AppyMeal

How do startups grow? How about when they do not have cash flow to pay people? Here’s how most startups manage equity sharing to grow when things are not quite profitable… … When starting a new company, there’s a very small chance profit will be around the corner. It typically takes most new companies 1-2 years before experiencing any kind of profit. That time frame grows, the bigger the project. For us, we decided to tackle the entire food delivery industry. Not the smallest of tasks. Therefore, we have to get creative with how we grow. The best strategy for onboarding new teammates is a vested equity stake with what’s called a vesting cliff. This means that as a new teammate comes onboard they know exactly what amount of equity they will earn and when. For example, let’s say we brought a new developer on to the team. We might set a 9 month cliff for 2% equity and a 3 year vesting period of another 4% if they stick around and work hard. This does two things: 1) It clearly outlines what the person is earning or getting for their hard work 2) It protects the startup from people that come for a short time, but do not stay for long enough to be impactful. Another thing for startups to consider is profit sharing. Does this equity qualify for profit sharing? Does it give voting rights? In reality, there is no limit to how a startup can structure the equity sharing. Can the equity be devalued later by diluting the equity shares? This is typically done to lower a stock price or bring on a large investment to a company. There are a ton of things to consider and possiblities that both the startup and new teammate need to consider before signing up. It’s a tricky business starting a business. Cheers #startuptips #smallbusiness

How do startups grow? How about when they do not have cash flow to pay people? Here’s how most startups manage equity sharing to grow when things are not quite profitable… … When starting a new company, there’s a very small chance profit will be around the corner. It typically takes most new companies 1-2 years before experiencing any kind of profit. That time frame grows, the bigger the project. For us, we decided to tackle the entire food delivery industry. Not the smallest of tasks. Therefore, we have to get creative with how we grow. The best strategy for onboarding new teammates is a vested equity stake with what’s called a vesting cliff. This means that as a new teammate comes onboard they know exactly what amount of equity they will earn and when. For example, let’s say we brought a new developer on to the team. We might set a 9 month cliff for 2% equity and a 3 year vesting period of another 4% if they stick around and work hard. This does two things: 1) It clearly outlines what the person is earning or getting for their hard work 2) It protects the startup from people that come for a short time, but do not stay for long enough to be impactful. Another thing for startups to consider is profit sharing. Does this equity qualify for profit sharing? Does it give voting rights? In reality, there is no limit to how a startup can structure the equity sharing. Can the equity be devalued later by diluting the equity shares? This is typically done to lower a stock price or bring on a large investment to a company. There are a ton of things to consider and possiblities that both the startup and new teammate need to consider before signing up. It’s a tricky business starting a business. Cheers #startuptips #smallbusiness

Don’t you hate it when you build an amazing product (at a coffee shop) and the users find a way to break it? We’ve been there… and will be again. Here’s what we’re doing to help prevent this. Building a product for the masses is extremely tricky. There are so many smart and brilliant normal people that are going to take your product, flip it upside down, swipe out of it during important api calls, and oh yea, not enter data properly. There is nothing more important than user testing you’ve been told. But wait… there is. Welcome the job of QA. An overlook position in the tech industry, but an incredibly important one is the QA (quality assurance) What do they do? Quite simply, they break your product. In our case, our app. They press our buttons. They enter in terrible data. And most importantly, they do the unexpected to our product. This is your first line of defense against the market. If you’re building an app, SaaS product or anything tech related, we can’t recommend enough getting a good QA to break it. They’ll do what the developers won’t, which is find the holes in what they built. Seriously though, this is (in our opinion) the best defense for a strong market ready product. How do you find a good QA? We’re not sure! Let us know if you do. (so we can steal them) Stay bug free out there! Cheers #qa #tech #app #saas #startup

New locations are pouring in right now for our local pickup and delivery app... how are we handling the growth? Here's how: Just this week alone we signed on 5 new restaurants for our marketplace. Additionally, we have 2-3 more potentially signing on this next week. For us that means several things: 1) more places for users to order 2) more real-estate for us to put our branding for users to find us 3) more partners to build off of Our issues are: 1) onboarding costs per restaurant 2) time it takes to onboard 3) as we grow our app needs to scale to the influx of data, users and orders So how are we handling the growth? A few ways we are handling the growth is time management, proper team communication, and prioritizing our developments. Right now we are utilizing Trello boards for releases, restaurant updates, and tracking how we are doing internally. For development, utilizing git branches to make sure that upstream stays clean is mandatory when multiple devs are working on updates. Finally, accomplishing micro tasks daily is truly the only way for any small business to succeed, especially ours. Planning to spend 12 straight hours working on our business or startup on Saturday is not sustainable. It is much more practical to spend 1-2 hours daily chipping away at things. That's our strategy. We are experiencing tons of growth with plenty of development updates to meet that growth. You might even see some restaurants pop up around Atlanta near you soon! Excited to see what 2024 brings

Our app crashed… While some people may think that sounds horrible, it’s a very common part of the development process. Let’s quickly chat about the behind the scenes of maintaining and updating an app for iOS/Android First, we’ve already made some huge leaps this year. We’ve got a long list of updates, goals and partnerships in the works. While that’s all great, nothing really matters if our product is… well crap. One of the most difficult things for software companies to handle is maintaining their product while they build onto it. Almost every year iOS and Android are pushing out updates to their operating systems. In addition, we built our #app with a #softwarelanguage called #reactnative that also pushes out updates yearly. Those two things alone could easily halt some of the development process, but that’s only the surface. We’ve also got -packages that need updating -packages that become deprecated -changes in device management -server updates and changes to the backend structures -expo is our testing suite that also updates yearly -there are basic local package updates like node and npm that need to be considered In reality, there is a vast web of issues maintaining and developing a product. Not to mention our web platform. How do we manage it all? The best solution is gradual updates. For instance, it is best practice to continually update your app periodically rather than all at once. Jumping versions from .69 to .72 on react native will certainly crash your app everytime. Therefore, we suggest dev teams slowly update every other sprint from .69 -> .70 -> .71 … etc. This is the best way to continuously keep development flowing and prevent an app from suddenly becoming unusable over night. Happy coding

The hardest thing for for a marketplace or service typically isn’t the build out or development, it’s getting and maintaining users. Here’s what we are doing to get new users to our platform… Appymeal does not work without users. We are an online marketplace for local restaurants. Therefore, we need users to bring orders and value to our partners. One of the ways we are gaining users is by leveraging real estate with our partners. What does that mean? It means using the tables of restaurants to gain exposure for our platform. Most recently we have designed and added table toppers with QR codes for customers to easily scan and download our app while they dine. While this alone is not enough to bring thousands of users, it’s just another way we might get 10-20 users a week. There isn’t a single extremely effective way to gain users. In reality, it takes a bunch of different ways just like this one all working together to grow our platform. We’re excited to see more growth in 2024. Below is an example or a table topper (front and back) that we have on every table at Sam’s On Main in Grayson! #growth #exposure #saas #apps #users #marketing #food

Dev Diary: We've been quite busy over at AppyMeal onboarding new restaurants, updating our app, and meeting with partners. 2024 is shaping up to be our best year yet. Our goals are: -Onboard 10-20 new locations -Push massive updates and launch version 3.0 with social engagement, push notifications, menu photos, and more -Tie in our sister companies and other products (more to come on this) -Continue to onboard users and spread our reach across Atlanta The biggest hurdles we are facing with development are: -Updating all of our packages + Expo -Building our backend to handle images -Integrating our other products -Fixing Android bugs and issues #Startup #appymeal #2024 #progress #development