🤔 Whadda you wanna know?
Our new "Ask Envision" series and resources on marketing, hiring, and fundraising
Hey Envision Family 🧡
We are so pumped to kick off Envision’s fifth cohort. Our new group of founders are building in industries spanning web3, fintech, SaaS, and more and we can’t wait to share more details – stay tuned!
What’s New
We are opening up our community as a medium to answer your questions on company-building. Starting with this edition of the newsletter, we are giving founders in our audience the opportunity to ask the Envision Community a specific question on some aspect of building a startup. Got a question on hiring, fundraising, go-to-market strategy, or anything else? Check out our Founder Qs section 😉 and submit your question below.
Gives - resources & opportunities from our community
Marketing: Ready to invest resources into marketing to bring your company to the next level?
Check out Outsourcing with Love for copywriters who write with more personality & punch.
Avoid these common mistakes when making your first marketing hire.
Fundraising: Are you a student founder fundraising? Pitch Rough Draft Ventures for $100k on a SAFE. Apply here.
Hiring: Olivia Moore recently tweeted about putting together a solid job posting. Check it out here.
Contrary Capital put together some resources for founders. Check out the Contrary Founder Starter Kit.
✨NEW✨: Ask Envision
Founder Q #1:Making the Ask in an Investor Meeting
“How do I effectively run meetings with potential investors if the meeting seems to be going well? How do I approach asking for another meeting? Is it appropriate to ask what check size they write in the first meeting?”
Answer from our community:
“100% ask the check size in the first meeting! Make a whole list of questions that you ask investors in the first meetings. Treat funder meetings like customer discovery interviews. In my experience, they take you more seriously for it.”
“If the meeting is going well, I would just straight up ask “from what I’m hearing it seems like we’re a good fit for each other. Would it make sense to meet again to explore this opportunity further?” and schedule the meeting right then and there.”
Founder Q #2:Making the first product hire
“Do you have any resources or thoughts on making your first product hire? When does it make sense to do that in an early-stage start-up?”
Answer from our community:
“I’d personally avoid hiring first product hire until having solid signals on product-market fit. The reason for this is added communication costs that undermine pivoting fast pre-PMF*. If you need to delegate some product work, I’d hire for a Senior Software Engineer who’s product-minded.”
“A product-minded designer is also great. Because lots of product work pre-PMF* is hypothesis-driven, this requires the ‘PM’ to think more on the founder-level about the most important hypotheses to de-risk (rather than features to add in a big tech company). That being said, the hire likely needs to be a unique combination of great engineering/design skills + have a founder mindset (be fast to learn or groom).”
“It’s definitely case-by-case, but when you find yourself spreading thin (from handing literally everything as a founder) and you feel as if your product’s growth is stifled (i.e: features aren’t being implemented or roadmapped), that’s when it’d be optimal to hire your founding product manager. You want to concurrently increase ease of use without jeopardizing fundamental functionality. Falling toward the latter will decrease conversion rate and, in turn, hurt ya pockets.”
(*PMF = product-market-fit. You can read more about the concept and what it looks like here.)
Got more questions about company-building?
Envision Updates/Announcements
We welcomed a new batch of diverse founders to the Envision family this week. Over the course of 10 weeks, our founders will go through a set of highly curated workshops, AMAs, office hours, and individualized support for founders in every step of their journey. Stay tuned for our announcement post!
We welcomed three new members onto the Envision Team to help us increase our impacts in democratizing and diversifying entrepreneurship. Get to know them!
William Abrefa - Head of Growth & Content
Grace Nguyen - Head of Community
Jennifer Zhang - Head of Infrastructure
Asks – because it takes a village.
Send us questions you want to be answered!
We’re growing our mentorship network! If you’re an investor, operator, or founder looking to support Envision companies with your time 👉 fill out our Mentor Interest Form!
Looking to partner with us as an ally organization, sponsor, or resource partner? Shoot us an e-mail at e-team@envisionaccelerator.com
Keep up with us on Twitter 🐥: twitter.com/envisionaccel
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Shoutout to Fidelity Labs for supporting Envision! Their mission is to inspire better futures and deliver better outcomes to the customers they serve - helping more than 40 million people invest in their own life savings.
Here’s a recent company from their labs’ incubator, Saifr!
Thank you to Gust Launch as well - they help founders incorporate their companies in less than 2 minutes and provide support all throughout the entrepreneurship journey. Get set up with them here!