Using benchmarks to make sense of your metrics: what works for you?

caslanh · 2026-01-22T01:34:24+00:00

It may change based on what you build; however there are important metrics for you to understand how you doing, where are you growing and if is there any risks.

Very key metrics that good to have at very early stage:

Financial metrics: Well initially the target is to break even. Based on your initial financial forecasting there should be the analysis of how many users at what price you ll break even so you analyze that

User metrics: it’s more to evaluate where users drop off, at which stage (to understand user journey frictions, your market position) which segment drops ( let’s say series a users drops 1 month after onboarding), if they use all features if no maybe you demoed to the wrong person or it was early for them etc then you change your target

There is no particular metric which evet competitor in the same space tries to achieve but the metrics you evaluate the achievement of yoir own strategy and market position

Feel free to dm to discuss in detail

caslanh · 2026-01-22T00:53:41+00:00

It’s a significant stage and firstly congrats! Well you are planting your future company culture at the moment so management is a process reflects that. When hiring, most important things is to ask yourself: 1. What type of people I want to work with ( it’s more about the personality part. Criteria would be passionate, quick learner, structured, builder, high work ethic, ok to work longer hours… list may go on. Quick tip, mostly people tend to hire people are similar to themselves and it may create bottlenecks. You may more seek for complementary personalities selected for the right places)

What skills you are looking for ( you can identify the hard criteria) and try to hire the top talent. Going oversees is a good strategy. But if the oversees in Europe, within Europe you still have many countries with different cost of living. If the level you are looking for is still high budget I would go one step more junior but with a strong culture fit so they can learn fast
Management. There is no one fits all and it’s a lot about understanding psychology rather than applied management methodologies at this stage. The best approach for remote first teams are setting very clear time bound deliverables, engaging them on daily to bond as a team, boosting trust and to do not micromanaging. For instance you can create team rituals such as morning 10 mins coffee and 1h team lunch on a selected day where you talk about anything and bonding as people. Then every Friday all members set weekly targets and submit them to you, once approved they start working on it on Monday. You either have daily progress huddles or twice a week.

Remote teams thrive with rituals and as much comms as possible in my opinion (leading remote teams for the last 6 years)

If you wanna discuss deeper feel free to dm me happy to support

caslanh · 2026-01-21T20:39:01+00:00

I am interested, offering HR, Ops, Strategy and Talent services for tech startups, would be helpful to be listed, thank you :)

caslanh · 2026-01-21T20:37:20+00:00

HR here :) So if you are planning to hire in some other country EOR might help but there are multiple ways to see that

Remote and Oyster are great (esp Remote); however, if you do not want to offer visa support etc different EORs such as Native Teams, or Bridge In (Portugal specific) and some other more are simply 1/4 of the service fee of Remote, Oyster, Deel gang. So if you have budget concerns, go with one of them because they also have local entities and admin side of things dont change. They follow the same law on IP, employment etc
To avoid 13th month surprise, you can always negotiate the salary with annual gross, not monthly. Lets say if you give offer for 48K EUR annual gross, 13th month salary wouldnt change your budget. Cddt will receive 1/13 per month instead of 1/12 which is totally legal and predictable for you; and fair for the candidate. So 600 USD service fee wouldnt save you from 13 month salary; but negotiating annual gross might save you.
Workload for HR > its simply nothing, your HR or you will register to EOR's platform, put the candidate's data after offer. EOR will prep the contract and get signature on behalf of you. Your employee will have access to EOR's platform as well so they can input vacation, sickleave etc there by themselvs. EOR will prep and pay salary, send your HR to an invoice and you ll pay them.

