Product at Accel
12 years of product development, scaling, go-market strategy, raising capital experience.
Start-up Operations
Product at Accel
0. Talk to both of your customers. 1. Talk to the resorts but more importantly speak with your users. Understand the type of experience they want. 2. On your backend you have to think about Risk / Reward factor of trying to integrate into different reservation systems
Valuation
Product at Accel
Generally you will start with 10M shares with a par value of 0.00001 per share which values the company at $100. This is pretty standard for a C-Corp How long has it been since you started the company?
Agile Project Management
Product at Accel
The one thing you must accept is that each and every company has their own style meaning it might be flavors of agile/scrum, kanban, waterfall. Before you sell understand how they operate and it may be working for them even though you think otherwise. Ultimately, it's what the engineering team is most comfortable with and their level of experience If you want to chat. Happy to dig in deeper.
Sales
Product at Accel
People talk to people they like but people do business with people they trust. You don't actually sell them on anything you provide insight and help them on what's best for them even though it may not create an immediate sale you are building a relationship which will develop over time.
Mobile Apps
Product at Accel
You should use MixPanel SDK and configure it to understand user behavior. Also use deep linking from Branch.io for deep linking.
Business Ideas
Product at Accel
There is a very simple way to think about this. 1. What are you good at? What skills do you have? What do you have work experience in? 2. Of the problems you have found which ones do you have subject matter experience with? 3. Then talk that about that specific idea with people around you. You will start with A by the time you talk to people you will be at Z 4. You need to make sure the problem is a large one and something people actually want. There is a difference between wants and needs. If you say: Customer needs something You have to educate them on why they need it which costs $$$$ If you say: Customer wants something You can put a wall between them and they will go and buy it Happy to chat further and dumb things down for you.
Team Building
Product at Accel
You are not doing anything wrong you are actually doing all the right things. I took a look at what you are trying to build. That is where you need to do some work. 1. Books today are relatively inexpensive. So what would the cost be to rent vs buy? Rent vs buy used? 2. Why not go to the library? 3. You can buy used, no? As a Non-Technical founder I don't see the problem
Product Management
Product at Accel
I can relate to you as I am a Non-Technical founder. The way to handle it is ask questions to both your Technical founder as well as the engineers. You allow your Technical founder to manage the tech team. You are the product manager so what you need to understand are the the complexities of different items so you understand the time it will take. 1. Short term items: bug fixes, optimization, etc 2. Long term items: features based on your product roadmap. Long story short, you let your technical founder run the engineering team. You don't manage them.
Venture Capital
Product at Accel
You should leverage angel.co to help you target who to go after.
Product Design
Product at Accel
I built a social discovery platform to help pregnant and new moms discover, find and buy baby products. Since this is a MVP I suggest the quick and dirty method. Quick and Dirty: Buy a Wordpress template (they come responsive), style it to what you are trying to do. Become an Amazon affiliate to pull the products. You or someone else write about the beauty products. That is your MVP. Long term items to think about: 1. Regardless if you have an App or a responsive website you will need a Content Management System. 2. Depending on the demographics you are targeting it will dictate what to build. More likely build an App for the long haul. 3. How will they accessing the app or site? Will you be sending weekly newsletters? or weekly push notifications? 4. What do you want the women to do on the platform? Discover then buy? 5. Where will you be finding the products from? You could use Amazon API or Viglink API to bring in the products and make commission. If you want to discuss further shoot me a message.
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