Browsing Tag: Startups

    Startups

    Jumpstart nabs $8.5M led by Sequoia for a recruitment platform that aims to increase diversity

    December 18, 2019

    When it comes to calibrating for an optimal workforce, diversity and inclusion have become a more prominent priority for companies in recent years. Today a startup that’s built a recruitment platform to help organizations source and hire in a more holistic way is announcing a round of funding to capitalise on a rise in demand for its services. Jumpstart, which provides a way for organizations to tap into a wider pool of candidates, who themselves have been more carefully ordered by way of Jumpstart’s algorithms, is today announcing that it has raised $8.5 million.

    The company today focuses primarily on filling entry/early-stage roles in “knowledge worker” positions such as engineering internships, junior-level marketing roles and business analysts. Founder and CEO Ben Herman said in an interview that the plan will be to continue moving up the funnel to target an ever-wider range of experiences and jobs. To date, the company has helped place people with big-name firms like Akamai, Adobe, Twitch, Lyft, Pinterest and many more.

    The Series A is being led by storied VC firm Sequoia Capital, with participation from Michael Lynton, the chairman of Snapchat’s parent Snap Inc.; and Joshua Steiner, the co-chairman of commodity trading firm Castleton Commodities International LLC. Those names and affiliations, significantly, speak to what kinds of power holders are looking at the challenge of diversity and inclusion in hiring, not just who is investing in trying to fix it.

    “Almost every company at scale manages early-career recruiting differently than industry recruiting. That’s because the techniques for identifying great early-career talent are just different than folks with a decade of experience. We think there’s an opportunity for Jumpstart to be a global platform for early-career talent,” said Mike Vernal, a partner at Sequoia.

    Jumpstart has an interesting jumpstart story of its own. Ben Herman, the founder and CEO, got his start in recruiting when he dropped out of high school in north London, England. He turned out to be a scrappy and very successful recruiter, working on behalf of a number of companies, in part because he was good at looking beyond the basic signals that many use to decide whether inbound applicants are good bets (those basic signals include things like which school you went to, your references and where you might have already worked), and expanding them to look at things like “passion projects”, interests, long-term goals and more.

    When those clients started to approach him with proposals to come in house, he thought of putting his enterprising nature to work for himself by starting his own business at age 21. Eventually, he found himself working for a lot of companies out of the U.S. and decided to make the move and see how and if he could bring a technology approach into the equation to improve the overall process — specifically by using AI to replicate the pattern recognition that Herman himself had used up to then in his successful recruiting endeavors.

    “Most of the tools in the market today are targeted at saving recruiters time,” Herman said to me in an interview this week. “They are overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. But the consequence is that they escalate the other problems [such as addressing diversity]. I look at these platforms as tools for putting a Band-aid on those bigger problems.”

    There is a lot about recruitment that is the opposite of “technology challenges.” Much of it requires a human touch and sensibility not just of what might really be the best fit for a business, but what might be the best fit for a specific person looking for a job. While that kind of nuance is more likely to be there the higher up the chain you go — partly because the “cost” of getting it wrong can be that much higher — it’s not as ubiquitous in the lower, lower-paid, more populated ranks of the job market.

    However, in the grand tradition of every problem now being a tech problem, this is now getting addressed, and Jumpstart is one of the companies aiming to do that.

    As Herman described how it works, the process starts in part by working with big companies, which are given access to the pool of candidates on its platform — that pool currently numbers 100,000 users. Those candidates themselves have been screened in advance with a set of questions that help place them into more ordered categories based on what they are looking for in a job experience, and what they are qualified to do (based on what they studied). In all, there are some 30 data points on each person in the Jumpstart system, he said.

    The pool of candidates grows, meanwhile, both organically (people can sign up on their own), or by way of those companies recruiting them onto the platform. Once the companies sign up to Jumpstart, they are asked to invite candidates to opt in to become a part of the pool.

    The thinking goes something like this: You may not have gotten this job, but sign up here to get considered for other exciting roles here and elsewhere. The pool of “nos” are always going to be much bigger than the pool of “yeses”: only around 2% of applicants end up securing internships and entry-level roles at the most sought-after places of employment, Herman said. This gives those employers a way of helping that other 98% find other opportunities.

