Team Startasprout

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 between them that a...

There is a version of the small startup that thinks it needs to buy a proper CRM, a proper project management tool, a proper customer support system, and a proper analytics platform in order to feel legitimate. There is another version, which is often the more successful one at the early stage, that runs most of the business out of a single Google Sheet for the first six months. The second version is not less serious than the first, it is just clearer about what actually matters at this...

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 mistakes over and over....