Not nearly enough information for anyone to give you guidance. Are you b2b? B2c? Software? Services? What industry? Is your waitlist 10s? 100s? 1000s? Hundreds of thousands? Have you tested pricing false doors or just leave your email?
Leaving an email on the waitlist is about the lowest commitment someone can give, without more info no one can really give you any meaningful advice.
Not nearly enough information for anyone to give you guidance. Are you b2b? B2c? Software? Services? What industry? Is your waitlist 10s? 100s? 1000s? Hundreds of thousands? Have you tested pricing false doors or just leave your email?
Leaving an email on the waitlist is about the lowest commitment someone can give, without more info no one can really give you any meaningful advice.
And this is why a double-sided marketplace is so difficult. No value to consultants if there are no potential mba students and no value to MBA students if there aren’t a lot of consultants.
Check out Whitney Wolfe Herd’s interviews and writings about how to succeed marketing to both sides of a marketplace.
I would encourage you to define who your economic buyer is. How do you make money? What I can tell you is that most mba students don’t have disposable income and shouldn’t be counted on for monetization. Without knowing your strategy, one of the things that could be running them off I’d be either explicit or implied cost.
Solutions selling. Again without seeing your pitch this is generalized, but I find that a lot of smart smart tech people who build an mvp love to market features and what the product can do. The mindset needs to be changed to focus on empathy and understanding of the pain for the person buying. It’s not what can the product do, it’s what kind of pain can the product remove and how can it make life better for your economic buyer. Focus on WHY, not HOW. I know this is very difficult for a lot of people with an engineering first mindset, but frankly unless your users are other engineers, most don’t care about how a problem is solved.
Getting people to do something different takes energy and as others have mentioned there’s friction in increasing effort. People are inherently lazy; The amount of energy someone is willing to put into your product is proportional to the perceived amount of pain they’ve will save. I would encourage you to think about things with 2 questions. Why change? Why now? Describe the benefits of spending the time using your product.
As others have said, 2 weeks isn’t enough time. Keep plugging away. Good luck with everything op.
Make.com (zapier competitor with much better pricing) in addition to the others mentioned already.
Think about it from a tax perspective. I would assume that even during development you want to write off your business expenses no?
Not really enough info to go off of, but a rule of thumb in a tech startup:
Remember, employee number means nothing. The options pool is meant to be able to bring on and incentivize the next 100 or so employees. Options pool generally is between 15-22%. If they hired a janitor as employee 3, do you think the janitor should get more equity than a CxO coming in at number 58?
Equity is based both on function (vp of engineering would generally get more than a vp of hr) and level.
For a company making 7 figures of revenue a general guide would be something in the range of: VPs .5-1.5%, Directors .25-.75%, sr managers .1-.25% then anything else below.
I know this is all super rough, but I see so many posts here with people with completely unrealistic expectations. In a company already making revenue there is very little risk (and not to the level of what the cofounder took to start it). Don’t expect even a single digit percentage.
In addition to what everyone has already said, changing laws = changing needs = opportunity. One example, HIPAA becomes law which then sprouted many industries looking at everything form compliance to electronic medical records to platform security to audits to insurance products etc. Cannabis becoming legal has also created a multi billion dollar ecosystem.
Think about how nascent AI is. One doesn’t need to create a Chatgpt clone to realize the amount of ancillary opportunities for governance, platforms, fake detection, data training, model customization etc.
Here’s your copyright infringement / breach of contract suit, have a nice day.
Can you sign up for a gym membership for $40 and then charge 100 people $5 to use your membership?
Even if you could, do you find this ethical?
Depends on what your reputation is worth to you. Word gets around; it may be challenging to find another co-founder once they find out you sued your previous.
Then there’s the whole squeezing blood from a turnip thing. You can sue to dissolve the company and grab the IP, but if the company was not successful what are you going to pay in legal fees to acquire the IP? Only you can do that math. You are unlikely to see a dime in cash or be reimbursed legal fees.
Lawsuits suck even if you are 100% correct. You will have to float the fees which can easily last over a year. Remember that the company shields personal liability from the cofounders so you max recovery is the assets of the company.
I totally understand what you’re going through and it sucks to be wronged like this. But if it were me, I may spend $500 on a lawyer letter demanding an IP assignment and then leave it there. It’s not worth 10s of thousands in legal fees as well as the stress and impact to your mental health. Take it as a lesson to write these types of contingencies into your next contract but don’t cut off your nose just to spite your face.
Happy to chat in DM. I’ve been through a suing the company lawsuit before.
51/49 is usually a better idea.