Hey there! You have probably come here from UpWork. Welcome! Since UpWork only allows 5,000 characters in their description field, I opted to upload all the other 42,000 characters here. With a reading time of 26 minutes, it might seem like a lot, but I encourage you to scroll down and have a quick read or at least skim through. This will give you a great idea about my skills, perspective, and experience, and will allow you to make an informed choice in hiring me. Let me know if you have any questions and I hope you have a great day!
Best, Andrey.
Before we begin with the startup stages, a few words about methodologies and LEAN in particular. We have all heard about it, read about it, and been forced to listen to somebody explain it at a networking mixer, but in my experience, LEAN works. Or, at the very least I have used some Lean concepts in my own projects and have achieved good results. It is understandable to not want to be bound by a single ideology, but Lean (and some Agile) principles in the very least should be carefully discussed and considered as parts of your overall approach and startup strategy. To summarize LEAN, you are on a mission to gain knowledge fast. Specifically, you want to gain the knowledge which will allow you to unlock a winning combination of a product and customers who will pay for it. In startups, there is normally a large degree of uncertainty and a lot of unknowns and variables that you have to tackle. Little by little you have to start to fill in the blanks through careful testing, validated learning, and feedback loops - once you have answers, you start weaving them into your strategy. The more you know, the more informed your decisions are going to be. This means better resource allocation, better strategic moves, and more useful analytics. As the Build/Measure/Learn feedback loop gains momentum, you will begin to validate ideas with minimum temporal and financial investment. By creating minimum viable products you will be delivering absolute core functionality to customers to gain feedback, eventually reaching a working model for your startup, which might even differ from what you set out for initially. Any change in any layer of your business should be well informed, well through-out, tested, and, if it passess all tests, welcomed. Failing to (plan to) learn is a surefire way to increase your odds of having a difficult time in your venture and I always suggest incorporating learning into any startup’s model. Based on where you are in your project and your specific needs, I will work with you to identify crucial knowledge gaps, fast ways to fill them in, and how to restructure your strategy based on the new information.
The first stage in the startup lifecycle is all about finding great ideas, refining them, and slowly legitimizing (or refuting) them through careful research, tests, and documentation. We begin by brainstorming, discussing, and critiquing ideas and concepts for business ventures. This creative, no holds-barred opening is then followed by a gradual systematic process of research, documentation, and informed elimination. As we start examining our ideas and refining them by giving them requirements and research data, we will be able to build cases for some, while others will inevitably fall by the wayside. There is a lot of research and analysis to be done, but by the end of this stage you will have a very clear idea of what your business is going to look like, and more importantly why it should look that way, and what has the potential to help make it successful. In our idea refinement process we will apply principles of design thinking and my own personal system - ZeroHour Templates - which will allow us to structure our ideation process and to efficiently document a large part of it. The point of documenting early on is that by writing and asking systematic questions we will bring some much needed structure into an otherwise haphazard process, and force ourselves out of any rose colored glasses by asking tough, but necessary questions. Furthermore, this initial documentation will become the basis for several important pieces of documentation later on, including a sound business plan. The benefit of going through a rigorous idea refinement process to construct a business plan is that not only will your business concept be made better, but you will also have a concrete document to begin receiving feedback on from potential investors and partners, and also use to be considered for funding and grants. Finally, market research is imperative for backing up (or disproving) as many of our assumptions as possible and finding out what place a business idea would have on the market with solid data. Having your assumptions disproven should be viewed as something positive as it will allow us to rebuild your proposition with a more sound approach. This approach backed by data and tests will add a great deal of credence and credibility to your business concept and claims, and may also ease your own mind about pursuing the idea. This market research stage, while not the final one, as research will be an integral part of the whole journey, will help us build a sound understanding of the chosen ideas’ target markets and customer profiles, thus supplementing the business plan. The ideation step encompasses our journey from generating a set of ideas to refining them through rigorous research and analysis to finally building a sound business plan for one, or a handful of them.
