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The Co-Founder Equity Script for Two Students Still in School

The conversation about how to split equity between two founders is one of the more consequential conversations of the early startup years, and it is one of the ones most often postponed until the postponement itself becomes the problem. Two students building together will often work for months without ever formally agreeing on how ownership of the company will be divided, and by the time they finally have the conversation they have already accumulated enough asymmetries betwe

How to Hire Your First Person When You Cannot Really Pay Them Yet

The most important shift in mindset is to stop thinking of the first hire as an employee and start thinking of them as someone who is joining a venture, since the person you can attract without much money is almost never the same kind of person who would take a paid role at a bigger company. Their motivation for joining you is different, and if you understand what that motivation actually is you can structure an arrangement that works for both of you.

Building Systems Before You Think You Need Them

There is a predictable moment in the life of an early company, usually somewhere between the twelfth and the eighteenth month, when the work that had been running smoothly on the founder memory begins to slip out of reach. Magnific.com Customer requests get answered late or not at all, important conversations are forgotten because no one wrote them down, decisions are made twice because the original decision was never recorded, and the founder, who had felt in control of the

Turning an Instagram DM into a First Sale, with the Actual Script

Most Nigerian student founders will sell something for the first time in a DM before they ever build anything resembling a proper checkout flow, and the DM sale is the honest beginning of most small businesses whether or not the founder ever admits it. The trouble is that the pattern for turning an Instagram DM into a sale is rarely written down anywhere, which means every founder has to figure it out for themselves, and most figure it out by making the same avoidable mistak

Launch

3 min read

The 10-Person WhatsApp Test That Beats a Landing Page

The most common piece of advice a new founder receives is to build a landing page and start collecting emails, and while the advice is not wrong, it is often applied at the wrong stage of the founder journey, which produces a landing page full of email addresses from people who never intended to actually pay for anything. The test I want to describe is much simpler, and it produces information that is more honest than any email signup list can offer, since it forces you to ha

Launch

6 min read

Launching While Still in School Without Burning Out

Founders who launch their companies while still in school usually arrive at the launch in one of two states. Magnific.com The first state is rested, intentional, and ready to handle whatever comes next, and this state is rare. The second state is tired, overcommitted, and quietly worried that they will not survive the next semester, and this state is much more common, because most students who launch a company while in school have spent the months leading up to the launch car

Launch

5 min read

A card with a lightbulb cut being held up by a man in the middl of a city

Why Your First Idea Is Probably a Feature, Not a Company

Magnific.com A pattern that shows up in almost every student pitch competition is the founder who has thought carefully about a single moment in a user day, has designed a clever solution for that moment, and is now pitching the solution as the company itself. The solution is often genuinely good, the team has clearly done real work, and the audience nods along because the problem is recognizable. The trouble is that the thing being pitched is almost always a feature inside a

Ideate

5 min read

Pricing Your First Version When You Have No Idea What to Charge

Pricing is one of the parts of an early startup that founders avoid for the longest, partly because the question feels uncomfortable to think about and partly because the available advice is so contradictory that it is easier to not decide than to risk being wrong. Some sources tell you to charge nothing in the early days, some tell you to charge from the first user, some tell you to follow your competitors, and some tell you to ignore competitors entirely. Magnific.com The r

Launch

5 min read

The First Hire Most Student Founders Get Wrong

The first hire a founder makes is one of the few decisions in a startup that compounds across years, because the person who joins early shapes the culture, the work ethic, and the rhythm of the company in ways that are hard to redirect later. Student founders, in particular, tend to get the first hire wrong, because the way student life is organized makes the wrong hire feel obvious and the right hire feel impossible, and so the company often ends up with the warm and familia

Launch

4 min read

A founder presenting her minimum viable product to the team

What Minimum Really Means in Minimum Viable Product

Almost every student founder I have met has spent too long on their first version, showing up with three months of work, a polished interface, and a long list of features, only to ask why no one is using it, and the honest answer is usually that they built a product before they had a question, which means the version they shipped was not minimum at all but only an early one. The phrase minimum viable product has lost most of its meaning over time, because founders use it to d

Launch

5 min read