ganeshsridharan

Thanks. Welcome to the world of startups.

Startups are hard. Deciding to leave a well-paid job in a big company for a startup with lots of unknowns is a big decision.

Having a clear reason about why you want to move away from a big company to a startup prepares you mentally to embrace startup life.

Here are the reasons to NOT join a startup that I shared with my friend, who is thinking of moving from a big company to a startup. I hope that if none of these reasons apply to him then he is going to really love the startup life.

List of techniques that worked for me to hire engineers.

I have worked in multiple b2b startups and one of them was reasonably successful. Based on what I saw, split ratio changes as the startup matures. Earlier we had mostly monthly sign ups. monthly >> annual. As we hired a bigger sales team and created incentives for them to close on annual contracts annual brought in a significant revenue. More like monthly ~ annual.

It also was based on the market type we went. Initially it was small b2b businesses (employee size of around 50k). Once we started moving up market, the contract amount and deal size increased.

I learnt a technique from my previous managers that I follow to make decisions. It is called "Tenets".

Tenets are neither wrong nor right. They are laid out so that everyone knows what are some of the non-negotiables.

In your case, for example, you could come up with the following tenets 1. All of the code should follow consistent patterns 2. Speed of creating a new component should be less

etc.

Now once this is done, you can share these tenets to the group of the participants and ask them to rate their proposal on the tenets. Finally you can take an approach based on the ratings.

IMPORTANT NOTE in decision making: 1) Decision making is not a democratic process. So make it clear that who is the owner who is going to decide on the final solution. Everyone can share their opinion but there should be only decision maker 2) Based on the tenets you come up with, there could be cases where some of the points (like dash-case vs. camelCase vs snake_case) does not matter. In those cases, do not spend time on going back and forth. Just take a decision and mark it as final 3) Make it clear to the audience how you are going to decide (like the tenets framework), who is the decision maker even before going to the meeting and make sure they agree to those. 4) After a decision is made, send a summary email (or write a document) on how you took the decision and if there is a time to revisit it.

It is difficult to answer your question without much information about all the numbers.

At a high level, you need decide whether you have figured out a product market fit, calculate CAC (customer acquisition cost), Churn rate for monthly vs annual.

If you are still testing your product and are not sure whether you have a fit then I would recommend continue with monthly plan and don't worry about annual plan. You will learn plenty about your product (based on Churn) from monthly subscribers.

If you are past the product market fit stage, annual plan provides you the best option. a) Average CAC is lower b) Churn is lower c) Most importantly, you generate cashflow by getting more money upfront.

There is also the hybrid option you can try, which is annual contract with monthly payments.

thanks

Do you have any recommendations on what actions you take to getting things done from remote team?

Thanks. Are there any specific steps you take to build trust with remote employees?