Following up from the previous step, the prototyping stage should come into play after you’re satisfied with your business concept, MVP tests, analytics results, and all supporting documentation and paraphernalia. Prototyping involves further fleshing out your product through R&D activities, tests, and analytics. The goal of the prototyping stage is to make a more sophisticated version of a proven (to a degree) product so that you can make more and more specific usability and market acceptance tests on your way to launching. This process will also fuel the production/development/logistics stage with valuable input into which features are important (core) and which are not, and a more fleshed out design. For companies without a ready product or who are trying to create a new product, this can often be a very useful step to take before going into full blown production. I have extensive experience in prototyping both software and tangible products from my work on many software development projects (defining and building MVPs, running A/B split tests, analytics and analysis, etc. for digital services such as web apps, mobile apps, software, and SaaS), to prototyping tangible goods with my 3D printing business for a variety of manufacturing and R&D business clients. Through prototyping you gradually, and with comparably little risk, build something which represents chosen important aspects of your vision. Little by little, using this partial representation, you will be able to gather feedback, conduct tests, and gradually refine it by adding, changing or removing features and design aspects. I am an advocate for taking these extra steps as they contribute to building a strong, refined vision and product. By the time you are done with the prototyping and testing process, you will have a much more detailed and informed idea about what your product will look like, why it should be the way that it is, and how it will be used to fulfil its role for its customers and users.
SIDE NOTE: The ideation and business concept refinement stage aims to sift through a set of ideas by asking a series of questions designed to minimize assumptions by using available studies and data, and carrying out tests. However, we will still largely be in the realm of the theoretical and will likely be dealing with concepts and not actual products. Little by little, to gain more knowledge, we will start building MVPs and versions of your product or service with only a few core properties. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get into meaningful contact with clients, receive feedback, and kickstart your fulfillment process. This will mark our transition to the prototyping stage which has a similar purpose as the later parts of the ideation stage and is a natural extension of it. In short, we should look for a way to test some or most of the assumptions we have made during the ideation stage (be they backed by data or not) by gradually building small, essential pieces of the product’s functionality which will serve us in running more sophisticated tests. A certain degree of commitment to the idea is required, as prototyping most often involves spending some resources. That is where the work we have done during the ideation stage comes into play - we should only invest where we are confident we can bring value and harness competitive advantage.
Running tests is imperative to gathering information. With the right kind of practical knowledge derived from a sound source, you will be well positioned to overcome a growth barrier, launch a product, optimize a process, shift team dynamics, and more. Testing is an integral part of the previous two stages - ideation and prototyping - and should be present in all stages of your business strategy. We will be conducting tests in a variety of ways to reach our information goals. As a prerequisite, it will be good to establish connections or channels to the target audience as a way to poll potential users for valuable input. The quality of the interaction is of importance - we have to navigate the spectrum starting from handing out fliers to sitting down with a customer of a focused one-on-one and from mass campaigns to finding our users ourselves. For example, the people with whom we can talk face to face or over conference call will be some of the most useful beta testers as the quality of communication is high. In most cases, the quality of our communication and questions will determine the quality of the response we get, so we have to be very careful in setting up the experiment. We can get very creative with how we run our tests, but we can help our cause by aiming to follow a set of good practices:
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We know exactly what we want to find out from the test
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We build the test so that we are as close to guaranteed to find that out as possible
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We limit the things we want to find out
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We carefully determine what audience we should show it to and why and carefully write down all assumptions. This step will be supplemented by the work done in the ideation and prototyping stages.
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We create careful budgetary expectations and make sure we fit our project goals within the budgetary constraints of the project. By carefully thinking out each element and laser focusing our efforts on acquiring core information first, we will minimize untargeted spending and direct funds towards value bringing activities.
Next, depending on the specifics of the project, we can use a number of avenues and activities to run our tests:
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Engage people through friends, colleagues, family, and our personal networks.
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Create surveys and pay to send them to targeted audience
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Create landing pages and direct targeted ad traffic to them and monitor users through analytics and heatmaps (and later retarget the initial test group for subsequent tests),
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Forum post asking for feedback (Reddit, HackerNews, specific industry forum), etc.
