Two months ago, I tweeted “TIL that cofounder conflict is best resolved over tacos.” A lot of founders appreciated the tweet (IndieHackers RTed), but my investors did not. A few hours later, one of my investors messaged me “Are you and Eric okay?” Then, that Friday, a potential investor told me that I could never show cracks in my cofounder relationship, that it was a very dangerous red flag to investors for a company looking to raise money soon. »
Right now, YCombinator - the famous Silicon Valley startup accelerator and incubator of Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and many other tech giants - is interviewing for its Summer 2019 class. Hundreds of founders are considering the opportunity to move to Palo Alto for $150,000 in seed funding and three months of storied startup programming. These founders give up 7% of their nascent company to join a community of Bay Area founders and give their idea a shot. »
My cofounder and I recently decided against building an email sign in flow for our users. Our website, Kapwing, relies entirely on Google and Facebook OAuth. In my opinion, too many startups unnecessarily build email sign in into their MVP. Although every product has different requirements, I think that, in general, founders should ditch email auth in favor of Google and Facebook Authentication. In this article, I’ll explain how we made the decision and why for other early-stage tech entrepreneurs. »
As a first-time startup founder, I didn’t realize that entrepreneurs were supposed to send regular email updates to their investors after raising money. For two months after we closed our seed round in June 2018, I didn’t send investor updates, and our investors didn’t ask me for them; I went back to growing the business, and they went back to their funds. Thankfully, another founder in my coworking space (the great Deon Nicholas) told me that investors and advisors expect a monthly update. »
Product Hunt has been an amazing launch platform for our image and video editing startup, Kapwing. We got to >300K monthly-active users last year with little marketing spend due partially to Product Hunt exposure. In this article, I’ll describe how Product Hunt (PH) works and share what strategies we’ve learned from fifteen PH launches in 2018. Disclaimer: This is absolutely not official advice (hence the title), and it’s not representative of everyone’s experience. »
Recently, a founder asked to chat with me about SEO. During our call, the founder - whose startup is backed by a top-tier VC - said to me “I assume that you acquired your first users through paid marketing.” Really? Is this an assumption nowadays? Since we’ve raised money, I’ve advised several founders who are fundraising for the first time. Many of them have told me that they need capital to pay for ads before they’ve even launched their product. »
How do you organize your startup’s website? It depends on the stage your company is in. We have redesigned our landing page more than seven times since launching in September 2017, and we’re about to do another. I wanted to share takeaways from my startup journey for other first-time founders organizing their website. Background My co-founder (Eric) and I are both web developers. For the first seven months of Kapwing, we bootstrapped, building the product ourselves and getting traction out of our savings. »
November 27, 2018 – Today, Wistia and Kapwing publish a co-authored report on “Video Usage At Startups”. In the last several months, Kapwing surveyed 132 startup founders about their use of video for business purposes and partnered with Wistia to publish the insights. The report details their insights: Video marketing is a popular medium among small companies: More than 85% of founders have made at least one video for business purposes. »
