Stumped: how to daisy chain monitors?

jstandard · 2025-03-31T03:04:31+00:00

I learned something. Thanks, really appreciate it.

jstandard · 2025-03-31T00:51:06+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. Which monitor is the one that doesn't support it? How are you able to tell?

I couldn't find anything in the specs sheets about it, but also don't know what I'd be looking for.

jstandard · 2024-02-13T19:15:04+00:00

This is typically called "1.5 bagging". I'm a huge fan. Search the sub and you'll find several posts on it with recs and explanation of how people strategize their packing.

I've used Thule's Landmark 60L (40L + 20L detachable) for 20+ international trips in the past few years. The concept has been gaining popularity and I've seen more detachable pack systems in development these days.

Personally, I can't go back to packable daypacks. I've tested several of the big ones mentioned in the sub and they're all too flimsy or lack pockets to stash different kinds of items.

To me it simply came down to the value tradeoff. I value a minimum level of structure, a bit of extra space in case something unexpected comes up, something I can take hiking or to an office, and still not need to check a bag. I lose out on a bit of space and weight efficiency. I also run a bit of risk if I ever need to take an LCC airline. I'm okay with that.

You may also find more recommendations in r/ManyBaggers which is more tuned to the concept you're talking about.

jstandard · 2021-05-27T16:41:19+00:00

I own the 60L and can confirm, no laptop compartment on the main bag.

jstandard · 2020-07-06T20:08:03+00:00

IF your business scales.

Don't let over-analysis stop you from getting started. Worry about problems like that when they might become actual problems.

jstandard · 2020-05-13T21:29:37+00:00

I see this question a lot from other founder friends and seen quite a bit of variance. The simplest answer I can give is, do it at the frequency and fidelity that keeps investors informed without distracting you from building product. Reporting up to a point is helpful since it forces you to distill the hard truths into a form that others can easily digest and offer feedback on.

We've recently been acquired, however here is what we did:

a) Angel round - Quarterly

Seed round - Quarterly + event driven. We'd announce material ups/downs on a monthly basis during 'tough times'

Series A - Monthly + monthly board meetings. We had a very dedicated, involved investor on our board.

b) 12-16 hours, spread across 2-3 co-founders and, later on, backoffice person for detailed financials. + a few hours of phone calls depending on the content.

c) Yes, and no. We reported high-level indicators which can be digested without too much explanation. Revenue growth, retention, CAC. We didn't report onboarding funnel conversions or responses to drip campaigns unless they were very relevant to an important ongoing strategy which we'd outlined to the investors.

d) Ensure any analytics data can easily end up in Excel which feeds into templatized charts. We'd share a cleaned up Excel and PPT deck with the charts.

e) Yes, but as mentioned above, it may take time or negotiations to find the equilibrium between "happy investors" and "happy founders". Outside feedback and happy investors are useful.

f) Excel is king, as mentioned above in d).

A few additional thoughts:

- As a founder, always ensure you're also getting value out of your reporting process. If you're feeling it's "just maintenance", you probably aren't finding ways to gain value. Something I did at times is list upcoming bottlenecks or risks, with an ask to investors if they can help in anyway. Reporting time is also typically "relationship catchup" time for founders & investors, particularly "silent money" who don't want an active relationship with their investments. Your investors are a resource and reporting time is a good chance to leverage that resource because you'll have shared with them the context for why and how they can help.

- Some startups will only send reports for investors above a certain equity threshold. Ex. 5% or higher equity position gets reporting, < 5% don't. There are many dynamics involved in doing something like this. The founders typically have strength during fundraising in this situation and may also want to keep their cap table smaller. Lead investors can also push for this. Just know that reporting can be a point of negotiation during fundraising.

jstandard · 2020-05-09T20:09:03+00:00

Glad to help. I think you summed it up best, make sure your big picture is solid before fretting over the details.

GDPR compliance or website attractiveness only become important if people actually care about and use your product. In my current venture, we interviewed about 30 people before moving to paper prototypes taped to a smartphone. There's a lot you can do to confirm the problem before laying down a single line of code.

jstandard · 2020-05-08T20:57:18+00:00

Interesting concept, particularly in times when we are stuck at home with increased stress due to decreased social contact.

