Fractional Co-founder

Starting a company as a solo founder suhhhhhks. Especially if it’s the first time you have built a business from scratch. You don’t want to be biased in your own experiences, but that just leads to self doubt. You are torn between getting more validation and moving forward and have no one to keep you honest. And the work! How in the world do you manage a dev team, pre-sell your product AND fundraise?

After four years coaching startup CEOs (and 27 years starting and running tech companies), I am offering a solution. More than a weekly coaching session and less than a full-time co-founder, I’ll commit $25,000 and two years of rolling up my sleeves, helping you execute on the priorities. If (IF!) we can successfully complete customer discovery and establish problem/solution fit.

If this sounds like an interesting proposition, read on…

 
 

Market

First- and second-time startup founders. Either a solo businessperson without a tech co-founder or a software developer without a business partner. They have a startup idea and a business plan and maybe even an initial customer or two. There are tens of thousands of these founders, often with brilliant ideas, who every year fail to get traction because of rookie mistakes and a lack of network.

Known Problem and Impact

The founder doesn’t have experience designing a product, managing a tech team an/or driving sales. They are likely going to over-design a product with too many features, which is confusing to the customer and far more expensive to build than necessary. And because they don’t have experience with managing developers, they are going to pay far more than necessary for a product they are unhappy with that cannot be successfully brought to market. First-time founders also find it very difficult to navigate the fundraising process and solo founders have a significantly harder time raising capital than their co-foundered peers.

Unknown Problem and Impact

The founder hasn’t completed the discovery phase and is in extreme danger of spending far more time and money building a product they won’t be able to sell because they either 1) aren’t solving a real problem, 2) can’t articulate the problem effectively or 3) are attacking a market that can’t be efficiently reached.  

Solution

Eric Marcoullier (a serial entrepreneur with decades of startup experience — Bio, Linkedin) will invest time and money into the startup and steer it most efficiently towards product/market fit. 

Solution Details

Eric verifies that the discovery phase is complete through a series of customer discovery interviews and then takes responsibility for product design and management of an outsourced dev team. Additionally, Eric will help the founder raise a Pre-Seed round to provide them with a basic salary and marketing budget.

Once the product is launched, Eric assists the founders in recruiting a permanent engineering lead, growing sales to at least $10k/mo and raising a successful Seed Round. 

During the Seed Round, Eric assists the founder in scaling the team, growing sales to $1M in annual revenue and raising a successful Series A round. At this point, Eric will help the team find a scaling coach and step back from day-to-day involvement. 

Value Created

The founder is significantly more likely to achieve business impact and a positive financial outcome:

Bootstrapped startups have a failure rate in excess of 90%, and funded startups still fail to exit more than 60% of the time. Eric’s involvement significantly improves those odds. 

Startups that have helpful mentors track performance metrics effectively, raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

Startups with at least two co-founders reach the scale phase 3.6x faster than solo founders. 

Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely. The fractional co-founder ensures that the founder(s) properly complete the discovery phase and properly scope their MVP, reducing validation time.

Process

If Eric engages with the founder, they will as a team verify that the discovery phase is sufficiently complete. If not, as much time as necessary is spent on customer discovery, as described in Cindy Alvarez’s Lean Customer Development. 

If Eric agrees to move forward with the founder after completing customer discovery, he will invest $25k alongside the founder, and take the role of Chairman of the Board, with the founder also a taking board seat. Each will receive 2% of the company.

Eric will vest an additional 8% of the company in equal monthly installments over the next two years. The founder will vest their 88% equity in monthly installments over the next four years. 

Once the company has raised enough capital that the founder can take a salary, Eric will receive his regular coaching fee as well.

Neither the founder nor Eric can be fired without cause and all disputes will be resolved through mediation. Should the founder or Eric leave voluntarily all remaining unvested shares will be returned to the company. 

To Apply

Send a pitch deck with the following slides to eric@marcoullier.com:

  1. Market

  2. Problem

  3. Impact

  4. Solution

  5. Value created

  6. Competition and unique point of view

  7. Number of customer discovery calls to date, and any customers or LOIs

  8. Additional traction (software, team, fundraising)

  9. Founder’s background and link to LinkedIn bio

  10. Commitment from the founder to invest $25k in liquid capital into the startup should Eric come on board after validating the customer discovery phase