Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by echelon on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @09:56PM
(#22690211)
> risk of being sherlocked or copied by the big tech companies
How the hell do you escape this? I'm terrified of my startup getting cloned and staffed with resources beyond my capability of matching.
Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by tialaramex on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @11:25PM
(#22690572)
The founders and my immediate boss at the first startup I worked for were convinced huge corporations would see what they were doing and just beat them to the punch. Only years later after one of the huge corporations bought the business and they could see it from the inside did they understand that was never possible. At the startup you'd set three people working on something important and get it done the same day, at the huge corp there'd have to be a week or so of meetings to even assign people. Sure you could assign thirty or even three hundred if you needed them, but you're already a week late.
So don't worry about it.
Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by ed_elliott_asc on Thursday March 26, 2020 @03:13AM
(#22691287)
Also once people we’re assigned it would be implemented by people who were (normally) not very good and could take months or years by the time they were finished because of all the extra features that weren’t actually needed were implemented and by the time they had changed frameworks, languages, tools and actually been deployed
Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by koolba on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @10:07PM
(#22690257)
Just ignore it. If your product is good enough and the market is big enough, you’ll be fine. If neither is true, you would have failed anyway.
Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by luckylion on Thursday March 26, 2020 @05:09AM
(#22691725)
If you're selling tech: they'll often rather buy you than spend time solving the problem themselves. Most things can't be sped up by a linear factor if you apply more money/people/resources, so they'd still need some time to catch up to what you do. Granted, they'd need less time, because they could do development, marketing, infrastructure etc in parallel, but still: they'll usually prefer not wasting that time and acquihire you (and your team), to go to where you are in a very short time and have domain experts on the team immediately.
That changes if there's a lot of competition of course, they might buy your competitor and throw their weight behind them.
Re:What to do if your startup is running out of cash
by qwerty456127 on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @09:45PM
(#22690159)
> If the burn rate is in the millions per month, then the forecast doesn't look good there.
How do you even get there, i.e. convince anybody to invest millions without having a well-engineered business model?
As I said before, when it comes to creating a tech startup in 2020, it now has to compete against the risk of being sherlocked or copied by the big tech companies, scalable to millions and generates a high profit margin whilst also being recession-proof, office or government ordered shutdown proof and now you can add pandemic-proof to the list.
Maybe the lesson to learn here can be what Paul Graham one said: 'You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.' All points are still relevant but now at this time, it is for startups to make something customers and businesses actually need not 'want' anymore whilst still being able to break even despite the aforementioned obstacles.