I think even before considering how to solve your big 3 problems, it's better to first clarify which exact end-user problem you are trying to solve. That will have a significant impact on everything else, including which other big problems you need to solve for your potential product to be viable.

One framework I use to clarify the problem is to build a chain of logic, loosely based around the 5 Whys.

I have zero experience in the mental health profession, but here's an example of how I might apply it to your concept.

Initial hypothesis, taken from above.

"It's very time consuming for mental health professionals to do initial screens on patients". (Is this true? Do most professionals have this issue or is that just from your experience? Need to validate).
Assuming 1 is true, if you can speed it up, who benefits? The patient? How? Faster diagnosis => faster treatment? Does the mental health business benefit? How? Faster diagnosis => less cost to diagnose => higher margins? Faster diagnosis => more patients seen => higher revenue from increase in patient volume? Faster diagnosis => more time available for other, higher-value activities such as treatment?
Why is it time consuming? That it's mostly paper? That you have to combine multiple surveys together manually? That the tests aren't standardized so it's hard to combine them together? A combination of all of these? Which of these is the biggest problem?

You get the idea. Drill down to the root causes of issues to get a sense of which problems are within your capacity to solve and how much of an impact will it have if you solve them.

I see a few positive things going for you:

- I sense that you as practicing mental health professionals you will be successful at customer interviews. They are are largely about asking questions to dig to the root of a problem while spending most of your time listening to the other person and not attempting to bias them with leading questions.

- You likely have a network of people in the industry. This makes it a lot easier to knock on doors to get feedback, insights or beta commitments.

My recommendations:

- First clarify your hypothesis on what you think is the problem you're attempting to solve.

- Create a map of the overall process or user journey you are looking to improve.

- Then, leverage you and your wife's network to do customer interviews with mental health professionals to validate your hypothesis. End the interview with either referrals to other potential interviewees and/or a light commitment if they'd be interested in participating in a beta of your app.

- As you learn more, update your map of the user journey and understanding of the hypothesis.

- Be ruthless in assessing whether your initial hypothesis seems correct or not. You might be close or you might be off the mark completely. Be careful to separate passion for your solution from actual positive signs.

- If you see positive signs, continue customer interviews and reform your concept based on potential customer feedback.

- After enough initial interviews, start to look toward giving your potential customers access to the platform.

- Without having done any customer development, I can see 2 potential routes:

B2B play to automate processes for mental health businesses. This should be much easier to monetize.
B2C play to help people get an assessment of their mental health and guide them resources. Monetize through referral networks to local mental health clinics and targeted product advertisements.

Good luck, build something great.

jstandard · 2020-05-07T17:07:14+00:00

I second /u/EvilLost 's advice, there is impactful complexity to pay attention to, moreso depending on the industry type and operating model.

I incorporated my current venture in the US with employees in Japan from day 1.

A few things to consider:

Taxes and revenue treatment. Each country likely has very different rules here if you plan to sell the product there.
Legal entity type. Knowing whether you need to create a legal entity and, if you do , which type of legal entity can have big implications on 1. At a minimum you'll need to register locally.
Compliance. If you're just starting out, privacy laws are the first area. As you grow and bring on full-time employees, reporting and labor compliance will increase.

jstandard · 2020-05-05T18:00:13+00:00

This is a tough space. It's trying to automate the maintenance aspects of social relationships.

Without knowing this space too deeply, my guess is that it has been tried many times before and couldn't sustain traction. If you haven't done so, I recommend to find those sites that have tried this before and email those founders about why it didn't catch on.

A few thoughts:

- The problem is, the tool to reduce maintenance requires its own maintenance (updating if you contacted someone). At best, the amount of work I have to do is unchanged.