The goal of this stage is to find out the answers to important questions. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that you should constantly be testing and filling in knowledge gaps, so I will most likely advocate coming back to running tests regardless of which stage in the startup cycle we’re at. The goal of acquiring this information is to help us find the specific product/market fit conditions in which there will be sufficient demand for your product for you to comfortably meet with adequate supply. In other words, we will try to calibrate one working configuration or combination of product features, marketing channels, pricing strategy, delivery methods, marketing, sales channels, customer service, etc, which together will constitute a working system; e.g. a system in which you create your product or service, acquire potential customers via marketing channels, have those customers buy your product or service, and you deliver the product or service. When customers buy, they should be satisfied with their experience, the product/service, and the customer service and maintenance. Furthermore, production, marketing, sales, customer service and other costs must not exceed the price you charge for the product/service so that you can register a profit. Finding your first working model is a very important step for every startup. There might more recalibration to be done and there might be better product/channel/customer combinations, but we want to start with one and go from there. Optimization and growth will come next.
Assuming your product is tangible, it will require a sound production and logistics system to transform the prototype into a product which can be (mass)produced to a singular high quality standard, and later distributed efficiently.
If you are making and selling a tangible product, we could use dedicated production, fulfilment, shipping, and logistics services and build different combinations of outsourced and insourced activities to best match your specific situation. Then, depending on what blend of outsourcing/insourcing we decide on, we will begin vetting manufacturing and fulfillment partners and work to determine the best way to arrange shipping and logistics to the customer. If you already have a production process set up, we can review it to identify processes and practices which can be improved, optimized, or automated.
Assuming your product it a piece of software, we will work to create a comprehensive specification which can then be given to software engineers to fulfill. We will draw on my software development experience to create a plan with realistic development stages and deadlines. My work on ZeroHour Templates will also be of help as it includes specification writing templates. If you do not have software development capabilities in house, we will work to choose the best talent from the outsourcing pool, again using my experience conducting interviews and hiring, including on UpWork. I will also help with screening offers for blatant overpricing, lack of skills, or other red flags which inexperienced buyers unfortunately risk making. Once we have a fulfillment team in place, we will closely monitor and manage the software development process to adhere to scheduling and quality expectations as the project moves along. I have a lot of experience with software development projects as a programmer, a team leader, and a project manager, and I can be of use for managing and ensuring quality, timeliness, and transparency for your project as well.
Testing and learning should not stop while production is going on. What free time is left from managing the project should be used to lay down the groundwork for the next stages - building marketing infrastructure and assets, building sales strategy and funnel, researching the market, continue testing the product and gathering feedback with the latest usable version, etc. At every point and with every new feature you should be addressing users in a meaningful way, and you should work carefully to make sure you have good information to go off of. Furthermore, the prototyping stage is a good point to start (or delegate) parallel work on laying some marketing groundwork such as websites, whitepapers, pitch decks, etc. which will be useful later on.
Having a consistent, unified, and visually appealing branding and design strategy has many benefits and could be as simple as a good quality logo, company fonts, and a company colour scheme paired with some good design practices for spacing and type sizes. I make sure to spend the necessary time and effort to compile a design strategy for every project I am a part of. In my experience, with minimal effort and by simply making and following a set of design guidelines you can create a good visual identity and make following it easy. Since your branding will go on all your documentation, websites, paper forms, and products, it will help make you recognizable and ensure that customers receive a unified experience through your many communication channels (especially useful when retargeting customers from one channel to another). Building a design strategy is a negligible amount of work for something with very far-reaching benefits. My extensive experience with graphic design and startup branding makes me a good fit to lead, structure and contribute to your branding project by organising freelancers and curating proposed designs for review, thus saving you time in organisational activities.
Marketing is a huge area of business management, and without getting into too many technicalities and semantics, we will be focusing on the practical: our goal will be to do our research on your product, clients, and market, prepare your offering, find potential clients to show it to, determine the channels via which we will show them your offering, and have some of those people enter our sales funnel as promising leads. In short - we want to show potential clients what we have and turn them into actual clients. (I have taken the second part - actually selling the product - out into its own stage, since in my experience both areas are big and varied enough to warrant this split for the sake of thoroughness and productivity, and focusing on each one individually usually brings better results.) The name of the game is “small tests” and finding what works fast, without spending too much. This is a simplification of the process, but it is a good structure and boilerplate template to build upon. Eventually, our strategy might grow more complex - one example would be to prepare multiple interactions with the same customer group (i.e. via retargeted ads) which will start by informing, building trust, and establishing credence and authority, and continue on to influencing buying choices and showcasing your product, all the way to closing the sale - but in the early stages simplicity is key. We should only arrive at complex solutions as a result of smaller, successfully working parts coming together. If you already have a marketing strategy and a sales funnel set up, we could analyze them to identify bottlenecks, analytics blank spots, and inefficiencies, and work to remove or remedy them to open up the way to scaling up your marketing and sales operation.