    Herman says that the basic platform is already a big development for many of these companies, which in the past might have made a few trips to select schools to connect with students at career fairs, essentially leaving out most other universities and candidates from getting a look in.

    The focus on taking the recruitment game away from campuses and specific outreach to universities is an important way of expanding a company’s efforts to improve diversity and inclusion. It’s also a notable contrast with Handshake, another early-level recruitment startup that’s aiming to make hiring more diverse. (Its efforts specifically start with university relationships.)

    It also seems to be working. Herman says that Lyft hired one-third of its interns for 2020 via Jumpstart, and 82% were from underrepresented groups. (He also noted that Lyft used to use four different platforms to do the same work that it now does just through Jumpstart.)

    Like Handshake, Jumpstart (and others) are capitalising on an interesting moment in the world of online recruitment. Companies like Indeed and LinkedIn (not to mention behemoths like Facebook that are new to the space but are big enough to be formidable rivals) have long been able to leverage their economies of scale when it comes to sourcing qualified applicants, or for applicants to tap into an interesting pool of job opportunities.

    More recent shifts, however, into looking for more diverse workforces has changed the game: since platforms like LinkedIn were never built (and cannot really be used today) to help source more diverse candidate pools, that creates an opportunity for newer platforms to build themselves with those kinds of priorities baked in from the start.

    And that’s not just important for recruiters, but also for the people getting recruited. On the part of students, the aim will be to do more than just give them access to more job openings, but also a way to share questions and ideas with others like them. “Jumpstart is focused on letting early-career talent express their skills and interests directly by creating a very in-depth profile,” said Vernal. “We are also focused on creating a community of folks with similar backgrounds and interests to help navigate the transition into the workforce.”

    This latest funding brings the total raised by Jumpstart to $12.5 million.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Jumpstart nabs .5M led by Sequoia for a recruitment platform that aims to increase diversity

    Startups

    #ANGELS founding partner raises $25M for debut fund Moxxie Ventures

    December 18, 2019

    Katie Jacobs Stanton, a former Twitter executive and co-founder of the #ANGELS investment collective, has raised $25 million for her debut venture capital fund Moxxie Ventures.

    As the sole general partner, she plans to invest between $250,000 and $500,000 in underrepresented and underestimated founders, Stanton tells TechCrunch, with a focus on “products that make life and work better.”

    Stanton co-founded #ANGELS alongside Chloe Sladden, Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Vijaya Gadde and Jana Messerschmidt in 2014 with a goal of getting more women on startup cap tables. The #ANGELS, four of whom are Moxxie limited partners, share deal flow but invest in startups independently. Stanton said she will continue her work with the collective as she ramps up Moxxie Ventures.

    “I wanted more agency over the types of companies I wanted to back,” Stanton said of her decision to raise capital from LPs rather than stick to investing personal capital. As for her decision to invest primarily in minority entrepreneurs, Stanton cited recent statistics.

    In 2019, just 2.8% of U.S. venture capital invested went to female-led startups, a small increase from last year’s 2.2%. Despite efforts from new organizations like All Raise, venture capital firms tapping their first-ever female check-writers or new funds cropping up focused on the underfunded, the latest data paints a disappointing picture.

    “We just aren’t moving fast enough,” Stanton said. “We need to take bigger swings to move the needle faster. The fastest way to make progress isn’t to move inside those existing institutions but by creating new ones.”

    Stanton is not new to investing, having built a portfolio of some 40 companies over the last several years, including Cameo, Carta, Coinbase, Ethel’s Club, Lambda School, Literati, Modern Fertility, Shape Security and Threads. As such, she was able to raise the $25 million effort in roughly six months. However, even with an extensive network of Silicon Valley heavyweights, Stanton said she pitched 279 individuals and organizations before closing the fund: “I told myself if I’m not getting rejected daily, I’m not trying hard enough.”

    The process made her a better investor, she said. A whopping 29% of the entities she initiated conversations with ghosted her after an initial reply indicating interest. “A fast no is a lot better than a long maybe,” she said. “It’s kind of like we went on these dates — it’s not like we had a great date — and I never heard from him again.”

