SUS2019 YC创业课 给硬科技创业者的建议
技术风险-原理验证
市场风险-预售、购买意向
What is a hard-tech company?
- It will take a lot of time and money to build the first product
- It may or may not be possible to build it
Market Risk: Do people want it?
Technical Risk: Can we make it?
Why start a hard-tech company?
In many ways, it's easier to start a hard company than an easy company.
How do you make progress when you have a heavy MVP?
Do things that don't cost money
• Assemble a team of top advisors
• Build computer simulations
• Build a plastic model
• Show customer demand
• This beaker proved the concept
How do you prove people will want your product, if you haven't built it yet?
Pre-sales
Ideally, you sell your product before you build it.
LOI: Letter of Intent
Non-binding contract to buy your product when it's ready.
Good LOI's Include:
•How many units they will buy
•The price they will pay
•When they will buy
•What specs your product needs to achieve
LOI is actually a kind of very clever construct, because it's not binding. It doesn't actually commit the customer to buy, but because it looks like a contract, customers take it really seriously.
Most hard tech companies will not be able to bootstrap.
Fundraising for Hard-Tech and Biotech companies
The key thing here is that for each of these fund raises, you want to have specific milestones that you hit.
The way to accomplish incredibly ambitious things is to break them into very small steps