Our marketing activities will vary greatly based on the specifics of your business: they might include buying ads in search engines, ad networks, or specialized niche websites and community forums, running ads and building presence on social media or local listings, “guerrilla” local marketing which involves engaging with your customers as directly as possible (chalk on the sidewalk, pamphlets, posters, street art etc.), market research and cold calls for enterprise sales, networking events, open mic nights, and others. We will work to carefully test and develop the right marketing channels which will bring in more in revenue than they take in costs and which make sense for your business with all its specifics, intricacies, and competitive advantages. We might reach a point where we can optimize the marketing efforts to bring in “better” customers - clients who require less overhead to sell to, who we can provide an excellent service to, who are more likely to recommend you if satisfied, and who are looking for our service specifically (as much as possible). We will do a lot of work which builds upon the user characteristics and market research documents which we began putting together in the previous steps to answer some very important question such as: “Who is my customer?”, “How do I reach them?”, “What is important to them and what isn’t?”, “What problems am I solving for them?”, and many more. We will build user profiles and do exercises to get into the customers’ shoes; the better we can answer these questions, the more effective our marketing efforts will be. Of course, for new startups, this process is and should be an ongoing discussion akin to an exploratory mission on an unknown planet: you won’t have all the answers in the beginning, and the answers you have will likely change and shift over time, but finding them and keeping them current will greatly influence your survival. So it’s important to start asking questions, testing, and learning at a good pace, and to never really stop.
The goal of this stage, for new projects, will be to arrive at one good working marketing product offering/channel/client combination which has been tested and works well; then we can build on top of that. For established projects, we will look at marketing to existing customers and growing and diversifying your channels.
Every industry has barriers designed to make it difficult for new companies to differentiate themselves, establish competitive advantages, and gain market share. If you have something good, it makes sense to try and protect it. Fortunately for most new companies, nobody ever truly owns a market, and there are almost always things which consumers want that they aren’t getting. For having embarked on your entrepreneurial journey, you probably have confidence that you can do a better job in some area of your product or service than the current market incumbents. You might offer higher quality, lower prices, new and improved features, have more experience, have a better location, or any number of different advantages. Or you might not have all that at the moment, which is totally fine - it takes time - but you have some idea how to get there. Here is some good news: one area in which you can always excel, and realistically hope to do better, is customer service. I cannot stress how important it is to constantly strive to be the best company by customer service in your sector. Not second best, not top 5 - numero uno. Customer service is comprised of many small human acts and kindness done within firm boundaries of good will and compassion, conviction in the quality of your product, and good business practices. Even if you are in many ways the first company to solve a given problem, and people don’t have many other alternatives, you still want to provide excellent customer service - for many customers it is a defining factor in choosing their suppliers, and should you disregard this, your first competitor will have a very easy time snatching away market share. An industry where the incumbents are notorious for poor customer service is very vulnerable to newcomers who are willing to treat customers better. Good customer service also curates a loyal customer base which will work for you - recommending your company and purchasing additional products. We will look at your current customer service strategy and discuss best practices from my personal experience in manning the phone lines, building customer service guidelines, and having handled hundreds of customers personally. We will try our best to understand how a customer feels at every step of the process of interacting with your business and how we can best put them at ease, ensure that they have a great experience, and solve their problem for them in a way that leaves them happy. Good customer service is imperative to a strong sales strategy - this will lead to referrals, good reviews, and repeat business. By the end of this stage you should have a good idea about how you are going to go about interacting with customers, how you are going to handle different customer service scenarios, and what extra steps you can take to go above and beyond for your clients.
