A recurrent question in the region. Thank you for asking! I've been based in Singapore since 2012 and have contributed to the expansion of the different startup ecosystems in Southeast Asia (more here: http://exitcoach.fyi.to/linkedin), including Malaysia. In 2014 I was part of MaGIC (Malaysian...
Hi, I've helped a lot of entrepreneurs with partner issues. The fact is that equity is divided in whatever way you negotiate. Rights such as first right of refusal are normally dealt with in the shareholder's agreement. Certain clauses or rights can certainly be unattractive to investors but...
What sort of SMBs are you looking for? There are over 5.68m SMBs in the US and you would be hard pressed to find a public list of each one. However, if you know a location and/or an industry, you can start with a place like hoovers.com or yellowpages.com. Hope this helps! Let me know if you ha...
Mobile app that has launched: You need ALL of the following: 1) Trending towards or at 100000 installs within first 90 days of launch; 2) Day 30 retention rate of at least 20% 3) Core "MTM" (metric that matters) healthy (dependent on business model, usage model etc) 4) Evidence that growth is j...
A convertible note is a possible route. It would provide the owner with a discount to the price set at your next round of funding. For example, assume you give the note holder a 50% discount on your next round. Then your Seed Round sets the price at $10 per share/unit, the note owner would be abl...
Hello, hope you are doing well. If you do not have contact with any current employee, I would suggest trying linkedin, or the companies website. Try contacting the HR dept directly, a phone call would be the best, ask them to indicate where you can send your resume. You can also try calling a loc...
Definitely traction (marketing, sales, customer acquisition, retention) and not infrastructure. You don't have a scalable business, you're "seeking" one. So seek it first, then worry about scaling. Put it this way: If there's two otherwise-identical businesses, and P has "good infrastructure" ...
Use marketing as a means to gather more data and test. Marketing is one of the most underrated and undervalued skills in startups. Startups don't struggle with competition but getting attention. Marketing drives more data into the product, thus you can validate your theories. Pre-product mark...
Instead of repeating the wisdom of others, I'll link to it below. Here is a great blog post on hiring your first salesperson: http://tomtunguz.com/when-to-hire-a-salesperson Also, Mark Suster has written a ton of great post on his blog about startup sales. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/o...
(built Spheric / 30+ person consultancy / sold in 4 years) I'm going to assume you're thinking of starting a service company vs. a product company (even though most service companies do have ambitions of some day having a product, it's best to stay focused on this for now - they are totally diff...