that same money into a bank.

Again, it really depends on your angel -- my strong advice to you is to be forthcoming about your goals. It's better to have everyone on the same page up front... especially if you plan on having a long term relationship.

Yeah, it's not too bad -- just need to be really careful before you bite the bullet. I wrote about the steps I took here: http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/how-to-buy-a-small-busine...

Part cash, part financed (bank + previous owner). More than 1.

I'd love to talk to your friend. :)

I run gas stations. My underhanded motive for buying it earlier this year was to learn how the processes work and then develop products for this particular niche.

It's profitable and, on most days, pretty fun. :)

I'd come too.

I'm going to take a counter position to some of the other advice on this thread.

Consider taking this gig. As an internship, I suspect that it's going to last 3-6 months. Yes, the commute sucks but I suspect you'll learn something far more important:

1. How users react to systems that geeks/engineers put in place.

2. How to talk to non-technical users (who, I assume, are the likely callers)

I did a short stint at a helpdesk many years ago and it certainly helped me learn how to talk to non-technical people. (I also did two summers selling cars at CarMax which, IMHO, was a fantastic way to learn how to sell yourself to anyone.)