    Entrepreneurs, of course, are all too familiar with the concept of ghosting, as venture capital investors are prone to disappearing or elongating an eventual “sorry, we’re not interested.”

    Moxxie enters the market at an interesting time for venture capital fundraising and investing. There are more funds than ever deploying more capital than ever. In fact, there are so many new sub-$100 million funds, there are new names to differentiate the sub $25 million funds, or nano funds, from the $25 million to $100 million funds, or micro funds. In total, U.S. VCs were expected to dole out more than $120 billion this year, surpassing last year’s all-time high of $117 billion.

    The frothy markets have allowed entrepreneurs to be pickier than in the past, leading to swelling valuations and frustrated investors. Stanton, like any optimistic VC, said she plans to be very disciplined and committed to the strategy she pitched LPs, meaning she will do her best to avoid the buzzy Y Combinator graduates that seek a $37 million valuation right out of the gate.

    “People are raising a lot more money now just because they can,” Stanton said. “I am trying to maintain some discipline and have some constraints around the valuation. When I hear things valued at $20 million at seed pre-revenue, I just back away. There’s going to be a correction at some point and I worry for those founders.”

    Moxxie has invested in four startups to date, including women’s professional network Elpha, pricing platform Purple Dot, a soon-to-launch tool for arranging meetings called Sesh and Honeycomb Labs, a parenting tech startup.

    “My kids were encouraging me to do this and I realized it really just takes courage to do what founders do every day and to create something from nothing,” Stanton said of the firm’s name, Moxxie. “I added the extra X for the female chromosome because of my passion for the broader female founder and investor community.”

    I’m really proud of this,” she added. “It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done but it’s something that I think is important to do.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | #ANGELS founding partner raises M for debut fund Moxxie Ventures

    Startups

    SAP spinout Sapphire Ventures raises $1.4B for new investments

    December 18, 2019

    Sapphire Ventures, the former corporate venture arm of SAP, has raised $1.4 billion for growth investments, including a $150 million opportunity fund to support larger deals.

    The firm, which focuses primarily on enterprise tech companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel, writes checks to Series B through pre-IPO businesses. Its portfolio includes 23andMe, Sumo Logic and TransferWise.

    The new funds brings Sapphire Ventures, which became independent from the German software company SAP in 2011, assets under management to north of $4 billion. Sapphire will write checks sized between $5 million and $100 million with the new funds, allowing the team “to do any financing we need to or want to,” chief executive officer and managing director Nino Marakovic tells TechCrunch. Sapphire’s fourth growth fund is the firm’s largest to date, at more than double the size of their $700 million Fund III. 

    “We need this fund because companies are staying private much longer because they want to get to a $200 million revenue run rate before they go public,” Sapphire Ventures president and co-founder Jai Das (pictured) tells TechCrunch. “We want to have the capital to support these companies as they keep growing.”

    News of the fund comes nearly one year after Sapphire Ventures lassoed $115 million from new limited partners to invest at the intersection of tech, sports, media and entertainment. Sapphire Sport has ties to the sports industry, from City Football Group, which owns English Premier League team Manchester City, to Adidas, the owners of the Indiana Pacers, New York Jets, San Jose Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning, among others.

    Before that, the firm closed on $1 billion for its third flagship venture fund.

    With seven check writers and another seven investment professionals focused on growth-stage investments, Sapphire has had a number of recent wins, counting a total of 21 initial public offerings and 55 exits since the firm’s inception.

    “We’re excited to have now reached critical mass with $4 billion under management,” Marakovic said. “We are the right size to take advantage of our target area of early and later-stage enterprise software companies. We are innovating on the model by adding value-add LPs and trying to align our whole model of services to the target companies to serve them as best as possible.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SAP spinout Sapphire Ventures raises .4B for new investments

    Startups

    Can a wearable improve memory? Humm raises $2.6 million so consumers can find out

    December 18, 2019

    There’s an emerging body of research suggesting that electrical stimulation applied to the brain can help improve memory and cognitive function.

