Victoria Ransom

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• What do think about outside CEO's? We currently have 10% equity unallocated and are deciding whether to give it to an outside CEO or divide it amongst members of the team. Thoughts?

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    It really depends on the dynamics of the current team: do you have someone already on the team who would make a great CEO? Is there somebody on the outside who you have identified as exactly the right CEO for your company? The thing about the equity is that while its unallocated now, you could divide it amongst members of your team, and if at some point in the future you DO find the perfect CEO on the outside, the team can dilute their equity a bit to come up with shares for the new CEO. It’s not necessarily a this-or-that situation right now, considering that you can always consider diluting existing shares.

• How do you ensure that operational performance is maintained as you start to grow?

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    As early as possible, put someone into the business who is responsible for implementing measurability, scalability, and technology. Have a good measurement system, where you can track whether you are doing well or not.

    The types of metrics you could track depend on the area of business. If you want to know whether you are doing well or not in sales, you could look at the per person sales productivity. If it’s client services, track how many clients per rep and customer satisfaction levels. If it’s recruiting, track the average time between someone sending you a resume and getting a response. Across the whole company, track whether margins and efficiency are going up or down.

• when building a functional online prototype...typically howmany features from the final product should be in the prototype?

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    Your functional online prototype should really be your minimum viable product (MVP). How few features can you get away with including to ensure you have released an MVP that, once used by customers, will allow you to test iterations and optimize for success? What does your engineering team (or technical co-founder) think is the least amount of features that your prototype can employ where the value of your product still shines through? Ultimately the most important take away is that once you do release the MVP, it’s important to focus on testing its success with customers, gathering feedback for improvement, and quickly releasing an updated prototype, coming closer to being “final.”

• Should I expect a new partner to buy equity, earn it via sweat equity, or a hybrid?

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    It’s hard to know because the specifics of your situation can vary so much. However, if this person is to be your co-founder, its unusual to make them buy equity. It’s probably more conventional then to consider sweat equity.

• How can you specifically use social media channels to get and sign up customers?

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    Social media can be a great tool to generate new leads for your marketing database and nurture those leads into paying customers. There are many best practices for how to do this in an efficient and successful way, too many to fit into the space here! However, we have previously published a blog post that is well suited to answer your question.

    Check it out here: http://blog.wildfireapp.com/2010/05/18/5-tips-to-turn-your-facebook-fans-into-paying-customers/

• Once Tim Ferries mentioned he makes sure the entrepreneurs he invests in has a safety net if the business goes bad. What do you think are back up plans an entrepreneur can have just in case this venture goes wrong? MBA ? etc

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    You should have either good enough work experience or education that you believe you can get a job quickly, as that would be the primary back up plan. For some that will mean an MBA, for others a deep expertise about an area that businesses find valuable and are willing to paying for.

• We are a 6 months old start up and we haven't launched officially, but due to the origin of the founders (South & Central America), we have received some offers to expand to some countries through personal contacts. Knowing we are not profitable yet, How can we know the right time to take those opportunities?

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    It’s hard to know without knowing what your business is. At Wildfire, we initially got really excited about partnerships early on. The excitement stemmed from thinking we wanted to be in all these regions at once, as quickly as possible. However, this quickly turned into more effort and time spent working out details of such partnerships without having spent time building out the core business itself. What we learned is that you shouldn’t bet on partnerships early on, but should instead bet on building your business yourself. Once you have a successful business on solid ground, then you’re ready to think about expansion and partnership.

• Did you raise seed capital to start your business?

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    Our initial capital came as a result of us winning the Facebook Fund. We were one of five companies to be awarded a $250K grant after a long selection process which included a written application, a video application, interviews and building a prototype. So we were fortunate in that this capital enabled us to build a product and get to profitability without needing to go to investors.

• What should I ask for and what should I be looking for in a technical co-founder?

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    Besides the obvious thing to look for – someone that has a strong technical background – I’d look for someone that is a good manager, and that can help you recruit. Recruiting will be one of your biggest challenges, so if the co-founder has a good network of developer and engineers, that is invaluable. Look for someone who can scale, because if they are good for the business when it’s a small company, and you give them 50% of the equity, but a year later you’ve outgrown them, then you’re going to have real business issues.

• How have you scaled your sales efforts? What did you do originally to get your first few clients and then how have you grown to be more efficient and get more and more new clients onboard?

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    In the very beginning, our first clients resulted from outreach I did into the networks I belonged to. For example, our very first customers were found through the Harvard Business School (HBS) database, and were people working in companies that were relevant to the space Wildfire was in. Scaling sales efforts has meant hiring early sales employees who had their own large networks. At Wildfire we benefited from the fact that our initial sales hires had large networks of contacts who had been in sales; this was critical to our early hiring efforts.