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Clarity

Paul Bennett

Cape Town, South Africa

2x founder at Context Travel and Cicero Learning, angel investor at The Bach, True Places, and Eyland Spirits, board chair at Sustainable Travel International, and advisor/mentor at Portico and Pack Up & Go. I love digging into the details with entrepreneurs. Live full time on a sailboat.

$2.00/min

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Startups Travel Technology Tech startups and entrepreneurship Travel Education Educational Technology Sustainability Sustainable Business Sustainability Strategy Africa

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Travel Industry

Context Travel founder ready to work with executives, VCs, or other founders in the travel industry on any and everything travel related, whether how to build a direct-to-consumer strategy or biz dev in the tricky world of travel distribution.

Growing Businesses

I've been in the trenches where every user matters and every conversion is material. I'm equally at home in the weeds of SEO, SEM, and content marketing with founders and their marketing teams as I am hovering above the fray with boards and VCs as they explore growth opportunities.

Sustainability Strategy

Organizations ignore climate and social equity at their own peril. Having built a B Corp and now serving as chair of the board at Sustainable Travel International, I can help you build a strategy around climate and social impact that drives a multiple bottom line for the modern era.

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Answers

Paul Bennett answered

How do you handle the overwhelming excitement when you start working on an idea?

The best way to test an idea is to begin to execute it, which is why a lot of founders say that success is something like 10% good idea and 90% execution. Think of your "overwhelming excitement" as an asset and dive in. But, be systematic and organized. Design your task list as a series of tests. Start to build, but critique at each step. If the idea cracks and falls over, then it was weak and it's time to move on.

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Work Life Balance

Motivation

Paul Bennett answered

How should a website selling accessible art to commercial spaces look? Which option would convert better?

If you define conversion in the second case as getting an inquiry, then I think that option is going to have a much higher CVR than the first. It's also a lot easier to implement. I would go that route to start—quick and dirty—in order to test the idea and learn more about your audience. If you get lots of traction then it might be worth investing in a much more complex, ecommerce site where users can find art that fits their needs.

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Website Conversion

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Sales Funnel Optimization

Paul Bennett answered

I want to create a couple of websites. Should I follow wordpress or should I get a life time deal of webstarts.com .

My vote is for Wordpress. Webstarts.com looks pretty janky. Also, as Rohit notes, you can really limit yourself with a full-service provider like that.

Wordpress has come a long way in the last few years and rivals Shopify in some respects (marketplaces, for example) for a fraction of the cost. Also, the developer ecosystem is incredibly robust. You can find pretty affordable and competent remote devs on Upwork; but it pays to do your own research as product manager and know which plugins, theme, etc. you want to utilize. You can find cheap hosting with the likes of GoDaddy or Bluehost, or go premium with WP Engine (recommended). Hope that helps.

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Website Development

Web Design

Paul Bennett answered

How to calculate startup stock distribution and allocation?

Outstanding shares are what constitute ownership, not authorized shares. It's unclear in your example what you mean by allocated. If you mean that all 10m authorized shares have been issued, with 8m given to founders and 2m sitting on the company's balance sheet in order to give to staff and future investors, then 10m represents the total ownership and you have to give this founder 1m shares in order for her to have 10% of the company.

But, if you mean that the company has only issued 8m shares so far out of the total 10m it is authorized to issue eventually, then that is the total ownership and 10% is 800k shares.

Hope this helps.

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Startups

Paul Bennett answered

Should I go niche or be a general visa/immigration platform?

You're asking two questions. On the niche v broad question, I agree with the other posters that going niche is a good strategy. You can carve out a space more easily. That said, it may not be super easy to expand out of a nice once you plant yourself in it. You didn't specify the niche you're exploring so hard to comment beyond that.

As for monetizing, your second question, a couple of things come to mind such as services like relocation, apartment hunt, taxation and financial services. Visa services could be your lead product, with a lot of add ons one you land the customer.

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Immigration

Business Strategy

New Business Development

Reviews

Member since April 2021