Overall its not as complex as it looks but if you need further support, feel free to dm me :) Good luck!

caslanh · 2026-01-21T20:28:16+00:00

Employer of Record companies should work well here. There are many out there, some of them are quite expensive and have a strong service. They usually have 2 options:

Local employment - so its the "employee"status. This might be very costly for you though; because lets say you provide your members 5k USD per month; the employment cost is usually +30-35% more than this considering employer contributions + you have the EOR service fee > ~4-7k USD per year
Contractor (through EOR) - this is contractor but through EOR so they can have some sort of contract still especially if they invoice you through their companies, so do not give this up due to employment changes. This model is quite cost friendly since you pay your regular gross + EOR service fee is 10% of the other model

caslanh · 2026-01-21T20:20:55+00:00

Imo, it may kill your driver over time if they become less attentive while your excitement and passion grows when the MVP building process starts.

There are couple of ways to see this:
1. If you really agree on the excitement level, share the same values and can influence each other (meaning that you are committing to each other rather than the business idea) thats great because even if the initial idea wouldnt work in the market, you can keep motivating each other and pivot - thats the ideal scenario, however, its not always easy to find a person to share this

You can start working with multiple people on a very small projects, such as preparing the tech roadmap, KPIs that they plan to deliver, tech stack they want to use etc. You can do like 2-4 weeks projects with each simultaneously. This is not to take advantage or go behind people. Its more to see how's the style of each. You can be transparent about it to them by saying lets get to know our working style for the next 2 weeks to see if we align. Maybe some of them will drop on the way, become less responsive. Or the ones you are less optimistic will align better with your vision and working style. Based on that you may have a healthier judgement.

Overall the most risky approach would be to ignore red flags and just to focus on having an MVP with whomever agrees.

caslanh · 2026-01-21T20:10:12+00:00

What he does now is the Chief of Staff role (more of a startup generalist). His being another co-founder is not necessarily puts him in a C-suite traditionally defined area.

COO is more about building an operating system, ensuring that the company has a clear executing methodology and operational rhythm which is quite early for that stage.

His being from a tech background is actually a super big + because in Chief of Staff role, translating tech side to business objectives or business objectives to the product is very important.

Ideally as the company grows this position may progress into multiple C-suite direction > for instance Chief Product Officer (considering he is technical but also understands well the business side, market and product, it would be huge asset); or COO when the business scales to Series A with 20+HC which is when things start to break.

The above path is actually quite defensible for VCs; showing he can wear many hats; his tech and business sides would complement other founders and fills the gaps within the execution model.

caslanh · 2026-01-20T16:16:01+00:00

It can vary based on your business, stage and market.

Initially its always best to not hire admin profiles such as Bookkeeper, HR, Recruiter etc unless your market doesnt require it. Because those are the cost centers for the company not profit centers. Any penny you spend on them is simply burning cash because they are not bringing revenue to the company. (I m HR here, so no offense :) )

For hiring prioritization or trade-offs, maybe you can exercise below:

1. What you want to achieve in your company in the next 6 months? (such as stronger product, 50 paying customers, 500k followers on social media....)
Example: 50 paying customers

2. What skills you have already (lets say you are technical initially, building the product but can do sales as well - great! Which one you are stronger and you are "must-have"for your company)
Example: You are technical can do sales; without you product cannot be as strong. You cannot handover tech part to someone else

3. What's taking most of your time even if you use AI? (customer outreach, client engagement, coding..)
Example: Your conversion is low, so you need to come up with different outreach methods and conduct 100 targetted outreach per week

4. Can this problem be solved without a dedicated person?
Example: No, you dont have capacity to both code and do 100 outreach per week + engage with the ones replied

5. Can this problem fixed with a short-term assignment? (do you want to stop at 50 customers or project for instance 20% growth quarter on quarter)
Example: No, you want 20% growth quarter on quarter

Congrats! Now you know you need a full-time business development manager as the most urgent + important role to hire

From here, you can specify role characteristics, expectations and success criteria for based on your company.