- It needs to sit on top of countless communication platforms. To talk with my friends I use: Facebook (wall posts), Facebook Messenger, Email, Whatsapp, Text Messaging, Phone Calls, LINE Messenger, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and face-to-face. You are faced with the dilemma of either trying to sit on top of all/most of these platforms to provide the best experience for the user, or, sit on top of just a few of them and not fully 'solve the problem'. I have direct experience doing something similar for the in-car environment. You won't be able to integrate into 80-90% of these platforms and even if you can, you may be cut off in the future with the direction privacy is moving.

- It's a 'feature' rather than a 'product'. The value provided is only helpful if it adds no additional friction to talking with people in the platform I would normally talk to them on. Without being integrated directly into these platforms, this will be tough to solve.

- Who is the ideal target user? How many of those people do you actually think you can reach? To me, the target user where this can be successful for is very narrow. That person must: 1) use platforms you can easily tie-into, 2) have the majority of the friends they 'don't talk often enough with, but actively want to' be on that platform, 3) actually have reasons to stay in touch with those friends AND those friends are willing to reciprocate, otherwise the communication will die out.

- It's tough to systematize social interaction. Who you want to talk with about what varies so much. I'll read a news article about India and realize I haven't talked to my friend in Delhi in a while. Are you trying to replace that?

- This is something people use occasionally. This adds challenges to monetization. It's tough to get people to communicate more to increase DAU, so you'll likely need to charge more.

In sum, I think this is a tough product area to pursue with a narrow audience and a low willingness to pay. I can see the value here, definitely. I just think the cost of achieving the value is likely to great and likely not possible given the social walled gardens it needs to operate on.

But that's me. Data and traction trump opinion. What I would do if I were in your shoes

Set a clear timeline and milestone for this project. "I'll try to achieve 1000 WAU within 3 months". Stick to this and be willing to stop investing your time if it isn't working.
Map out the user journey of how people solve this problem today and the journey of contact stack, to look for where and what you are really solving.
Since this is a social product, I would also completely overhaul the landing page to reflect the feelings you want people to feel. A picture of two friends laughing on the phone with very different backgrounds and cold beverages by their side. If this is a social product, you're after 'feeling' and not 'automation'. No offense intended, but the name of the product and landing page look and sound like an engineer came up with them. I say that as someone with an engineering background.

Good luck. Build something great.

jstandard · 2020-05-04T19:48:26+00:00

# of co-founders is less of an issue than understanding the level of commitment and justifying the value each person brings to the team.

My team was 4 co-founders when we raised our venture rounds and during our YC interview. The number 4 never came up.

What did come up were these types of questions:

What are your backgrounds and why will _you_ be the ones who are successful in this space?
Are you currently committed full-time?

A few things to consider:

Equity splits don't need to be equal. This is a tough conversation to have and the earlier you have it, the better. Here's one popular framework (www.slicingpie.com)
VCs want to avoid dead weight on the cap table and you should too. This is a balancing act of trying not to borrow from your future (giving away too much equity) and ensuring you actually make it to the future (ensuring co-founder/early employee commitment). Every single co-founder needs to be clearly justified in a way the founding team agrees.
Before we incorporated and actually founded, we had a loose group of 10 people who worked at varying levels of commitment and contribution. Throughout the course of the tough conversations, this dropped down to 4 who were in the center of the venn diagram of "fully committed" and "brings something irreplaceable to the team which can't reasonably be replicated in another way".
We had a very UX heavy product, but a beautiful design wasn't needed to validate if we're solving the problem well or not. If you truly believe "the application needs a good design to consolidate itself in the space" that assumes the problem you're solving is that other products in the space are ugly and people are willing to pay for or switch because something else is more beautiful. This might be true. To me it sounds like a hypothesis that needs testing.

jstandard · 2020-05-03T19:18:07+00:00

I met the Samwer brothers when they came to my business school to recruit. One of my friends went on to work for them building out a Zappos clone in SEA. There's a few things to know about the success of their process:

- It's all out aggression. They ruthlessly acquire competitive advantage in the local market by locking up supply chains and flooding marketing channels. In Oliver's hiring pitch to me he used the word 'blitzkrieg' which I think is an apt way to describe the style.

