Evan Baehr's profile on Product Hunt

Evan Baehr

cofounder, able

#13763@evanbaehrevanbaehr.com

Activity 1 Made 738 Following 1,006 Followers

Upvotes (3)

Joined on May 21st, 2014

20 points

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Sitting in my living room looking over at my Amazon Tap, thinking: I assumed you always gave me the lowest price.... now I hate you. Need Wikibuy app for Tap!

on Wikibuy

5yr ago

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@charliehoehn Great questions. 1. Many folks jump to building a prototype early on. "Minimal viable product" is a great forcing function for stripping a product down to its core--so that you can ship it as fast as possible so that you can get feedback on it. I think about startups as organizations collecting data in order to confirm/negate hypotheses. MVP's are great ways to do this FAST. Companies usually begin with an IDEA - which is often a PRODUCT. So creating an MVP first is very wise. I think the mistake we often see is that founders stay too focused on product for too long--so often their pitches end up 90% about their product. But a product is necessary but not sufficient for a company. A pitch deck - done in an MVP way - brings the same kind of fast prototyping up to the level of your business - not just your product. MVP is great - but do it for your product AND your deck. 2. Raising capital is usually dilutive to your company - meaning: you just sold (lost?) part of your company. So the longer you delay raising capital, the more likely you raise at a higher valuation. There isn't a right answer to when to raise capital. But a general thought: consider raising capital as soon as you have hit diminishing marginal returns in your own learning and hypothesis testing. For example, if you have a company of 2 people and have built a basic prototype--the question to ask is: how will hiring a third person (or spending more money on, say, marketing) help us learn faster? A fun irony in 'fundraising advice' is these two maxims: I. Raise as little as you can as late as you can. II. Raise as much as you as soon as you can. Both have wisdom to them - but only you can make the call. I'll end with this: the #1 thing a founder must do is not run out of money, for if you do, it is all a moot point.

on Get Backed

5yr ago

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Evan Baehr here - one of the authors of Get Backed. We didn’t set out to write the book, but along the way of raising money for and building our companies, our friends kept asking us: ‘I’ve got an idea and want to raise money - how do I do it?’ When we tried to point them to a resource, we couldn’t find one. We couldn’t find anything that answered the real questions: What do founders actually do to raise money? What do they show investors? How do they build relationships? What mistakes do they make? So, after raising $50 million for our own ventures, we interviewed 75+ founders and took everything we learned and put it into this book. Once we had a manuscript, we were going to publish on our blog. But we decided to email it to Harvard for kicks; well, turned out they also think this is an important topic. So, we have a book! We believe launching a company is one of the greatest privileges and callings anyone can have--and we want more people to be able to do that. So we hope this book lowers the barrier to entry by teaching founders how to raise money. I’ll be on Product Hunt all day to answer any questions. Thank you Product Hunters for your support.

on Get Backed

5yr ago

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