The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, Or Grow Your Company with Your Customers' Cash (John Mullins, 2014)

-
Type of models

  • Matchmaker (e.g. expedia & Airbnb)
  • Pay-in-advance (e.g. Dell & via.com)
  • Subscription (e.g. Wall Street Journal & Tutorvista)
  • Scarity-based (e.g. Zara & Lot18)
  • Service-to-product (e.g. Microsoft & GoViral)


Drawbacks to raise capital too early

  • Distraction
  • Pitching vs. proving merits
  • Risk
  • Baggage
  • Difficulty


Ask these before going for an angel

  • Dare to ask what you want?
  • How to make your youth of inexperience not an impediment?
  • Can you ignore the naysayers and pursue your vision?
  • Are you the person that turn lemons into lemonade?
  • Do you underpromise and overdeliver or vice-versa?
  • Do you understand the difference between cashflow and profit?
  • Do you do things differently or copy what has been done before?
  • Can you delegate and not be a control freak?
  • What is your company’s core strength and how to build a reputation around it?
  • What do you bring to the party?
  • How do you know who your target market is?
  • Have you targeted the right market segment in sensible fashion?
  • How to make your business look bigger and more credible?
  • Are you quirky and inventive enough to get noticed by the media?


Matchmaker angel checklist

  • What is your business likely to be the winner that “takes all”?
  • To what extend are you addressing a compelling problem?
  • Is there an overpriced and poor existing market structure that you plan to disrupt?
  • What level of trust will be necessary in your vertical, and how will you ensure it?
  • How to prevent customers from circumventing you?
  • Is your market fragmented on both the buyer’s and seller’s side?
  • Are you targeting narrowly or widely at the outset, and are you building a Honda or a Mercedes-Benz?


Pay in advance angel checklist

  • You are a customer-funded business, why do you need capital now?
  • What’s different about your proposition compared to others?


Subscription angel checklist

  • Does a subscription offer a better and cheaper solution?
  • What is the customer acquisition cost, investment payback period and lifetime value?
  • Are you building technology because you can or because your business depends on it?


Scarcity and flash sales angel checklist

  • What is the depth of the vendor relationships you and your team bring to the table?
  • Is your venture easy to copy, thereby making new competitors likely?
  • Are your metrics about members, or about “paying customers” and their value?
  • Is your plan to “get big fast” or to grow at the pace your customers can fund?
  • Is your business reliant on one stage of the business cycle?


Service-to-product angel checklist

  • What product more compelling than the already successful services you now provide?
  • To what extend it will open up new and attractive market segment?


Popular posts from this blog

Kokology Questions & Answers

-
[These are extracts only, to see the full details kindly purchase the original book] Kokology is the study of kokoro (Japanese: 心) which in the aforementioned language means "mind" or "spirit". ... The books were published in 1998 in Japan and became a Japanese bestselling phenomenon. The books were translated and became available in the United States in 2000. Below are some questions and answers for sharing: A Desert Journey Boring class settings, you drifted away and enter the eternal desert... 1. You are riding a camel and you are near exhaustion, what will you say to the camel? 2. Before you die of thirst, a traveler point to you a oasis, who is this person you know? 3. You finally come to your destination which is a town, what is your feeling? 4. After you dismount, another person took over, who is this guy? - 1. What happened when love is lost? 2. Who always help or comforted you? 3. What is your feeling after getting past lost love?...
Read more

Neuro-Linguistic Programming Models Summary (02 of 14)

-
GeneraliSation The The Meta Model generaliSations make explicit the way we summarise and categorise our experiences. Generalisations are basically the rules we use to manage life. There are usually exceptions or counter examples to rules. These rules and categories create self-imposed or company wide limitations. Examining these limitations is a powerful problem solving strategy. By generalising one or a few experiences, we can figure out what to do in a different experience. We learn to drive a particular car, and then use that experience to drive a new one. If we weren’t able to generalise, we would have to learn how to drive all over again. Problem Solving Examining categories and generalisations is an excellent creative problem solving strategy. What are the experiences that come to mind when you think of money for instance? We typically use an emotionally charged experience to stand in for all our experiences in a category. We generalise and categorise all kinds ...
Read more

Neuro-Linguistic Programming Models Summary (11 of 14)

-
The Inner Hero Pattern Beat the drum and let the poets speak. This is the day of purification for those who Are already mature and initiated into what love is. No need to wait until we die! There’s more to want here than money And being famous and bites of roasted meat. --Rumi Life can be lived in many ways. You can make it about making money or winning at all costs, or pleasing other people, or perhaps never standing out. Or you can live your life as a great journey of consciousness, one filled with many challenges and surprises, one that makes a positive contribution to the world. I want to talk here a bit about these different paths, emphasising that the Self-Relations approaches of Generative Self and Generative Trance are especially tools for supporting the latter path. Life as a journey has been described by many people, most notably the mythologist Joseph Campbell.  Campbell (1949; Gilligan and Dilts, 2009) studied the stories of many different cultur...
Read more