    A recent study conducted by researchers from Boston University this year found that 70-year-old participants in a clinical trial performed certain memory tasks as well as 20-year-olds after exposure to mild electrical neurostimulation. The results were published in April in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, and reported by Science Daily.

    Now Humm, a graduate of the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator program, has raised $2.6 million to commercialize its own product, which draws from years of research into the effects of electrical stimulation on the brain.

    The company actually conducted its own study with the University of California at Berkeley. Published earlier this year, the report said that of the 40 participants in the study who were given Humm’s wearable patches, all saw their performance on certain specific memory tests improve roughly 20% above the placebo or control group. It was an improvement approximately 120 times greater than the natural learning effect of the control group in the study, the company said.

    Simply put, the electrical stimulation boosts brainwaves and enhances what neuroscientists call working memory, which determines the amount of information a person can retain at one time. The patch sends out a small electric pulse that triggers neurons to resonate together at a similar frequency. By prompting more neurons to fire in concert, it primes more of the brain to process information.

    Humm is one of several startups that are developing neuro-stimulation wearables for all kinds of applications. Halo Neuroscience has a wearable for improving athletic performance; Kernel and Flow Neuroscience are examining the technology’s ability to treat depression; BrainCo is another company looking to improve learning through neurostimulation; while Neuros Medical is using the technology to treat chronic pain.

    According to the company, this seed financing will be used to scale production of the company’s first product, which was launched in August.

    “As software and biology continue to be on a collision course, new technology paradigms will emerge that will unleash creativity and empower scientists, clinicians and engineers to read, edit and write biology — including key human functions,” said Ciarán O’Leary, general partner at Blueyard Capital, which led the most recent investment into the company. “Humm’s technology improves the performance of the human mind and has the potential to expand healthspan for millions of people.”

    The initial market for the company’s products are middle-aged, middle-class consumers looking to learn a new skill or language, according to the company’s chief executive and co-founder, Iain McIntyre.

    “Using the patch is as easy as sticking on a band-aid — nothing bulky or awkward. In a 15-minute session, our clinical trial shows a 20% improvement in working memory capacity [against placebo] within the first three minutes of wearing a patch, that then lasts for more than an hour afterwards,” McIntyre said. “In our testing with hundreds of early access users this year we’ve seen people doing exciting things with that boost, like accelerating the speed they can learn a language or remembering more of what they read.”

    At $5 per-patch, the company’s pitch is that it costs about as much as a fancy cup of coffee, and has better results for stimulating productivity.

    Users just slap a Humm strip onto their forehead and leave it on for about 30 minutes. McIntyre recommends using the patch no more than twice a day.

    Early access for the device is currently closed (after the Air Force reportedly put in an order for 10,000 of the devices to trial them), but the company is setting up a waitlist for folks looking to try it out. The company expects its device to be commercially available by the third quarter of next year.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Can a wearable improve memory? Humm raises .6 million so consumers can find out

    Startups

    Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating with a safety screen

    December 18, 2019

    Make space for another dating app in your single life: Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating but with female-friendly guardrails in the form of a user-controlled video blur effect.

    The idea is pretty simple: Singles are matched randomly with another user who meets some basic criteria (age, location) for a three minute ‘ice breaker’ video call. The app suggests chat topics — like ‘pineapple on pizza, yay or nay’ — to get the conversation flowing. After this, each caller chooses whether or not to match — and if both match they can continue to chat via text.

    The twist is that the video call is the ‘first contact’ medium for determining whether it’s a match or not. The call also starts “100% blurred” — for obvious, ‘dick pic’ avoidance reasons.

    Blindlee says female users have control of the level of blur during the call — meaning they can elect to reduce it to 75%, 50%, 25% or nothing if they like what they’re (partially) seeing and hearing. Though their interlocutor also has to agree to the reduction so neither side can unilaterally rip the screen away.

    Dating apps continue to be a bright spot for experimental ideas, despite category giants like Tinder dominating with a much cloned swipe-to-match formula. Tech giant Facebook also now has its own designs on the space. But turns out there’s no fixed formula for finding love or chemistry.

