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Clarity

Dan Jacobs

London, Greater London

I have worked for 20 years in early stage businesses in a variety of roles from engineer to CTO and over the past five years have founded or co-founded four businesses and raised investment for them.

Highlights of my career include:

- Being early staffer at Lastminute.com
- Being CTO of Virgin.com
- Co-founded a bank

I'm currently co-founder of two startups, I also write on the subject, mentor less experienced founders and am a trustee of two charities.

http://www.danjacobs.com

$3.33/min

2 Calls

1 Review

26 minutes
Avg. call

Entrepreneurship Lean startup Fundraising Startups Product Strategy Marketing Strategy Product Development Business Strategy Revenue Modeling Generating Revenue

Call me to talk about

Seed Fundraising in the UK

You're a pre-seed startup, you've been bootstrapping to get this far. What do you need to get to Seed investment? What are the best funding sources? How do you Crowdfund? What about Angels or VCs? Is it too early? I have both fundraising several startups and advised others successfully. I will be able to help you chart the right course for your business.

How to Value Your Business

You're an early stage business and you're looking to take your first round of funding. How do you value your business? What is good value for investors? What is good value for your business? I can talk you through the variables and advice on an appropriate valuation.

Hiring a CTO

Startups can be made or broken through making the right hiring choices. I can advise on how to hire the right technical staff and CTO. I am also for interviewing potential CTO's for you.

Technology Strategy for Startups

Your a startup trying to choose the right technology, platforms, tools to build your product or service. Based on what you're trying to do, budgets etc.

Do you out source? Hire permanent staff or contractors?

You do you manage your code?

I am also available for interviewing potential CTO's for you.

Troubleshooting Your Startup

You're an early stage startup in the UK (you may be pre-seed or post seed), you have hit some road bumps. I have extensive experience in troubleshooting businesses at this stage and providing some options for moving forward.

Answers 18
Reviews 1

Answers

Dan Jacobs answered

How do I find investors for my startup?

Wow, this is a really broad questions. Is this your first funding round? A seed round? A series A? do you have revenues? Do you have a product?

Some very general points:

1. Decide if you want just money or 'smart' money i.e. an investor who can contribute more than just cash.

2. Can you raise at least 50% of it from your own network? If so you might consider Crowdfunding.

3. Do you have a lead investor? even if they are investing a minority of the round, this will make it easier to find other investors.

If you can give more information, I will be able to help further.

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Crowdfunding

Fundraising

Dan Jacobs answered

How to start with digital marketinng for new product for online seller and plan is to get few thosands new users every month.

A very generic question, here's a very generic answer:

1. Put aside a sum of money for testing

2. Try different ads (with different images and text) on different networks (facebook, twitter, Instagram, display ads etc). Your demographic and the product / customer may give you some hints at which are best

3. Work out which one has the lowest cost of acquisition vs the most $value in sales (make sure you have really good analytics in place to be able to properly track from click on ad through to purchases)

4. invest your budget in that channel until it's not longer economical or efficient compared to the other method then...

5. repeat above

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Social Media Marketing

Digital Marketing Strategy

Inbound Marketing

Dan Jacobs answered

What would be considered "enough traction" before going for a seed round?

With the progress you have made you should be able to get seed funding.

The advantage of waiting longer is that you will be able to set a higher valuation and retail more of your company.

If you need the money to properly support the business and customers then it sounds like about now is the time to seek investment.

Happy to discuss further if you want to schedule a call.

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Seed Capital

angel investing

Fundraising

Dan Jacobs answered

As a passion project I have developed a music app, which will be launching soon. What is the best way to promote it?

Hard to say with no information, but...

I would always suggest starting with the community your customers belong to.

1. Try and get relevant music blogs writing about your app.
2. Look for tweeters who are big influencers of your potential customers and see if you can get them interested in tweeting
3. Try creating some incentive for people to share the app with their friends / peers
4. Write your own content for your website or a blog, good quality content is what google looks for these days
5. Decide based on your markets demographics what other networks are good to establish a following on and create useful content there, e.g. instagram

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App Marketing

Mobile applications

Dan Jacobs answered

Do I need planning permission for a co-working space in London?

You don't need anything other than a B1 + the right rental agreements in place. You can have a building where one floor is residential and one floor is office space, that's perfectly normal usage.

With regards to setting up co-working spaces, there are loads of them now. So you should consider what makes you different.

I have plenty of experience working in London co-working spaces so can give good advice about what works and what doesn't if you'd like to arrange a call.

