STARTUP QUESTIONS Quello che la tua startup non può ignorare

Stefano Bernardi

2009-2011:  •  Startup Investor: Iubenda •  Tech Marketing: GoWar, Coderloop  •  Advisor, Angel Investor: Iubenda, Coderloop  •  Conferences: TC Disrupt, LeWeb, FOWA  •  Lecturer: Universities, Events, Startup Schools •  Employee: Stealth Startup  

90’s & 00’s:  •  Entrepreneur: GoWar, Equeety, Hosteeo  •  Developer: Vluta, SaveMyInbox, Equeety •  User Groups: Italian Startup Scene, UpStart Roma, HackItaly  •  Engineer: Ruby / Rails BSc Computer Engineering

GEEK, CODER,

ENTREPRENEUR

Angel/VC Investor, Blogger, Marketing

ISS

STARTUP QUESTIONS 99 questions to ask yourself

before starting a web company.

WHY

•  Why are you really building this company? •  Are you ready to be an entrepreneur? •  Do you have what it takes? •  What problem are you solving? •  How are you going to solve it?

PRODUCT

•  What is your product going to look like? •  Who is going to build it? •  How much time will it take to build it? •  When can you launch a private beta? •  Is it a feature or a company? •  What are the minimum features for your

MVP? •  What is the killer application?

TECH

•  What technologies are you going to use? •  Why? •  Will you be able to find developers that

know these technologies? •  Are they easy to learn? •  Are they scalable? •  Are they fast?

LOCATION

•  Where are your customers? •  Where are your competitors? •  Where are your partners? •  Why are you not there too? •  Does it make sense to stay where you

are?

TEAM

•  Is every team member 100% committed? •  What if you run out of money? •  What if they are offered a job at Google? •  What is each person going to do all day? •  How are you going to divide equity? •  Who is going to take a salary? How much? •  What is the size of the option pool? •  Who is going to do customer care? •  Are you the right team do do this?

FUTURE

•  What are the vision and mission of your company?

•  How many people do you see your company employing in 1, 3 and 5 years?

•  What exit are you looking for? •  Is your company going to be relevant in 3

years?

CUSTOMERS

•  Who are your customers? •  Would YOU be a potential customer? •  Where are they hanging out? •  How can you get their attention? •  Are they willing to pay? •  How are they solving this problem today? •  Are you going to either make them more

money or save them some time?

METRICS •  How many users do you want to have? •  What are the most important metrics for

your company? •  Is the lifetime customer value of a customer

bigger than the total customer acquisition cost of a customer?

ARPU  *  CLT  >  CAC  +  (Salaries+Infrastructure+etc  /  Users)  

A: Acquisition - where / what channels do users come from? A: Activation - what % have a "happy" initial experience? R: Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time? R: Referral - do they like it enough to tell their friends? R: Revenue - can you monetize any of this behavior?

MARKET •  What’s your market?

Tip: If you have a travel website, your market is not the $2.5 trillions global travel market.

•  How big is your market? TAM? •  What are its growth expectations? •  Is it going to still exist in 5 years? •  How is it divided at the moment? •  How much do you want to take of it? •  How are you going to do it?

Number  of  Poten@al  Customers  *  Price  of  Product  =  ?  

COMPETITION

•  Who is your biggest competitor? •  Why should someone invest in you

and not them? •  Why are you going to beat them? •  What do you know about the market

that other competitors don’t? •  What if Google does it? •  What can you do less and better of

your competitors?

FUNDRAISING

•  How much money do you want to raise? •  How many rounds do you want to raise? •  Debt or equity? •  When do you want to raise it? •  Who's going to raise it? •  What’s the current economic condition

and how does it affect your fundraising?

BUSINESS MODEL

•  What is your business model? •  Is it scalable? •  Is it legal? •  Where does most of the money come from? •  How can you make more money? •  How many users/customers do you need to

get to break even?

(IF) SALES

•  Who is going to sell your product? •  Who is he going to sell it to? •  What is the price of your product? Why? •  With whom should he speak in such

companies? •  Which investor could help you out with

this? •  What commissions are you going to give

to sales agents?

(IF) SAAS/FREEMIUM

•  Will customers trust you with their data? Should they?

•  Can customers export their data? •  Do you plan on having a free plan? •  How can you ensure you maximize

conversion from free to paid? •  Can people start using the software without

interacting with a human? •  Can you deploy without downtime? •  Do you have APIs?

(IF) MARKETPLACE

•  Can you easily market to both sellers and buyers? Tip: you are building two companies

•  Have you solved the chicken-egg problem? •  What percentage are you going to take? •  Can someone bring it outside the system

and game you? •  Is it legal? •  Can people do it on ebay?

Tip: if they can, they will.

(IF) ECOMMERCE •  Who's gonna handle logistics? •  Will you need a lot of money to build

your inventory? •  Do you have cash flows problems? •  Who's gonna build/provide the products? •  What is your margin? •  How do you handle returns? •  Do you have exclusives? •  If not: do you have the lowest price?

(IF) ADVERTISING

•  How many users do you need to have before getting revenues?

•  Why would someone advertise on your site and not on Facebook?

•  How much is it going to cost to advertise on your site?

•  What kind of users are you offering to advertisers?

•  Where else can they find them?

AND THE REAL QUESTION

What are you doing here? Go home and code.