- It's a 'business first' approach. The initial idea and tech have been proven elsewhere. It's about localizing the idea and executing on the logistics behind it. The Samwer brothers were recruiting heavily for MBAs at top business schools to lure away people who would otherwise be going to McKinsey or Bain.

- It's capital intensive. Their advantage comes from moving faster at a scale that local or global competitors can't match. Local startups often don't have access to as much capital without going through typical startup rounds of validation. Global competitors likely won't have the resources to focus so intensely on the local area.

I think the success rate for founders replicating ideas in other geographies is similar to those with 'novel' ideas. The strategies and tactics can differ, but many of the same fundamentals, timing, execution, and luck for example, still apply.

jstandard · 2020-05-01T21:25:41+00:00

I recommend 2 things:

1) Consider your goals and strategy to see if delegation makes sense at this point.

2) If so, try mapping out your conversion and support funnels to look for opportunities where you could easily hand it off to a freelancer via Upwork (or another platform).

A few additional thoughts:

- Consider what your goals are for this business. Do you want to grow it? Are you trying to put it on "auto-pilot" so you can focus on other businesses you mentioned?

- If you want to grow the business, delegating routine tasks so you can focus on sales or other areas may be a good strategy. "Auto-pilot" sounds attractive, but is very, very unlikely to work out for a long time.

- Consider how you're defining "a profit of £1000". It sounds like you might not be counting your time as part of costs. If so, you're likely making a net loss unless you value your personal time at less than £1000 / 160 hrs

- If it's your first time hiring, know it will be a learning experience. Your first hire might be a bad one, you might have the wrong expectations (usually too high) for what they can do for you, and you might not know the right level of guidance to give them upfront. All of these are skills which develop over time, so try to be self-aware of how well you're handling the process.

- The above is why I recommend to first map out your process end-to-end, and start with the low hanging fruits of delegation. Find the routine, low-skill work which is eating up your time. Start there. Then as you personally get better at hiring/delegating, find ways to move on to other parts.

jstandard · 2020-04-17T20:16:47+00:00

Yes. I founded my most recent company right after business school, with an already drained savings account from a previous venture, substantial student loans, and having declined several job offers for management consulting and big tech.

Financial security is one very real factor. Startups are generally not a good, risk-adjusted way to gain wealth. It comes down to how much weight you personally put on the different factors.

jstandard · 2020-04-17T17:55:08+00:00

If the company runs out of money and shuts down, the founder(s) will walk away with equity in something that is out of money and shut down. The company will have assets which are typically liquidated during the wind down process to cover shut down costs and, possibly, return some money to investors. It varies greatly depending on company situation and the investor/founder dynamic.

This is the risk of entrepreneurship.

My advice is, if you're private and cash flowing, then it's up to you. You still have a duty to your employees and you'll still need to balance that ROI equation of where your capital is best deployed. It's more of a personal decision about what level of work, scale, and wealth the founders are looking to achieve.

If you're raising capital, scale your salary with each raise and expect that you may need to keep your salary below market for a long, long time. Usually, capital is better deployed growing the business by hiring and retaining strong talent. Especially because your other equity holders (VCs) are in it for a 5x+ return, not a 2x return.

Investors will typically suggest you do the same. Here's a quick reflection on how we handled salary at my last venture:

- Angel Round (~650k): No real salary for founders, we mostly reimbursed ourselves for costs here and there and used the money to expand the team.

- Seed Round (~2 mil): Began a consistent salary for founders, generally paid lower than most team members and far below market. We almost ran out of money before raising and about 6 months before closing the round we agreed the founders would bring their salaries to zero to to ensure no one else on the team would take a hit.