    All the data in the world can’t necessarily help with that problem. So a tiny, bootstrapping startup like Blindlee could absolutely hit on something inspired that Tinder or Facebook hasn’t thought of (or else feels it can’t implement across a larger user-base).

    Co-founder Sacha Nasan also reckons there’s space for supplementary dating apps.

    “We’re focusing on blind dating which is a subset of dating so you can say that indirectly rather than directly we are competing with the big dating apps (Tinder etc). This is more niche and is definitely a new, untried concept to the dating world,” he argues. “However the good thing about dating apps is that they are not substitutes but complements.

    “Just like people may have installed Uber on their phone but also Hailo and Lyft, people have multiple datings app installed as well (to maximise their chances of finding a partner) and that is an advantage. Nonetheless we still think that we only indirectly compete with other dating apps.”

    Using a blur effect to preserve privacy is not in itself entirely a new idea. For example Muzmatch, a YC-backed dating app focused on matchmaking Muslims, offers a blur feature to users not wanting to put their profile photos out there for any other user to see.

    But Blindlee is targeting a more general dating demographic. Though Nasan says it does plan to expand matching filters, if/when it can grow its user-base, to include additional criteria such as religion.

    “The target is anyone above 18 (for legal reasons) and from the data we see most users are under 30,” he says. “So this covers university students to young professionals. On the spectrum of dating apps where ‘left’ would be hookups apps (like Tinder used to be) and ‘right’ would be relationship app (like Hinge), we position ourself more on the right side (a relationship app).”

    Blindlee is also using video as the chemistry-channeling medium to help users decide if they match or not.

    This is clever because it’s still a major challenge to know if you’ll click with an Internet stranger in real life with only a digitally mediated version of the person to go on. At least live on camera there’s only so much faking that can be done — well, unless the person is a professional actor or scammer.

    And while plunging into a full-bore videochat with a random might sound a bit much, a blurry teaser with conversation prompts looks fairly low risk.

    The target user for Blindlee is also likely to have grown up online and with smartphones and Internet video culture. A videocall should therefore be a pretty comfortable medium of expression for these singles.

    “The idea came from my experience in the app world (since the age of 14) combined with a situation where my cousin… went on a date from one of the dating apps where the man who showed up was about 15 years older. The man had used old pictures on his profile,” explains Nasan. “That’s just one story and there are plenty like these so I grew tired of the sometimes fake and superficial aspect of the online dating world. Together with my cousin’s brother [co-founder, Glenn Keller] we decided to develop Blindlee to make the process more transparent and safer but also fun.

    “Blindee makes for a fun three-minute blurred video experience with a random person matching your criteria. It’s kind of like a short, pre-date ice-breaker before you potentially match and decide to meet in real life. And we put control of the blur filter in the woman’s hand to make it safer for women (but also because if the men would have control they would straight away ask to unblur it — and we have tested this!).”

    The app is a free download for now but the plan is to move to a freemium model with a limit on the number of free video chats per day — charging a monthly subscription to unlock more than three daily calls.

    “This will be priced cheap around £3-4/month compared to usual dating premium subscription which cost £10+ a month,” he says. “We basically look at this income as a way of paying the server bills (as every minute of video costs us).”

    The London-based startup was founded in March and launched the app in October on iOS, adding an Android version earlier this month. Nasan says they’ve picked up around 5,000 registered users so far with only minimal marketing — such as dropping flyers on London university campuses.

    While they’re bootstrapping the launch he says they may look to take in angel funding “as we see growth picking up”.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating with a safety screen

    Startups

    Nigeria’s Rensource raises $20M to power African markets by solar

    December 18, 2019

    Nigerian startup Rensource Energy has raised a $20 million Series A round co-led by CRE Venture Capital and the Omidyar network.

    The renewable energy company builds and operates solar-powered micro-utilities that provide electricity to commercial community structures, such as open-air trading bazaars.

    Launched in 2016, the startup has shifted its operating strategy. “We’ve pivoted away from a residential focus…and we’re building much larger systems to become essentially the utility for these large urban markets we have a lot of in Nigeria,” Rensource co-founder Ademola Adesina told TechCrunch.