Following our marketing activities, next we need to turn our attention to building a robust, adaptive, and most importantly functional sales strategy. Marketing leaves us with a value proposition packaged into products and services, market and customer data gathered through research and tests, and channels through which we can reach some of our potential customers to some degree of success. That’s a good start - these potential customers have been informed of and attracted to your solution. Next, you need to guide your potential customer to the sales event by working with them to reaffirm the value of your offering. Depending on your situation, this could be done via a series of meetings or a landing page with a couple of clicks. As with all stages thus far, our approach to sales will vary greatly based on where you are in your journey and whether you have an established sales strategy. Furthermore, your approach to sales should adapt to the realities around selling your product; the easiest example being that you would have a difficult time to effectively sell a traditionally retail product the same way you would go about selling enterprise solutions and vice versa. Retail and enterprise sales are a good example of different sales approaches. In retail sales we aim to sell one small thing to many customers while in enterprise sales, we maximize our engagement with a few big clients in order to sell something presumably big to them. Both approaches come with their specifics and they in many ways represent two ends on the spectrum of your engagement efforts with your client. For example, in trying to sell a paid AppStore SaaS application, your efforts might be better spent tuning your sales channel, value proposition, and free/paid feature mix on your app, rather than to go and try to sell it with personal meetings. As a counterpoint, if you have built a hotel management system - closer to an enterprise solution - it might be a good idea to set up meetings with local hotels. Sure, one day you will hopefully have hotels seeking you out (and you should be laying the groundwork for that) but in the beginning approaching sales hands-on would be a sure fire way to gain a lot of feedback on your product and value proposition, and get some paying clients and references. It’s important to do things which don’t scale, as Paul Graham says, and your first 10 and 100 clients might be hand-picked and costing 2 hours of engagement each, but it is equally as important to take a realistic look at your product and its market, and figure out the best way to go about conquering it, and then go above and beyond within that frame. Selling software also brings another layer of complexity which requires a different approach.
There are countless sales methodologies (https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/6-popular-sales-methodologies-summarized) and each one has its merits. I am by no means a sales expert, specialist, or academic; my sales experience is purely practical and comes from having sold an array of different products and services. I have successfully sold affiliate marketing products, 3D printing services, eCommerce projects, and SaaS GDPR compliance packages. I am definitely not a sales guru or someone who will “blow your mind with my 10 Easy Unexpected Insider Sales Tricks”. What I can help you with is share my opinion and observations of your existing sales process and help you construct a down-to-earth, realistic, and functional sales process. It won’t be fancy, but it will work.
As a small side note, your sales could depend on distribution channels and partners, in which case you should be selling to them. It’s almost the same experience, only this time alongside the product benefits, you should also be selling the business benefits of carrying your product alongside key metrics and performance incentives. I can share my experience in setting up these networks or help you review your current arrangements.
Client feedback is of paramount importance. Think about it - this is a person who has probably gotten to know about you through your marketing channels, has purchased your product or service, and has experienced its benefits and downfalls in some way or another. They have bucketloads of very valuable information for you, and you would do well to gather as much of it as you possibly can. You have to be sure to reach out to clients and even consider offering incentives in return for answering some questions and sharing their experience. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback - sometimes when you’ve worked so hard on a project you’re afraid of hearing something negative. Don’t let that fear guide your actions - embrace it instead. If the customer is unhappy it is your mission to learn why and to do your best to consider and remedy whatever has contributed to their bad experience. This mechanism of self improvement will propel your business forward. People are ready and willing to give second chances in most cases, so you will have your time to turn things around. Also, it goes without saying that it is likely that whatever upset one person might also upset another (excluding some edge cases). Other times customers will have good things to say or give you ideas about parallel services you could offer, and other times still they won’t have any thoughts on your performance whatsoever - that is OK too. You can’t please everybody, you can’t listen to everyone’s wishes, and you can’t implement all feature requests, but you can be open to praise and criticism, you can adopt a learning attitude, and you can try your best, within reason, to go that extra mile for the people you service.
Depending on the type of product or service you offer, there might be additional work to be done for your clients after the sales event - for example, you might have to carry out a repair job, deliver goods, or install an appliance. Together we will go through your process of delivery and we will look to identify weak points to try and bring in extra efficiency to both save you resources and increase client satisfaction. We will also discuss implementing quality control to ensure the customer receives a full, complete service and a fully functional, working product.
When a company starts to experience growth, processes are put into place to save time and resources. Furthermore, processes provide a unified way for employees to deal with common events and occurrences which is built according to company policy. Processes can be helpful, or they can be unhelpful and risk adding additional overhead, ambiguity, and delays if not configured correctly. We will go over your business functions and processes in an analytical way and aim to detect bottlenecks, processes which need to be simplified, or places where having a process will benefit your operations. This will be an exercise in optimisation - we will be looking at how we can make things work better and to potentially rework some of the processes you currently have in place. Making changes in processes will effectively require some degree of change management, so I can share my knowledge in advocating for and bringing change and innovation to newer and already established companies.