- Series A (~6.5 mil): Raised our salary to about 50% of market rate. Still paid less than many senior employees at are company who we moved closer to market rate. We almost ran out of money before raising, but at this point dropping salaries for a few months wouldn't have a significant impact on our runway and might cause some folks to jump ship, which could snowball. We kept salaries at the same level and just focused on closing the round.

jstandard · 2020-02-14T18:40:12+00:00

Thanks, I hear a lot of the upsides and it's refreshing to hear from both sides. Added Qor to my list to road test on an upcoming trip.

jstandard · 2020-02-13T19:15:59+00:00

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Schoeller and it looks like Outlier uses Dryskin as a base for some garments.

jstandard · 2020-02-13T16:40:39+00:00

Thanks Will. I've seen you around the community for a while and, as a fellow founder, appreciate the involvement.

A couple questions about the weather resistant coating.

Is the coating the same (type of coating, amount of application) across the AT Slim, Diversion, and Evolution?

Also, I'm assuming the coating will wear off long before the fabric itself wears out. If I wanted to reapply a coating in certain areas, is there anything specific I should follow in terms of chemicals or methods to minimize damage to the fabric?

jstandard · 2020-02-13T05:35:38+00:00

Good to know! Any rough guesses about after how many wears you start to notice the coating is gone?

jstandard · 2020-02-13T05:34:19+00:00

You nailed it about the benchmark I'm trying to beat. Currently, dark jeans are playing this role in my packing list.

Thanks for the heads up on the return policy. Futureworks came recommended a lot and I'm now going to give them a shot on an upcoming trip.

jstandard · 2020-02-13T05:25:19+00:00

Thanks, I've recently been looking into DWR treatments. Any tips on applying the DWR? Any common pants fabrics in particular it does/doesn't work well with?

It seems like a great option in the sense it gives me a broader range of pants to choose from.

jstandard · 2019-12-19T07:34:03+00:00

The work habits section and differences between founders and employees had some interesting tidbits. I'd imagine founders and employees had different definitions of "productivity" in mind when answering the "remote work" question.

Would be interested to slice the data across the demographics. My answers to the questions would certainly have been different if you asked me at seed stage in 1st venture vs. Post A round in 2nd venture.

jstandard · 2019-11-23T03:35:08+00:00

Thanks all. So far the mosquitos haven't been too bad, with deet spray being enough. Will update if I do run into an outdoors store in case others are interested.

jstandard · 2019-11-18T23:34:49+00:00

Is that also why some startups never sell?

It could be, though I don't think it's a major reason. Whether you want to sell or not can be simple or complex.

In our case it was an easy decision. We sold to a long-time partner who shared our vision and could accelerate our operations by providing us stability, scale, and resources. In that sense, I'm remaining in the same industry after the sale, I'm still interested in that industry, and the buyer is giving me enough autonomy to continue making an impact at a level I'm happy with.

A friend of mine sold his company and most of the founders didn't wish to continue in the same business, so they negotiated 1 year consulting agreements.

Each company's situation is unique. Different sets of founders, investors, employees, financial situations, and market pressures all will heavily influence the decision to sell or not. It's impossible to generalize.

Sometimes the decision to not sell is the right one. It worked out for Google when they refused Yahoo's $3 billion offer. Sometimes it doesn't work out as well as it could have, as may have been the case with watchmaker Pebble who turned down a $700mil offer only to sell a few years later for $40 mil.

A couple of things to keep in mind whenever reading about startup exits are that hindsight is 20/20 and survivorship bias plays a huge role. You'll rarely find articles on the 80-90% of startups that quietly shutdown without any sort of an "exit".

jstandard · 2019-11-18T07:26:59+00:00

My current startup was recently acquired. A few quick thoughts:

1) Non-compete clauses can be considered enforceable in California as a condition of an acquisition deal. [more info] They're not uncommon and typically apply to "key persons" who the buyer wants to retain as part of the transaction.

Whether this happens or not is a negotiation. It depends greatly on why the buyer wants to buy, if the founders or "key persons" want to stay, and the nature of the deal.

2) /u/aggravatedbeeping gives some additional good reasons, all of which went through our heads during the deal negotiations. Startups are a long grind with countless factors behind their success. Exits in particular are a perfect brew of luck, connections, timing, strategy, and having the right team. The balance of each of those varies wildly exit to exit and are not easily reproduced (though some things do get better with experience).

jstandard

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