Runway

Everyone's always looking for that secret sauce for growth. Sometimes it's best to just look at what's been successful in the past and double down on that.

At Runway, we messed up BIG TIME for one of our customers at the start of the summer. The customer was a referral from a family friend too 😬 😬 😬 Here's what happened and here's what I learned: We've had a lot of trouble with our automated payroll system. As a result, we sometimes have to manually process weekly invoices for the projects our student talent is working on with businesses. For this customer I didn't make it clear that our payroll system is finicky and essentially in beta. I tried to hide the fact that this part of our product sucks and thought they wouldn't care if I manually processed things behind the scenes. They didn't like that... Lessons Learned: → Lack in transparency is a turn off → It's best to set expectations with your customers BEFORE you onboard them To make matters worse, the students that the business picked for the projects didn't understand how our website worked. It was their first time using it and they didn't understand that Runway is technically the employer and processes payroll, timesheet, taxes, etc. As a result of the confusion they asked the business multiple times where to submit their hours, how they will get paid, etc. This put stress on the business because we're supposed to have all that handled for them. They didn't like that... Lessons Learned: → Need to make it insanely obvious how your website/product works → BEFORE you onboard a customer, reach out to them individually to make sure they don't have any questions So what ended up happening with this engagement? The lack in transparency and the confusion resulted in a terrible customer experience. The business didn't want any part of it. So we had to basically do a buy out and the business then worked with the students off of our platform. We got our revenue but it felt like we cheated that customer to be honest. I felt bad. Most importantly, they may not use us again when they want to hire a student and may not refer us to their friends. — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for daily stories from my journey.

Per data from Carta - on average a company gives up about 20% equity for a seed funding round. The pre-seed funding round has become very popular now as well and companies are giving up about 10-20% equity for those. To my knowledge that magic number for investors to do a series A round is about $1-2M in ARR (has probably gone up now in recent years). IMO you don't even know how big your company can be until you've grinded it out and gotten to $1M in annual sales. So what's my point here? During the slug it out phase of going $0-1M you are learning SO MUCH about your business and market. So the point is this: → Why are you giving up almost 40% equity of your business when you don't even know what you have yet??? → Your sales and marketing playbooks are changing every day so you're likely wasting a lot of the funding on non profitable CA channels → You're likely spending money and TIME building product features that customers don't care about → You're probably doing strategies based on what your investors tell you to do instead of your own creativity and intuition Don't get me wrong, getting capital likely makes it easier to get from $0-1M but the margins are slimmer than you think. Only about 1% of startups become successful businesses. Only about 10% of VC backed startups become successful businesses. So if you are an early stage founder and considering getting VC funding, the question you need to ask yourself is: is that 9% difference worth giving up AT LEAST 40% of my business??? — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for daily stories from my journey.

Hiring unqualified interns wastes time and resources. At Runway, we thoroughly vet every applicant to ensure they're ready to excel from day one. Don’t spend weeks training—hire with confidence. Join Runway today! #universityrecruiting #entryleveltalent #universityrelations

As disappointing as that rejection email is, it’s at least better than no communication at all. — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for daily stories from my journey.

It was weird running a business with solid traction and parlaying that with a corporate job that was paying me bi-weekly. Financially it was like bread and butter. I got paid, got to live a good lifestyle, had plenty of free time to work on the business, and didn’t have to worry about the business making me money / could invest profits into the business. Sounds like a lot of pro’s! Yet, I don’t think it put us in the best position to make the company as successful as it could be… I’m full time on Runway now and it’s made a big difference. I’m more persistent and try to get more revenue because I HAVE TO. I don’t have a pay check coming every two weeks… My decision making has changed and the business has taken significant leaps as a result. If you have a side hustle and have a personal financial runway of 3-6 months you should consider going ALL IN on your side hustle. You’d be surprised about the doors that open for you and your business when you do. — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for daily stories from my journey. #entrepreneurship #sidehustle #founderstories #startups

If your team is stretched too thin and has one person conquering several different roles, you should consider hiring a university student to do some fractional work for you. Why? → They're hard-working and want to make an impact → They're eager to learn and highly motivated → They bring next gen perspectives that you might not think of — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for daily stories from my journey.

When you are trying to get your first customers it's actually better to think like a college dropout then to think like a ex-McKinsey & Company & ex-Harvard Business School alumni. Don't try methods to acquire customers at scale. Get scrappy and only focus on getting one customer whether that is by going door to door, passing out flyers at a conference, or even cold calling all of your parents' friends. — I’m Ford Coleman, a founder. Follow me for weekly stories from my journey.

If you or your team is stretched too thin it may make sense to bring in some entry level talent to lighten their load. Every team or employee has those work activities that they hate doing that an intern or analyst could knock out... At Runway, we have a database of eager applicants ready to tackle entry-level tasks. Don’t waste valuable resources on simple work; contract smart, young talent instead. #entryleveltalent #workforcesolutions #talentoptimization

If you're already looking to hire an intern or entry level professional, here's why Runway is a no brainer platform to use: → Runway finds you vetted candidates, helps schedule interviews, manages interns payroll, and does their taxes for ZERO fees. → If you want to pay $20/hr for an intern, you pay exactly that and NO more through our platform. Our fee comes out of the students' paycheck. We handle literally everything so all you have to do is get the work done. Check out our site at www.joinrunway.io