Having a cohesive and well-put together team with good skills/responsibilities delegation will ensure smooth sailing through the uncertain and turbulent moments which await every startup. We will discuss your HR and hiring policies, current employees and team dynamics, responsibility distribution and work delegation, hiring and terminating new talent, working with freelancers and outsourcing, and employee incentives and motivation. My experience of building new teams and managing established ones in a myriad of companies will be useful during these stages.
Growing is almost always good, but it’s important to control the pace at which you do so, the risks which you take, and to be able to effectively and predictably register growth spurs when it best suits you to do so. Scaling up and growing your business is dependant on several factors: having a stable, reliable marketing channel, a good grasp of your customer’s needs and wants, a functional sales strategy, outstanding customer service, clear, efficient, and well-placed processes, a strong, cohesive team with a clear division of responsibilities accepting of new employees, and the ability to deliver a high quality product or service and provide relevant maintenance. In fact, the steps I have presented thus far aim to set up exactly these fundamentals. If you’re already at this place before we have worked together, then we will take an analytical approach of going through your business (using the previous areas as a boilerplate structure) and aim to identify bottlenecks which are inhibiting your growth and ways to solve them, and opportunities for expansion.
To have a successful ongoing expansion effort I find it helpful to split your tasks into two: internal and external. In short, external tasks are aimed at bringing you more business, while internal tasks have to do with ensuring that you have the ability to meet the newfound demand without unnecessary risks or shortages. Internally, you need to make sure that an increased customer flow will not hinder your daily operations, destabilize or overspread your team, diminish your customer service, reduce the quality of your product, or take up so much of your time that you, a person in a leadership position, can no longer fulfil their leadership duties. Thus on the inside, scaling up is mainly an optimization problem where things which were working for 5 clients no longer work for 50 or 500 and need to be changed; you have to practice efficient delegation and plan for restructuring, budgeting, resource allocation, and potential renegotiations with suppliers and partners. Externally, your goal is to grow your market share by leveraging your existing market channels and sales funnels, growing them, and establishing new ones. Furthermore, based on your business specifics, you might decide that you have the necessary competitive advantages to extend your product portfolio or venture into complementary services or an entirely new industry. A common mistake is to look at only gathering new customers - increasing the lifetime value of existing customers through upsells, repeat sales or subscriptions is equally as important.
Growing has a lot to do with measurements, analytics, and, as we have learned to expect by now, tests and hypotheses. Since we almost never start off with 100% knowledge of a given industry or how to achieve a given goal, it is important to be honest and upfront about what we do and what we don’t know. This allows us to put uncertainty into clear terms and to seek to reveal the truth and data about customer behavior which lies beneath the surface. We will establish KPIs, set up analytics at key points, and continuously monitor our performance and that of the tests which we run, saving us resources, raising our efficiency, and providing a way to tackle the uncertainty ahead.
First we need to figure out if VC and acquiring additional investments is the right path forward for you, for your co-founders, and for your company. If the circumstances do indeed point towards seeking outside investment, we will work to prepare an array of documentation and strategies to set us up for the first stages of looking for investors and entering negotiations. There are some important questions to ask and answer at this stage, such as: How much capital are you looking for in return for what percentage equity? Maybe debt financing is better? What is a realistic price someone will pay for 10% if your company? What are your financial forecasts and growth rate? Why do you need that investment and what are you going to do with it?. There may be even more questions depending on your specific situation and we should take the time to go through them and answer them diligently, as we will be asked a lot of these questions later.
We should start curating potential investors early on based on your company’s value proposition, industry, strengths, and future trajectory - any investor with a good, matching portfolio is worth exploring. Together we have to acquire a deep understanding of your business, its driving factors and key performance indicators, and gradually transform that into valuable documents and information chunks for investors. You will be selling a piece of your business as a product - why should they buy it?
