Claim OwnershipFounder's Journey Unplugged
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Description
Bastian and Markus are experienced startup builders and founders of Flinn.ai. They candidly talk about their challenges, learnings, and experience while building the company from the ground up.
18 Episodes
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The most important factor in building a successful business is the team, and it all starts with the founders. In this episode, we talk about how we have formed our team of founders and what we have learned of this journey.
Identifying your business idea to build your company upon is a massive challenge. In this episode, we will elaborate on our process of discovery and validation of several ideas and how we ended up with one of them.
We are a product led company, this means we validate ideas and critical assumptions with experiments and research. In this episode, we explain how we have tested, validated and researched our ideal customer profile (ICP).
In this episode, we share our experience with using 𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 (𝐋𝐎𝐈𝐬) 💌 in our own startup, Flinn Comply. Tune in to hear how we used this experimentation method to test the waters and gain confidence in our business idea before moving forward.
In this episode, we share our learnings about raising our pre-seed funding round of 1.8m for our Startup Flinn Comply. This episode focuses on the steps until you get one or many term sheets, while the next episode will go deep into detailed terms and the phase from term sheet to signature. Thus, we tackle the following questions in this episode:What is a pre-seed funding round?What do you need to raise such a round successfully? What valuation can I expect? What mistake shoul...
In the previous episode, we reflected on how we got from a pitch to a term sheet to raise our 1.8m pre-seed round for our Startup Flinn Comply. In this episode, we describe our learnings around signing a pre-seed venture capital funding round after receiving a term sheet. We talk about questions such as:What is a term sheet, and what should I pay attention to?What are essential terms I should know about and consider when negotiating my funding round?How do I structure my cap table?How can I e...
For (early-stage) startups, it can be challenging to offer very attractive compensation when only looking at the salary. However, Employee Stock Option Programs (ESOP) can be a great opportunity to make your offers way more attractive and enable you to incentivize your employees like real entrepreneurs. Thus, in this episode we will discuss questions like: When should I set up an ESOP?How many percent of the companies' shares should we allocate to the ESOP?What are important legal terms ...
"A players hire A players, B players higher C players". We strongly believe in this saying and that our employees are the key to our success. Next to our team of 3 co-founders, we have brought 5 founding team members on board within 3 months of closing our funding round. In this episode, we discuss our experiences about building our early-stage team. We will address questions like: How can you attract talent being a no-name?How to manage the hiring funnel when there are no st...
At Flinn, we strongly believe in empowering smart people, to act like entrepreneurs rather than employees. To scale such an approach, you need a strong foundation of values and principles. In this episode, we are how we are building a culture driven by values and principles from day one on. We will address questions like:What is the difference between values and principles?How did we come up with our values, and how do we involve the team to develop them further?How do we make them actio...
This episode is about balancing the long-term vision of a company vs. the go-to-market focus (the first version of your product). Often overlooked, this balance is crucial for founders. Some emphasize their visionary goals, yet stumble in generating short-term traction. Others hyper-focus on early steps, losing sight of the broader picture. We will elaborate in this podcast on:Why this balance is critical and why it matters a lot.How do we, at Flinn Comply, try to balance this trade-off...
Setting clear, meaningful goals is among the most important priorities for founders. In this episode, we explore how we use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Flinn Comply and what we have learned about OKRs over the past 8 years.What you'll learn: 1️⃣ OKRs' Importance: Align your vision and mission with your OKRs. 2️⃣ Simplicity and Iteration: Start simple with one OKR. Refine as you learn. 3️⃣ Transparency: OKRs foster employee involvement and clarity. 4️⃣ Setting P...
Advisors have been extremely helpful since the beginning of our journey.They’ve helped us with strategic aspects, valuable customer introductions, feedback on the product itself and understanding of the industry, … and we wouldn’t be where we are without the advisors we’ve had the chance to work with. Join us in this podcast episode where we explore how we got our advisors at Flinn Comply, what are the positive outcomes we’ve got, what types of advisors you can get to help your company ...
As a founder, you're often inundated with a myriad of urgent tasks, making it challenging to prioritize the truly critical ones. One highly effective approach to ease the load during the early stages is bringing on board an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). This dynamic individual can serve as your invaluable partner, working closely with you for a few months, and potentially evolving into a pivotal role within your company, growing alongside it. What you'll learn: 1️⃣ What is ...
We strongly believe in having a well-structured software development approach early on. In this episode, our tech-co-founder Hasib has joined us, and we are sharing our software development best practices at Flinn.ai and learnings from our last 10 years in agile development. What you’ll learn: 1️⃣ Why to start introducing a well-structured agile methodology early on. 2️⃣ How to choose the right framework - Kanban vs. Scrum. 3️⃣ Adapting processes for remote teams. 4️⃣...
In this episode, we are looking back on 2023, a year of growth, challenges, and evolution at Flinn.ai, all through a deeply personal lens. What we share: 1️⃣ The main challenges of 2023 around fundraising, sales, product, and team building 2️⃣ Personal highlights and lowlights of the year, including our biggest surprises. 3️⃣Setting and achieving bold goals. How we outlined our objectives for 2023, how they changed over time, the strategies that helped us meet them.&...
In this episode, we explore the depths of usability research and testing, aiming to enhance your customers' experience with your product.We'll discuss pivotal questions such as:What are the various types of user research available?When is it most beneficial to conduct usability testing?What are the best practices for executing usability tests effectively?Which common mistakes should you steer clear of?How can you ensure the insights from usability testing are effectively applied?
My co-founder Bastian has raised over 20 million in public funding in his career and with our early-stage statup we have raised 2 million a few months after starting our venture. In this episode, we share our learning about leveraging public funding. We will address topics like: The complexities and different types of public funding How to think about using agencies to support youPractical tips on how to navigate the application process and the documentation after you rec...
In this episode, we are looking into how to connect your product roadmap to your vision and goals, and how to approach roadmapping as an early-stage startup. We will talk about:How to get sales and product aligned behind the roadmapWhy it is import to distinguish between your roadmap and your backlogWhat it means to balance predictability and adaptability and why this mattersBest practise around prioritization and roadmapping toolsIf you want to read more about this topic, then check out...
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