    The company has a partnership with German manufacturer BOS AG, with whom it designs specialized panels for it use case. Rensource also has developer teams in Nigeria and Europe for its software-related programs.

    In addition to becoming a micro-energy provider to Nigeria’s robust SME classes, the startup aims to offer them B2B services. With the $20 million round, Rensource is launching its Spaces Offline to Online platform for supply-chain services, including business-analytics and working capital options.

    “It’s a mini-ERP tool. We’re trying to bring a universe of people who are banked, but…still offline — their products are offline, they don’t track anything, and there’s no data behind their business — online,” said Adesina.

    The benefit Rensource seeks to deliver to Nigeria’s SMEs — at a profit for itself — is to lower overhead costs through better business practices and free them from the bane of generators.

    Across marketplaces in West Africa, noisy, fuel-guzzling and pollution-producing generators are like an unwelcome, yet necessary business partner.

    Lack of affordable and reliable electricity in Nigeria creates a massive real and opportunity cost to Africa’s largest economy.

    For perspective, the West African country is roughly the size of Texas, with a 200 million population larger than Russia, and generates less gigawatt hours of electricity annually than the U.S. state of Connecticut.

    Nigerian businesses (and citizens) adjust for these power deficiencies by spending on diesel fuel and generators.

    The IMF’s 2019 Nigeria report quoted economic losses of $29 billion in Nigeria due to unreliable electricity supply. On global Doing Business rankings, Nigeria ranked 169 out of 190 countries in the category of “Getting Electricity.”

    This difficulty and cost weighs particularly heavy on Nigeria (and the continent’s) SMEs, which often operate in Africa’s informal economy — projected to be one of the largest off-the grid commercial spaces in the world.

    Rensource’s micro-utility model deploys power clusters — made up of solar-panels, batteries and a power management system — adjacent to markets and commercial hubs. The energy application isn’t totally clean, as the startup still uses its own diesel backup system.

    Rensourse has used this model to become an off-grid energy provider in six states in Nigeria, and powers the Sabon Gari market — one of the country’s largest, located in northern Kano State.

    The company plans to expand to 100 markets within Nigeria and to additional African countries within 24 months, according to Adesina.

    Rensource generates revenue from charging merchants daily, weekly or monthly fees. “In 2017, we did a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Last year we did about $7 million in revenue, and this year we’ll do better than that,” Adesina said.

    The company doesn’t release official financials, but generated a small profit last year, according to Adesina. He named deploying more of its micro-utilities to new markets and diversifying services as the path to long-term profitability.

    Rensource differentiates itself from many home-kit solar energy startups in Africa, such as M-Kopa, by becoming a renewable energy utility at scale.

    The startup’s CEO sees the model as a classic leapfrog tech business, effectively bypassing Nigeria’s deficient electricity grid and providing a less capital intensive alternative to large (and often complicated) energy infrastructure projects.

    Rensource is also following a trend by some Nigeria-based startups, such as trucking-logistics company Kobo360 and motorcycle ride-hail company Gokada, to shape a suite of additional services around the needs of core clients.

    In Rensource’s case, those clients are SMEs and traders in the informal economy. “This informality of theirs is what we see as an opportunity in building this new business line and bringing these [merchants] into the online world,” said Adesina.

     


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Nigeria’s Rensource raises M to power African markets by solar

    Startups

    How startups close their first big sales

    December 17, 2019

    No matter what your startup sells or who you’re selling it to, companies that survive — and grow — need big customers and lots of them. But how do you land million-dollar deals with limited resources and no credibility?

    In more than 20 years of building companies and products, I’ve learned that in the grand scheme of the startup lifecycle, while you scale your way through growth to eventual sustainability and success, acquiring your first customer is relatively easy. Any good salesperson can sell a good product to the prospect of their choice. Hell, any mediocre salesperson, even when they’re hawking complete crap, can get lucky once. Your first customer is a great signal, but it’s just a signal, not a savior.

    What actually matters is what we learn from that first signal and all the signals that follow.