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Coworking

Property

Property Law

Dan Jacobs answered

How to start a startup with my Idea

I'd venture that if you have to ask such a generic question about how to start a startup, you're probably not well equipped to do so.

My suggestions are as follows:

1. do 3-6 months interning with a small very early stage startup
2. find someone else to execute your idea whilst retaining a % equity
3. look to find co-founders who can execute the idea, stay involved but focus on your skill set (if it's relevant)

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Start-ups

Startups

Lean startup

Dan Jacobs answered

When do I release my product?

I would take it as a positive thing, it shows a level of validation that someone has independently come up with the same idea. You can analyse what they have done and learn from their mistakes.

Other things to consider:

1. Is there only room for one product solving this problem?
2. what can you offer that this competitor does not?
3. have belief in yourself and your ability to add personal value

I recommend you take a deep breath, consider the above, don't make any rash decisions, if they've been live for 11 months another few weeks won't make much of a difference.

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Entrepreneurship

Startup Consulting

Dan Jacobs answered

I am interested in creating a curated daily deals (i.e. Groupon) app within a specific niche. How do I go about this?

It would be helpful to know the sector.

I would try and start hyper local. That way you can easily and quickly get deals with small local businesses. You can then grow to small chains and then larger chains for a wider coverage.

Small local business are in my experience very up for these kinds of programmes which might drive more sales or footfall.

If you're looking at bigger corps or online brands then you should start with reselling an existing affiliate programme e.g affilinet in Europe.

Happy to give more specific advice on a call.

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Generating Revenue

Entrepreneurship

Partnerships

Dan Jacobs answered

I just received approval for a loan for my startup. I was approved for more than I need. Should I take more?

There are two views here:

1. take the money whilst you can get it because it's not easy to get
2. only take what you need because you're likely to spend it even if you don't need it

There is no 'right' answer. It comes down to how much you trust yourself to make use of the money, it's likely you will always need more than you think.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1. Could I raise the money later when I need it?
2. Will taking the extra money now give me a significant advantage? What extra edge will it give? Is that worth it?
3. is the size of the extra cash so much that it would add extra burden to repayment?
4. Would the extra loan mark you down if/when you go for investment?

Hope that helps. Happy to discuss on a call.

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Marketing Strategy

Loans

SaaS Sales

Dan Jacobs answered

How to start an online course?

Start of by using a site like udemy (https://www.udemy.com), they are a platform for creating online courses and handle payments for you. They may have some users who are in your sector.

It sounds like finding 'customers' is your main issue. There is no panacea here, the approach you've taken so far is largely correct, here are some more ideas:

1. How about going direct to large construction companies (an industry you know) and offering them discounts for training their staff?

2. Reaching out to your own contacts to try and find more

3. Start a mailing list giving tips to these people and up-sell

4. The things you are already doing are good, blogging, social media etc. I would add creating meetup groups for engineers (and other target market).

5. Starting local is good idea, at least once you validate a customer acquisition model in the local area, you have something you can role out more widely.

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Entrepreneurship Education

Dan Jacobs answered

If I don't have a co-founder but have a minimum viable product, how do I get investors interested in my idea and eventually my company?

Firstly, you don't need a co-founder but it's highly recommended, investors on the whole will trust a team of co-founders more than a single founder. The reason is that statistically co-founding teams are much more successful than single founder teams. Why bet on a company, even with a great idea, that has less chance of being successful.

Having said that you can find investors who will bet on you, it's just a case of kissing lots of frogs.

If you have an MVP, you need to use it to validate your assumptions. That does not mean that you need to get 100,000 users on board. You need enough users to show average usage. I'm not a statistician but depending on your customer base your sample of users could be 10 (B2B - enterprise) to 10k B2C mass market.

Proof points would be:

* stickiness - how often the come back and use it
* conversion to sales
* NPS - would they recommend the product / service to a friend?
* there will be lots of other specific qualitative and quantitate proofs that will be specific to your product

It should not take you long to put this together in a presentable form and take it to investors.

Happy to help you further on a call, including working out specific KPIs or proof points.

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Fundraising

Reviews

Great call with Dan! Instead of asking Dan a specific question I just presented our situation as a whole, he asked questions that got to the heart of things and quickly came through with a perspectives that our team had never considered which aligned our internal passions and motivations to business goals we had never considered, yet which genuinely brought light to those inner motivations. Thank you Dan. That was fabulous advice!

Alexander Nazerian Source: Clarity

Member since November 2015