You can’t even imagine how lazy I was to do the monthly report for my investors in my old startup Coguan every month. Quondos is an independent company. The only partners for the last 3 years are Alex and I. startup financePhoto rights by Fotolia There is no one to report to. This is both good and bad. Good because it frees up your time for more fun things. Bad because you always run the risk of neglecting a fundamental aspect of startups : finances . The fact that you have to report means that you have the numbers under control at all times. I am currently implementing this type of control in Quondos’ most important projects. These are basic figures that the manager of an e-commerce site has to report to me. Traffic metrics : page views and unique users. Catalog : new products, removed products and total products. Sales : products sold, gross margin, net margin Expenses : cost of promotions, staff, shipping costs, etc. At the project level, this data may be sufficient. At the company level, you would be missing a key piece of data, which would be the cash flow . If you are interested in knowing what I would put in an Excel spreadsheet to make a basic business plan for an online store, take a look at this post . Having a startup mentality with an investor helps you to be more disciplined. Your life depends on having your finances under control. It’s not a matter of having an obligation. You want to know how you’re doing at all times so you can navigate your ship.Imagine you organize a spectacular, free event, but no one comes. Although organizing a day may seem easy, it is not so easy when it comes to promoting the event. event attendancePhoto rights by Fotolia There are hundreds or even thousands of companies that organize events but few are really good at the promotion part (and very few do the marketing). This is where you come in. Instead of doing what many people already do (organizing events), you fill them yourself . You would therefore offer a “filler” service. You could even create a pay-per-attendant model. The best thing is that you can combine it with two other ideas that I already gave you in the past. You could also hire tweeters to spread the word about the event on Twitter. Then, if you need to fill in the gaps because it always gives a bad image if you organize an event and then nobody comes, they can even hire students to fill in the gaps. I have seriously considered this idea in the past. The good thing is that with Facebook Ads it is relatively easy to fill any event by segmenting it towards the interested audience. I may offer it soon on Beguerrilla.es as another service. I will tell you about it
