20 years ago, I created the Danish gaming site Daily Rush with @mwittrock – inside a startup accelerator called Prey4, complete with fantastical projections of world domination 😂 – but now it's the end, after the proprietor of many years died in 2018.

Let's talk about defining a price for one-time payment products.

When I saw that @gumroad supported Pay What You Want, I had no doubt that this would be the pricing strategy for CSS Scan.

I'd always recommend PWYW with a minimum price instead of a fixed pricing. Why? [...]

It turns out that some people just value your product more than others!

👉 With PWYW you're not only receiving the value that you expected but also donations for a good work.

Plus, with a minimum price, you'll at least earn the same amount you were supposed to if it was fixed.

💡 You only need 1 person paying more to already make it worth.

It's not easy, though. CSS Scan started at $1.99. It was selling like water, so I raised the price to $2.99, and after that, $3.99 - in about 3 days.

❗️ What I didn't expect was that 30% of people were paying more!

I realized that the price could still be higher by looking at the average of the sales prices. E.g., when it was $3.99, the average price of it was actually at $4.69!

I left it at $3.99 for 3 months. Based on the $4.69 average, 1 week ago I decided to raise it again to $4.99.

🧐 Now let's look at the data!

📈 Previous conversion rate: 6,5%
📉 Current conversion rate: 5,7%

It received 1403 views this month. Doing math:
(1403*6,5%)*3,99 = $363
(1403*5,7%)*4,99 = $399

🤔 So there's actually a growth in revenue
⬆️ $363 to $399
🎉 +$36 or +10% per month

1/ Someone emailed me asking how to break into VC, so I wanted to answer on Twitter where others could see and contribute to the conversation.

2/ “Being a VC” can mean a lot of different things, so it’s worth asking:

What actual activities do you want to do?

- Deep market analysis?
- Be in the flow of information and people?
- Make deals?
- Work closely w/ founders over time (e.g take board seats?)
- Manage capital?

3/ It’s worth specifying what type of VC you might like to become — as there are different archetypes. E.g.

- Benchmark (Lead series A/B - couple investments a year)
- First Round (Lead seed rounds, partner w/ a few companies a year)
- SV Angel (Make lots of seed investments)

4/ Continued:

Expa - Incubate companies

YC / Village Global - Build a platform to help entrepreneurs at scale

Do you want to join a firm or start one? There’s a lot to consider.

Different paths will require different skillsets & sets of experiences.

5/ Since the person who wrote the email is a young person trying to break into VC by joining a firm (and who doesn’t want to start a company), I’ll tailor this tweet storm to that goal. There’s some overlap.

Today I want to talk about the legal aspects of startups. How to set up? How to think about legal costs?

Fun!

Read on >>

1) Lawyers are expensive -- oof! A startup lawyer can cost you $300-$1k per HOUR! An associate paralegal may be slightly cheaper. But still pricey.

What do you need from a lawyer?

-company setup costs
-doc creation and review for financing rounds
-exit negotiation

2) For the purpose of this thread, we're just going to focus on setup costs, because this is where I see the most mistakes.

Once you get going, you may quickly realize you need a better lawyer - hah - and that generally helps w/ solving for financing rounds and exits

3) If you want to potentially raise money from VCs, you'll want to set up as a Delaware C Corp. If you don't ever want to raise from VCs, an LLC is fine.

Lots of ppl start out as an LLC because you can get tax benefits if you are not profitable.

4) But to me, if you know you want to raise VC money, it feels a bit penny wise / pound foolish, because you will need to spend $$ to convert your LLC to a Delaware C corp.

Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.