I am building a marketplace that is composed of bloggers and writers as the supply side of the marketplace. My target is to acquire at least 400 of them before Sept 2015. My idea is to offer stock options to the first 5 (say 5000 shares each out of a million shares of the company). I can ask them to bring another 20 bloggers each, to whom I can award 500 shares each. The rest of the later bloggers will have 100% return on revenue generated by them in the first 3 months after the launch. Can anybody help me refine my intuition? Thanks!
Here are my thoughts:
"Offering stock options to the first 5". We tested this and it turns out this isn't viable. Not only will you administrative overhead managing your cap table, you're going to turn off investors that may not like the structure.
My advice is: keep it simple.
1. Define your customer persona
2. Contact them and find 10 of them to say yes
3. After you have validated demand, find the supply to fulfill the demand.
4. Create a few success stories.
5. Rinse and repeat.
Bloggers/writers primarily want to have a dependable source of supplemental income. If you can do that, while making the experience enjoyable, you'll be on to something.
Answered 9 years ago
Access 20,000+ Startup Experts, 650+ masterclass videos, 1,000+ in-depth guides, and all the software tools you need to launch and grow quickly.
Already a member? Sign in