Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Are you paying yourselves salaries? Do you have an actual office? Benefits? etc? I would suggest that you not get ahead of yourself with "making it big" and instead focus on making it a solid business. Get to the point where you're paying yourselves and everyone who works for you a market rate salary and benefits, and you have office space, and you're cash balance is growing. Basically this is the classic definition of being 'profitable' (you have net income). Then hire a CFO.

The CFO will help you organize your thoughts around how much money you make and need to make in order to maintain a level of profitability. Then take your net revenue and feed it back into the business, pick up your next campus. Work on the process for organizing a campus, what you need to know who you need to contact. You will be able to start hiring sales people. These people should be paid based on advertising sales delivered, not 'leads generated'.

Once you've got your next campus, quickly post mortem what went well and what didn't. Then move on to the next one.

As you add campuses your revenue stream will increase and you will be able to add additional engineers to help integrating the data. Every million dollars a year in revenue shines more light on what works and what doesn't in your business.

Have fun, enjoy the experience of all the things you are learning, (even the bad things teach something).

No salaries, no office. My two cofounders and I have been throwing everything we've got into this; we're all broke.

Our business model requires people actively maintaining property listings at each school, and then growing student traffic at that school and then, once we're established, securing advertisement deals.

Our rationale behind raising funding is that we can either cut corners and struggle and keep adding one or two schools a month until it's simply impossible for three people to maintain, or, with a little bit of money behind us to do our own advertising, have someone making cold-calls to collect properties, and have a student representative on the actual campus helping us brand locally, we can streamline the process and achieve the kind of wide-spread adoption we need in order to secure large advertising deals (right now we target our placements toward local businesses, but once we are established we'll be able to secure deals from places like banks or office supply retailers).

How are you currently finding ad deals at other schools? Have you thought about affiliate style sales? You promise a cut to affiliate members of those ads to the member that brings in the ads. Maybe too much overhead tracking all of that, though.

Well that helps clarify the question considerably.

   > No salaries, no office. My two cofounders and I have 
   > been throwing everything we've got into this; we're 
   > all broke

To put it nicely, "So what?" (I know that sounds cruel but trust me it isn't) What you have is a bit of traction, you don't actually have a business yet and as such its probably too early for any but the most inexperienced of investors to invest in you.

You know you need more than the three of you, but lets focus on one school for the moment.

You need a "listings manager", a "sales person", a "student rep" for a school. Lets say your "unloaded" salary pool is $100,000/year (that is salary but not benefits cost[1]). You'll need revenue from advertising at that school to exceed $100,000 annually. Since you're just proving this out you three can presumably "play the role" of the three people you would hire here to do this. So you need a minimum of $8,500 per month in advertising revenue. You should target double that or $17,000.

Once you have one campus working, where it is paying more than enough for your three "campus specific employees" then you can start to think about investment to go further. An investor is going to ask you questions about "What does it cost per campus? what can you make per campus? What are the limits on that?" you will need to have really good answers to those questions which you don't currently have.

[1] This is a 'swag' or scientific-wild-assed-guess on an number, I based in a student working part time during the year getting about $10K/year (1000 hrs @$10/hr) A sales person being paid mostly on commission ($30K/year + 10% commission for $10K out of the advertising sales, and your listings manager making $50K a year straight up) You should adjust those numbers based on your own experience/insight

Haha don't worry about the harshness--comments like yours are why I posted here.

The point I wanted to make with needing to hire people is that it becomes more cost-effective to have one "listings manager" maintaining 35 schools (we've budgeted for four "listings managers" total, once we're fully operational at the 150 campuses--the job mostly a lot of calling), and one sales person handling multiple schools, etc. The more schools we've onboarded, the more effective our HR spending is going to be.

We've calculated revenue per campus as well as cost per school/cost per student/revenue per student and all that, it's just not something we're really comfortable discussing publicly (if you want, feel free to shoot me an email at sean-at-universityniche.com).

Ok, that makes it easier and harder.

Start here: "We've calculated revenue per campus as well as cost per school/cost per student/revenue per student and all that..."

There are some businesses where the economics get better with scale (search advertising for example) and some where scale doesn't have nearly the same level of impact (a lot of service businesses, grocery stores, etc) Yours would seem to be more of the latter.

As much as they dislike the characterization, many sales people are coin operated, specifically the profession attracts people who like an easy to use 'scoring' system for how good they are, and sales is great for that since the score is built into the job. Since you feel like a listings manager can handle 35 schools, and there is three of you, why don't two of you start in the role of 'listings manager' and the third hire a sales person and focus on getting student "reps" signed up. Plug into the student financial aid department, they love having part time work opportunities with flexible hours for students. The sales person is going to want to be "hands on" and talk to people directly. Ideally the person you hire here is going to eventually be your VP of sales and will train other sales people, so consider making a deal of equity for work early on.

Challenge yourself to take the people you have, add exactly one sales person, and make enough money to pay everyone salaries. If you can't do that, with 35 schools then you don't have a business yet. Don't be afraid to fire your sales person if they don't deliver. I isn't anything personal it's just a fit thing, either they can sell your product or they can't, either the product can be sold or it can't. If getting advertisers is "easy" then your sales guy will be very productive, make themselves and you a lot of money. Also don't be too surprised if you can't work a very large territory with a single sales person. Getting people to part with their money is an art and it takes skill just like writing code does, respect that.

Always keep in mind the 'big plans' and so when you make decisions make sure they don't cut off future plans (for example don't sign off advertising rights to a third party for the rest of the world or something) but get the core of the business running and tuned, then take it to the next level.

There was a HN post the other day about another startup that provides proven sales people on the ground as a service. You don't have to pay them full time, it's like odesk but for sales people.

Right, that's exactly what Chuck is advising you to not do. You have your sights set on the stars; "How do we land big advertising deals", "How do we spread to lots of different campuses fast". Chuck is advising you make sure you can walk before you try to run :)

To throw in my 2c, you shouldn't have to land the huge advertising deals and spread to fifty campuses just to make enough money to pay the three of you guys. If you require a nationwide presence just to make enough money to pay three salaries, the business doesn't work. But it doesn't sound like that is the case, so it should be doable to reach a level of income where you can pay yourselves without expanding too much yet. Then grow.

Now that you're established at a couple of schools, I wouldn't look for local 'establishment' everywhere you plan to expand to.

I would map out 4-5 new areas for your business to expand to -- if possible, try and optimize for expected ad revenue (ie., ease of getting advertisers on board) and student base, housing availability, etc.

Then target businesses in those areas, emphasizing you are already highly successful in other areas and will be launching locally soon. Get some testimonials from your current advertisers to help convince new ones.

In short, get ads on the site (=> money in the bank) before you have accommodation listed. Launch new areas with a 'coming soon' page. Build up a buzz amongst students about your product. Register sign-ups to gague interest, and use these to attract advertisers and landlords ("Hey, look, we have 400 signed-up students, just waiting for us to launch here!"). Make people impatient for it. Then deliver the platform.

Rinse and repeat, as quickly as you can (but not so quickly you'll run out of money, or fail to deliver).

Offload as much work as possible onto your users. If you're currently curating or creating property listings, get landlords/estate agents to advertise their own properties instead. Show them how Niche will be a one-stop shop for the majority of students looking for accommodation.

Once even 1-2 estate agents in an area have tenants who 'found' them through Niche, you'll have enough credibility that business will come to you instead of you having to chase it. Encourage this local credibility to snowball nationally as you spread out further, through testimonials, blog posts, social media, well-timed interviews with local newspapers, etc.

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