    Aggregate value to target prospects

    The process starts way before the first sales pitch. Your chances of closing your first big sale are going to be directly related to how well you’re targeting your prospective customers. So let’s begin with a discussion of aggregation and targeting.

    All product and service sales come down to usage and aggregated value. It doesn’t matter if your target customer is a consumer or a business. It makes no difference if your price point is dollars or thousands of dollars. It doesn’t matter if your transaction is completely frictionless or requires a six-month hand-hold by your sales team.

    If your customer is a consumer, they’re going to have limited usage with your product or service and the value needs to be tightly wound into that small usage window. If your customer is a business, they’re likely going to have multiple users and almost continuous usage of the product or service, so the value will be delivered over time.

    So a “lot of customers” for your product or service might be 100, or it might be a million. Either way, you’re offering the same value per dollar based on usage. You’re aggregating that value into the sale, so you need to be targeting those customer prospects with the highest expected usage.

    A classic rookie mistake made by most entrepreneurs is spraying and praying at large prospect audiences for the sake of their largeness alone, hoping that those shards of value surface for the right people at the right time.

    Don’t do that. Instead, for B2C sales, you’re going to need some intelligence about your prospect list, which means more than Facebook ad demographics — it’s being able to predict the usage based on the source of the prospect. For B2B sales, you need to determine the optimum type of business to sell into: their size, their industry, their appetite for innovation, and anything else you can use to narrow your focus.

    Figure out who is going to get the most aggregate value for their usage and target them.

    Targeting customer prospects based on value aggregation is not only going to increase the chances of closing, it’s also going to dictate the near future in terms of the growth of your startup. A targeted, good customer is going to make your life a lot easier. A random, poor customer is going to fill your world with complaints, support requests, change requests, feature requests, and ultimately severe changes to your product roadmap.

    Consolidate and find a champion

    When you’re a startup, your customers are buying innovation. The tricky thing is, no one needs innovation. Rather, they need the derivatives of that innovation  —  time, simplification, throughput, security.

    In order to close a big sale, in other words, the aggregation of many, many units of that usage and value, you’re going to have to consolidate that usage and find a champion of value on the customer side.

    So the question becomes: Who benefits the most from the derivatives of innovation brought about by maximizing the usage of your product or service?


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How startups close their first big sales

    Startups

    Daring Foods will offer healthy, tasty plant-based chicken

    December 17, 2019

    Anyone who wants to eat a meatless burger has plenty of options — but what if you want to be a little healthier?

    Daring Foods will soon be offering an alternative, in the form of plant-based chicken made from five non-genetically modified ingredients — water, soy, sunflower oil, salt and natural flavoring (a mix of paprika, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, cardamom).

    “We’re not here to be a gimmick, we’re here to be part of your life every day,” said Daring Foods co-founder and CEO Ross Mackay. “There’s a big need for plant-based food that’s actually healthy.”

    The company started selling the first version of its Daring Pieces product in the United Kingdom at the beginning of this year.

    Today, it announced that it has the backing of Rastelli Foods Group, a major U.S. food company supplying hotels, restaurants, retail markets and other commercial customers. In fact, Rastelli has committed $10 million to Daring, an investment that combines cash with infrastructure, sales and distribution support.

    With Rastelli’s backing, Daring plans to launch in the United States in February, selling directly to consumers through its website, and also to restaurants and retailers. It sounds like the startup is committed to the U.S. market, and is shifting its headquarters from Glasgow to New York.

    I had a chance to try Daring Pieces for myself, when Mackay cooked a light lunch for me earlier this month. He heated them on a pan with no extra seasoning, and they were ready in about eight minutes. He even encouraged me to eat it with my hands, to feel how Daring Pieces have the texture of real chicken.

    As a vegetarian, I’m not exactly an authority on chicken, but I thought it tasted pretty close to the real thing. I even brought another portion home and cooked them for dinner a couple nights later.

    Mackay is vegan himself, but he said his target audience is meat-eaters who are looking to a more plant-based diet. By focusing on chicken and white meat, he’s hoping to create what he calls a “second generation” of plant-based meat products — healthier than the first, and therefore a bigger part of everyday diets.

