Congrats, you have now raised a small pre-seed round (consider your self at least somewhat lucky or at least one step closer to achieving your goal) or an angel round, your stress as a start-up founder is finally over. Not a chance, the next hard steps are:
- Validating your product market fit or at least testing new markets
- The second step is scaling your team, remotely or local (if you raised enough)
- The third is now building out a solid roadmap with marketing (you didn’t forget about marketing did you? it’s not just about software development anymore.)
- It’s time to figure out your budget and make sure you keep burn somewhat under control or guess what you are back to step 0 – looking for funding.
- Time to see what your competitors are up to, can you beat them? what is your differentiator?
- Time to schedule meetings to people that can help you scale, or were you going to just buy all your traffic without any partners?
- Maintain a work-life balance, stay healthy, and try to be stress-free so you can think clearly
- Think about if you will pay yourself or not, will you go all in and spend it on the product? or is it time you can actually pay yourself and breathe? You do believe in your product wholeheartedly right? If so, ramen-cash is all you really need. The rest of the budget goes towards: Development + Sales/Marketing (make sure to get that CAC < LTV and earn back ratio between 1-3 months).
Lesson II: Generating $ – what’s the lowest hanging fruit?
Remember it won’t get easier, your thoughts may have been “After I get funding this burden will go away”. In fact, you have more responsibilities now, and unless if you are exceptional at delegating and not a micro-manager (which Entrepreneur is? — right) expect to put in longer hours. If you are not ready for it, thank god you have a bachelors degree to fall back on.