Using Advisors To Support Growth
Hello! A practical suggestion for growing your startup, be it with beta users, or onboarding more and more clients, is to utilize customer-centric advisors. If you can find advisors that come from the industry or have strong connectivity to your client base then you have struck gold.
Advisors don't need to be name brand either. Find a random industry person who is senior enough to be respected and looking for something exciting to support (your company!). Align some economic interests if you can and let the work begin!
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Good idea. Do you offer a equity option to the advisors? If so, how much % do you offer them usually? I think it's quite complicated to decide, especially for bootstrapped startups, where there might not be a huge valuation in the future.
Typically yes. The average range is usually between 0.25-0.75% but it can be more dependent on a) stage of the company b) demands on advisor and c) utility. The last is the most important.
If you bring someone on for general advice vs. someone who specifically helps you connect with thousands of customers, well you can imagine you probably need to incentivize them a bit more!
Interesting. Mind sharing an example of how your advisors have helped your business grow? I'm curious.
(First comment was under the wrong account, oops 😜)
No worries! A scenario that we recently negotiated was an advisor / Board of Directors member who we wanted to bring into that position in exchange for free consulting and referrals. The advisor we brought in was an industry expert and actually owned one of the businesses that my client's software serviced. A perfect match.
Since the relationship began they've been working together to further develop the software and engage with more referrals from the advisor's network week by week.
So the advisor is giving your client referrals, which then means more business from the client to you - is that right? Pretty sweet deal!
One of the perks of being a startup growth consultant haha. The better I do my job the better both the client and I do!
Totally agree that the best advisors are ones who are customer focused, no matter what function, and ones who have been in your shoes multiple times with success.
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