    Plus, with Daring Pieces you don’t feel like you’ve had a heavy meal, and you can be comfortable knowing that there aren’t a bunch of artificial ingredients.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Daring Foods will offer healthy, tasty plant-based chicken

    Startups

    Why CEOs should spend up to half their time recruiting

    December 17, 2019

    Hiring the right people may be the most important thing you do when you start a new company. But how much time should founders spend on hiring when there are so many other competing demands?

    Last week, we discussed team-building and several other issues during a panel on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt Berlin with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and Red Points CEO Laura Urquizu.

    “I was looking through early emails the other day,” said Prince . “I had forgotten how hard it was to hire people in the very beginning. I think that [Cloudflare co-founder] Michelle [Zatlyn] and I spent probably at least 70% of our time in the first two years just begging people to work for us.”

    While it’s a hard job to get right, Prince said he didn’t believe that this was a job he should have outsourced to recruiters. “Fundamentally, as the founder and leader of an organization, your job is to attract and retain the best best possible people,” Prince argued. “And so even to this day, at least a third of my time is spent on recruiting.”

    Red Points co-founder Urquizu agreed, noting that she also spends at least a third of her time on recruiting. But she also argued that as you grow as a company, your needs may change and you may need to let some people go.

    “I usually say that what brought us here is not going to bring us to the next stage — and that includes people,” she said. “It’s not pleasant and it is very hard when you have to say ‘bye’ to people that have been with you in the journey for two years, or for one year, or three years, but then you need to find the next people that are gonna come along with you in the next stage.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why CEOs should spend up to half their time recruiting

    Startups

    Extra Crunch members get free startup legal documents from Avodocs

    December 17, 2019

    We’re excited to announce a new community perk for Extra Crunch. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members located in the United States can get free access to Avodocs from AXDRAFT.

    Avodocs provides free legal documents for startups, including NDAs, privacy policies, founders’ agreements, employee onboarding documents, terms of service and more. Founders and startup teams often waste tons of time searching Google and asking friends for legal help. Avodocs provides the necessary documents for early-stage companies in minutes.    

    Avodocs is used by more than 4,000 startups, including alumni from Y Combinator, 500 Startups and Techstars. Users of Avodocs enjoy having documents ready for signature in less than 10 minutes, plain English description of the implications, a simple Q&A process for creating a document, the ease of editing and personalizing documents after download and the fact that Avodocs works on any device. Users of Avodocs also get access to extra content, such as a consulting agreement and advisory agreement, as well as document storage and DocuSign integration.

    Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features how-tos and interviews on company building, intelligence on the most disruptive opportunities for startups, an experience on TechCrunch.com that’s free of banner ads, discounts on TechCrunch events and several community perks like the one mentioned in this article. Our goal is to democratize information about startups, and we’d love to have you join our community.

    You can sign up for Extra Crunch here.

    After signing up for an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership (U.S. users only), you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to sign up for Avodocs. If you are already an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

    This is one of several community perks we’ve launched for Extra Crunch members. Other community perks include a 20% discount on TechCrunch events, 100,000 Brex rewards points upon credit card sign up and an opportunity to claim $1,000 in AWS credits. For a full list of community perks from partners, head here

    If there are other community perks you want to see us add, please let us know by emailing travis@techcrunch.com.

    To sign up or learn more about all the benefits of Extra Crunch, head here.

    Disclaimer:

    Documents on Avodocs were created for startups operating in the United States. Avodocs provides self-help services at customer’s specific direction. Avodocs is not a law firm or a substitute for an attorney or law firm.

    Communications between customer and Avodocs are protected by Avodocs Privacy Policy, but not by the attorney-client privilege. Avodocs does not provide any kind of advice, explanation, opinion, or recommendation about possible legal rights, remedies, defenses, options, selection of forms, or strategies.

    Access to Avodocs is subject to its Terms of Service. 

    This offer is provided as a partnership between TechCrunch and Avodocs, but it is in no way an endorsement from the TechCrunch editorial team. TechCrunch’s business operations remain separate to ensure editorial integrity. 


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Extra Crunch members get free startup legal documents from Avodocs