TTringas

Agree with all of this. Thanks Rosie!

Good feedback. I agree with your first point. I think that outside of Silicon Valley we actually have a crisis of lack of access to early-stage capital for entrepreneurs (and hence the multi-decade decline in new business starts).

There are a lot of both underserved and underrepresented entrepreneurs right now and and it's a real challenge to define the area of focus.

Point is well taken about not just writing a check. I don't get into it in this specific post because the pitch is basically Typical Earnest + a focus on underrep'd founders. But Typical Earnest already includes a community, shared resources, and access to an awesome group of mentors: https://earnestcapital.com/about/

Hello Hacker News, looking for feedback on how we could expand our "funding for bootstrappers" model to better serve underrepresented founders. Suggestions, comments, critiques, all very much welcome here. Thanks.

The merchants needs to have a copy of the Google Maps API on their site and need to follow Google's terms of service in that regard. If they have a ton of traffic they may need to pay for a license.

Not including my time, a few hundred dollars a month for servers and other services (like intercom.io). Gross margin is over 90% which is probably typical for micro-SaaS.

yes, yearly. Thanks, fixed!

Yes, it's an annual subscription the renews each year. Most of the time with SaaS annual billing you are pre-paying for the full year, so if you cancel you don't get a pro-rated refund. Customers are ok with that as long as you're clear about it.

Thanks George!

It's a great point. I struggled with how explicit to be about this. E.g. - do you email all the early adopters and tell them how lucky they are they are on a lower plan? Does that comes across as too sleezy? How do you translate this into NEW users? Do you put above the "sign up" button "Buy now before prices increase!"?

Maybe it could be added to the monthly receipts, showing the current price for new users minus their "discount"...

But yea, raise prices.

thanks! keep at it.

Answers to this could go on forever but...

I think the more important part is to build a subtractive methodology, a way of editing out and whittling down ideas that won't work.

Use the James Altucher idea machine strategy and go sit in a coffee shop with a pen and paper and almost anyone entrepreneurial can come up with 50 ideas for possible businesses.

Then you need to go work editing those ideas and brutally crossing them off the list. And don't get attached to those ideas. Be comfortable having 50 ideas and crossing all 50 off the list. But having the mode, of taking every idea that comes to you and then really thoroughly scrutinize it, can help you know when you've hit on something really good.

Odds are, that really good idea originates from some random source, not necessarily a system for finding a good idea, but because you're already in the mode of evaluating them properly you'll be ready to pounce on it.

Glad you liked it. So there are a million different opinions on this for sure. I particularly like Dan Norris's take on this to start solving a problem that people are already spending some money to solve now. Not necessarily that they are already spending money on a similar product, but that they are in some way spending money towards solving the same problem. Great interview with him here: http://productpeople.tv/2014/07/10/ep59-dan-norris/

Another tactic: most software can be done on a small scale by a human being behind the scenes. Before you build out some incredible software product, try to sell the service to a few folks beforehand. You can mimic the software product by literally giving them a form to input some data and you then you manually do the work that your code would be doing. Obviously doesn't scale but it's a great way to find out "if someone will pay."