As we move along with this process, we will be gradually building your pitch deck based on a combination of existing templates and what we consider to be important to highlight to investors, or pre-approved and required pitch deck formats by the investors we are looking to attract. Even though most pitch decks have a similar structure, it is important to showcase your company’s strengths and achievements in a meaningful way through good design and copy, while remaining transparent about challenges and areas where you want to grow - as investors are normally brought on to help the company achieve a goal. With their help, you will be able to achieve your goal faster, and they can profit as a result as well. Appendices and supporting documents might also become necessary as we move forward with distilling and packaging your company vision, promise, and performance. Once we have a tentative pitch deck, we will begin refining your presentation and eventually schedule small test presentations for friends, colleagues, and family to gather feedback and practice, before we move on to presenting for investors. We will call and email investors with attached decks to set up meetings, as well as leverage your existing network. After each investor presentation, we will follow up for feedback and guidance - even if talks don’t succeed, this process will help us refine your pitch, deck, and presentation skills, as well as provide valuable market response data. Throughout this whole process it is imperative that for each potential investor we gauge how comfortable you are with them, their propositions, their involvement levels, and their plans for the future
When a deal moves forward after an investor has expressed interest, we will work together to consider their offer and its implications from voting rights to ownership percentage. I will share my experience with negotiations and will assist in building your negotiation strategy.
General Business Strategy - tell me about where your business is heading. Let's consider the global and local economic climate, your local economic happenings and trends, and figure out the next steps for your enterprise. I can be a bouncing board for ideas, play devil’s advocate, help you brainstorm new directions, discuss and disassemble potential scenarios, and more.
My peripheral skillset includes programming and IT/software development project management (I have written code for most of my startups - Java, JavaScript, C, C#, Swift, Arduino, HTML, CSS, Python, Node.JS, PHP, SQL), web design and CMS (I have created over 75 websites, most of which are running on customised WordPress), graphic and video design (I have done branding and creative work for most of my startups using Photoshop, AfterEffects, Lightroom, Illustrator), and advanced Office suite capabilities (though I’ve only seldom written custom VBA code) in Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and the Google Drive suite including Docs, Sheets, and Slides. I bring advanced automation skills to the table with Zapier, IFTTT, DialogFlow, and WebMerge. Other software and services I am proficient in: Google Analytics and Search Console, Hubspot CRM, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Trello, Buffer, and many others.
Q: If you’re so good at this, why aren’t you running your own company instead of consulting on others?
A: The answer is simple: I am. At any given time over the past 9 years I have been running a startup or collaborating on a project, and I continue to do so today. But I can’t hope to continue to be successful by just doing - I have to learn and update my knowledge as well. Working with companies like yours and individuals like you not only lets me learn more about an industry and a business case I might not have any experience in, but is also in the very core of what I love doing - solving business problems. I love finding creative, data backed solutions to convoluted business cases - I get a real kick out of it. Like I said above, I am all about solving the entrepreneurial meta problem of how to run good companies, and working with you to understand your specific business case and challenges widens my horizons and lets me draw on a bigger experience pool. So to summarize, while I am working on my own projects at the moment, a big part of my learning process is working with other companies and exposing myself to new and potentially unfamiliar cases. By navigating these new experiences I become better at what I really love doing and I might help somebody along the way - even better1
Q: Why do you charge so much/so little?
A: I charge what I feel is a fair price which represents what my time, effort, and deliverables are worth. I am flexible on price - we can negotiate a flat rate for a given task out front, or go about it at an hourly rate which we have agreed upon.
Q: What is your work process?
A: Every project is different, but in general I suggest we start by having a completely free no-strings-attached call to just learn more about each other and whether we are a good match for working together on your project. It doesn’t matter which step in your entrepreneurial journey you’re at. During you free consultation, you will bring me up speed and we will determine how my skill set can bring value to your specific situation. Of course we don’t have to go through all steps if you’re feeling comfortable with your work thus far and you’re looking for specific help in a different area or in solving a specific business case. If we both feel good about moving forward, we will agree on the workload, parameters, and compensation, and we will get started. A typical project will include some time spent on conference calls with you and/or your team and time spent preparing deliverables for you.
Q: What about confidentiality?
A: My personal belief is that you should never be afraid to share your business idea. Even if a competitor hears it, you should have the ability, knowhow, and confidence that you can do it better by being one step ahead at every stage of the entrepreneurial process. To get down to brass tacks, you have my word that I will not use, distribute, or copy your business idea. I am perfectly comfortable with signing an NDA as well.