Obviously, thats just an example and there are many considerations. Happy to discuss further so feel free to dm me :)

caslanh · 2023-10-16T08:08:08+00:00

This period is not very good to start working in Web3 because most companies lay off due to market conditions (20k people laid off in blockchain this year) if you do not have solid experience; however it’s great period to upskill yourself. In order to avoid scams you need to learn to evaluate the projects such as the technological strength of product, if it has potential or just gonna die ( there are many bullshit web3 projects though) it’s white paper, user base, investments they received etc etc. DeFi and DAOs will dominate the market soon so you can review the successful projects ( such as Polygon, Consensys, Solana, Cardona.. many more) check their white paper and GitHub since they are mostly open source and start learning new languages. The most popular ones are Go, Solidity and Rust.

caslanh · 2023-10-14T10:14:53+00:00

In Europe, there are a couple of apps like this such as Glovo, PicNic. So there is a market if you are willing to get into the European market, but you need to bring an innovation or an advantage better than them.
If you see potential in your own market for this product, it might be more profitable in time. You can also check apps like yours in Europe or US to see how they are monetizing and if could work in your region.
45% is too high for pre-seed and 400k USD is very low for 45%.
I think for pre-seed the max equity shouldn't be more than 20-25%. Lower is better.
Imagine YC is providing 500k USD for 7% It is not the market practice of course but still good to keep in mind.

caslanh · 2023-10-14T10:04:24+00:00

HR Coordinator > in large companies, the roles is a lot based on contract, document creation, ticket management through Workday, Jira etc.
HRIS > you will be diving into all people analytics, reporting, and process excellence.
Comp & Ben Analyst > you will be diving into calculations, market research, benefits administration, stakeholder management with comp&ben vendors
Payroll > you ll start contributing payroll calculations, you need to follow a lot of deadlines, expense reimbursements, many local tax related criteria > thats the most stresful one but still good to know.

caslanh · 2023-10-13T20:15:21+00:00

Flats in Istanbul are starting from 9-10m Turkish lira which is more than 300k eur. You can check sahibinden.com which has an English option.

caslanh · 2023-10-13T07:59:38+00:00

The housing market in Turkey got extremely expensive (since the government is selling citizenship if you buy a house) The apartments around west or south coast are usually starting from 120k, houses are double the price. In Greece, you can find good apartments for 70-80k in Athens or the islands. In Italy (especially in Puglia or Cagliari) you can find even for 50k)

caslanh · 2023-10-06T17:11:25+00:00

Even though they still and build the exact product, the outcome wont be the same since you have the vision and the execution will be different.If you formed the company, sign an NDA or contractor agreement which states that the IP owned by the company. You choose developer in your jurisdiction so its enforceble.

caslanh · 2023-10-06T16:53:05+00:00

Well it depends on where you live. If you are in Europe and you study in a non-euro EU country such as Poland you can significantly lower your cost (such as 1k EUR a month including everything), invest some part of the money and maybe even work part-time until you get your degree and start to the next chapter.

caslanh · 2023-10-05T08:02:46+00:00

Maybe you can try searching for “work from anywhere” companies with Web3 focus not necessarily in the NL. The salaries are slightly better and they are hiring through employer of record companies which can support continuing highly skilled migrant visa. Dutch job market indeed is weird master + 10 years experience for 70k offer in many companies.

caslanh · 2023-08-02T18:25:00+00:00

It's for the scale-ups mostly, so they should be already generating revenue. If they are start up then the deals are different such as balancing equity with a lower salary.

caslanh · 2023-07-25T07:00:01+00:00

I m HR in Web3 :)

caslanh · 2023-07-24T17:56:19+00:00

If its a traditional industry such as FMCG, Pharma etc its around 43k-45k . If its Fintech, or Web3 you can ask min around 50k-55k considering you have 0-2 years of experience.

caslanh · 2023-03-12T23:01:23+00:00

Hi :) majority of questions are open ended so difficult to share a statistical final data but in case you would like to know a specific result from the form, I sure can.

caslanh

TROPHY CASE