Tuesday, June 15, 2010

We’re thrilled to announce that we recently completed our seed round of financing. Getting this funding involved developing a detailed business plan and pitching the company to investors. In addition to describing our mission and product, it was important that the business plan include a detailed budget for the year, five years of revenue and expense projections and details about our founding team and the types of individuals we’ll need to hire. We ultimately received multiple offers from angel investors.

This funding will primarily enable us to grow our team and to further develop our product to make it more social and interactive. Once the beta site is up very soon, we will eagerly solicit user feedback so we can invest our funds to build out exactly what our readers want. We are now both working on ChickRx full time and can’t wait to see what everyone thinks!

Sunday, May 30, 2010

We’re very excited to launch our beta site soon. We’re currently doing final edits on our content and tweaking the UI. We are also pleased to announce that our business plan made the semi finals in the Harvard Business School business plan contest.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with talented and patient professionals, such as our graphic artist, developer and lawyer. In working with them, we’ve realized how much launching a startup is actually like caring for your health. When you go to the doctor, they know how to treat what’s wrong (hopefully!) and what to look out for. But unless they have all the time in the world to devote to you, there may be some issues to which they just don’t pay much attention. It’s up to you to take ownership over your health and be on top of everything you need to ask or tell your doctor.

Similarly, we’ve discovered how much work on our end actually goes into working with freelancers and outside vendors. It’s up to you to take ownership over your product, make sure you ask all the right questions and get into the weeds to thoroughly review their work and suggest changes. If you care, you can’t just pass off the work and expect everything to be right - you really have to dig into the details.

We never expected launching a website to be a mini education in web design, programming, and law, but we’re proud of all the energy we’ve poured into our passion and grateful for what we’ve learned. We know we’ve barely scratched the surface and are excited to keep learning more.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Recently a lot of friends have been asking us about business plans.  We just finished ours and thought we’d share some tips.

1. Find a template - there are some good, industry-specific ones on bplan.com.
2. Your team - why are you the right people to pull this off? also, it’s okay if you don’t have all the people you need - just be clear about the hires you still need to make. Think about the timelines of who you’ll need when and communicate this via your financial projections too
3. Financial projections - find some comps so your assumptions will be as educated/justifiable as possible. As you’re putting them together figure out which line items really move the needle. Revisit your monetization strategy and really think hard about this
4. Risks - don’t turn a blind eye to what your risks are (i.e. low barriers to entry?). Address them and discuss how you’ll deal with them

Turning away from execution to write your plan can seem like a distraction, but we found it to be an extremely valuable opportunity to really clarify what we would offer and how we’d grow a successful business.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

On Twitter of course! Here are the people we think entrepreneurs must follow:

Venture Hacks: http://twitter.com/venturehacks
NYC Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson: http://twitter.com/fredwilson
Entrepreneur and Investor Chris Dixon: http://twitter.com/cdixon
HBS Prof Noam Wasserman: http://twitter.com/noamwass
HBS Prof Tom Eisenmann: http://twitter.com/teisenmann
Stanford Prof Tina Seelig: http://twitter.com/TSeelig

Almost all of them have blogs as well, but we like to go on Twitter and get a little celeb gossip mixed into our stream of professional advice too. We hope you find their insights helpful.

Monday, February 01, 2010

As co-founders of a site about young women’s health, we have a lot to choose from. But our favorite dirty word is…. networking.

Sometimes the N word gets a bad rap, but networking isn’t just about schmoozing and BS. When you meet someone important, figure out a sincere question with which you can follow up. If you’re wracking your brain for too long, don’t waste that person’s time.

But just as important to networking is the seemingly non-important people. Some of our best milestones have materialized because of friends our age.

We’ve kept in touch with a friend who worked at 85broads.com back when we were interns. She’s the one who told us about the New Media Women competition!

A close friend is a creative writer who put us in touch with her literary agent. ChickRx coming to Barnes & Noble and the Kindle soon! (Not really, but one day we’ll be able to say that.)

Lunch to Launch, an NYC networking group for female entrepreneurs, led us to an amazing web designer.

A friend from an undergraduate club invited us to speak at NY Social Media Week.

Starting a new venture can monopolize your attention. But don’t forget to keep in good touch with your friends and keep expanding your social circle. It’ll keep you happy and sane, and maybe even help advance your business.

Friday, January 22, 2010

As a follow up to our last post on advisors, we wanted to speak about the most valuable advisors we’ve found thus far. It wasn’t the entrepreneur with the ridiculously over-valued exit, the corporate rockstar, or the seasoned investor.  These types of people all have great advice, and advice that will become increasingly important as ChickRx turns into a revenue-generating business. But let’s be honest… we needed advisors whom we could ask the dumb questions. And for any first-time entrepreneur, there will be plenty.

We were lucky to have a few friends around our age who had successfully started their own companies or invested in startups through their jobs. For all our basic questions, they had been there and done that pretty recently. They provided not only informed opinions, but also time. The people with the fanciest positions aren’t going to sit on the phone for over an hour teaching you Startups 101. So our advice is to think about who knows their stuff and already likes you enough to lend some real help. And if you don’t already know someone like that, time to start networking (the topic of our next post!)

PS Huge thanks to Trip Adler of Scribd, Scott Harper of Charity Fusion, and Alex Rubalcava of Rubalcava Capital Management.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

As we’re getting ready to launch, one thing that’s been on our minds is our Board of Advisors. Through classes at HBS, events in NYC, and friends’ connections, we’ve been able to meet many highly accomplished individuals who would be great advisors to ChickRx. Many have been kind enough to offer advice over the phone, but at what point should we try to formalize the relationship? The entrepreneurs, angel investors, and corporate leaders with whom we’ve spoken are very busy individuals, and isn’t asking them for access to continuous advice a little presumptuous?

The standard advice we’ve gotten is to make someone a formal advisor after they show a real interest in you. So in other words, you shouldn’t even have to ask; they should be excited enough by what you’re doing to want to stay involved. And what about offering them equity? We’ve been advised to be careful about throwing around minimal equity stakes in exchange for continued advice. When an advisor is truly excited about your company, they’ll want to put their money where their mouth is. We’re sure there are appropriate exceptions, but this is the general approach we plan to follow.