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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

CAC, LTV, and the Metrics Worth Tracking Before You Have Money

The metrics that show up most often in startup writing are usually designed for companies that have enough scale to produce reliable numbers, with hundreds of customers, defined channels, and stable retention curves. Magnific.com The metrics are useful at that stage, but they are often unhelpful or actively misleading for founders in the first year of building, when the numbers are too small to be statistically meaningful and the channels are too erratic to support any kind o

Terminologies

5 min read

What Product Market Fit Really Mean

Few phrases in startup writing are used as often or as imprecisely as product market fit, which sits somewhere between a milestone, a feeling, and a marketing claim depending on who is using it. Founders describe themselves as having found product market fit on the basis of strong early sales, while investors describe the same companies as still searching for it, and somewhere in the middle the term has lost the sharpness that made it useful in the first place. The aim of thi

Terminologies

5 min read