Anthony Rose

When should you start billing for your product? Free or paid? Free trial period? Free while still in beta? It's a big founder dilemma, so here are the pros/cons of different billing models: 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙙𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙖 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙤𝙙 You've just launched the product. You're embarrassed to bill for it. Pro: Reduce friction, get the maximum number of signups. And if it doesn't work no one's going to blame you for taking their money. Con: Sounds like a great idea but investors are going to grill you as to how you're going to turn those free users into paying customers. They may hold on investing until you've switched to a paid model & proved that people will pay for the product. 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙙 𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙧𝙨 The classic Free / Pro / Enterprise model. Pro: Super easy for people to get started, no friction. Con: Your problem will be coming up with a sufficiently differentiated product to avoid users staying on free forever. One of my favourite sites, Similarweb.com (analyse competitors' web traffic), their free tier is pretty good, paid tier is insanely expensive. So I stay on the free plan, never switching to paid. Also, investors are going to grill you on this model and wait until you've got the upsell numbers before they'll invest. 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡, 𝙣𝙤 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙙𝙚𝙙 I'm a big fan of allowing people to try your service before you ask for their credit card so this is what we do at SeedLegals, there's a 7-day free trial that gives unlimited access to many platform features. Pro: No friction for people to get started. Con: If your users are looking for a one-time action (PDFSplit is a good example) and can do that on the free trial, they may love your service but never sign up to the paid plan. 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡, 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝙪𝙥 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩 A common way to avoid the problem above is to require credit card details up front, promising the user that you'll only start billing after 7 or 30 days. The onus is on the user to log in later to cancel the subscription, if they forget to do that, you start billing them. Pro: Most people are going to forget to unsubscribe and will be billed as a result. Con: It adds a barrier to trying out your product, particularly if you have competitors who don't require a card up front. And your customer support team is going to have lots of unhappy customers who say they weren't aware they were going to get billed later or forgot to unsubscribe in time. 𝙉𝙤 𝙛𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙤𝙙, 𝙥𝙖𝙮 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 If you're so confident in your product that you can require people to enter their card details before they've even had a chance to try it then this is the brave way to go. Pro: Avoids all the problems of free trials, you get to book revenue from day one. Con: It's a huge leap of faith for people to enter their card details before trying your service. It needs sufficient word of mouth out there that your service is so hot that people will pay without even trying it first.

The Adventures of Alice, Startup Superhero, Part 1: Taking The Leap Have an idea that you've been dreaming of building? Thinking of giving up your day job to do your own startup? Hundreds of thousands of people across the country are thinking exactly this, but scared to take the next step and not sure where to start. Meet Alice, Startup Superhero. Head back every day for the next episode to see how Alice takes the plunge, validates the idea, find investors, raises investment, and builds her dream. With @seedlegals there to help every step of the way. More episodes along with tutorial videos and articles at seedlegals.com/resources/the…

I’m giving away an hour of my time to one founder. If you’re getting ready to raise investment, the pitch is where it all comes together. Or falls apart. So I’d love to help you make yours amazing. You can choose: 🎯 A 60-minute 1:1 coaching call, we can work on your pitch, talk through your funding plans, look at your product or tackle whatever’s on your mind about growing your startup. 🎥 A recorded founder interview with me, tell your startup’s story in a professionally recorded interview, then share it on your channels, and ours. It’s free to enter and takes less than a minute: 👉 seedlegals.com/ask-anthony-d… If you know a founder who’d love this, tag them in the comments. Open until 27 November. You don't have to be a @SeedLegals customer to enter (if you are planning to raise investment, of course @SeedLegals is the fastest, most reliable and most delightful way to do that).

There are 2 MILLION potential angel investors in the UK, but only 30,000 SEIS/EIS investors each year. SEIS is such an brilliant tax benefit for investors - the best in the world. Investors can deduct 50% of their investment from their income tax & pay no CGT if they keep the shares for 3 years. How amazing is that! What is more amazing is that 100% of people don't know about it. We need to spread the word! The more people who know about it, the more companies will get funded, a win for all. Our @SeedLegals team put together this awesome e-book - download it, share the link, spread the word seedlegals.com/ebooks/s-eis-…

What do you think of the term 𝙎𝙪𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 instead of 𝘼𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚? Super Intelligence is silly - every time you ask Claude to do some task like extract data from a PDF you're going to say "I got Super Intelligence to do it". Ridiculous. So, how about 𝘼𝙪𝙜𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚? (whose acronym, for better or worse, is also AI) That nicely describes how we use AI to augment what we can do ourselves, which will be increasingly important as it translates into augmented touch, smell, sight, and physical add-ons. Also, Augmented Intelligence sounds benign, it's that massive computing power working alongside us, to enhance us, rather than displace us.

Have you seen the UK government's new Founder Relief proposal? No CGT on your first £10M on an exit. Sweet! But read it in detail. Your company is unlikely to qualify, and you should assume that it will not apply to you. To recap: Once upon a time, there was Entrepreneurs Relief. If you had more than 5% equity in a company, then you paid only 10% capital gains tax when you sold your shares, up to a lifetime value of £10M. That was sweet! Then the government changed the rules, renamed it to BADR (though Worser would have been more appropriate) and cut the lifetime limit to £1M. In today's budget, they've reduced the BADR limit to just £500k - which as a tax benefit is minuscule. To compensate, they brought out a fabulous-sounding new Founders Relief - consultation paper link below. When you start reading it, it looks great. It applies to founders who've got more than 25% equity at any point in the company's life, which probably means if your company's got 3 founders or fewer, you probably qualify. But then it goes into such a convoluted maze of growth, revenue, and R&D requirements that few companies are ultimately going to qualify. And that's really the thing that makes it useless, because the whole point of such a relief is that, as a founder, when you're weighing up the pros and cons of building a business in the UK versus, for example, moving to the US, you see at the outset that, great, I'm going to pay only 10% CGT on my shares. But here, there is so much uncertainty that there's no way you can bank that as a benefit, and so ultimately it fails its key purpose, which is to drive decision-making for an early-stage founder to build and stay in the UK. So, fabulous work by Startup Coalition and Dom Hallas on getting this and the other package of founder benefits that they've managed to get into the budget at a time when that must have been an incredibly hard uphill climb with the government. I'd love it if this benefit was something that founders could bank on at the outset, but it's not. So I'm looking forward to using the consultation period to turn this into something deterministic rather than having the same chance as a lottery ticket. assets.publishing.service.go…

There are some fantastic free in-person @SeedLegals events in NYC this week, all themed around conquering your fears about presenting in front of others, getting confident on stage, creating a brilliant pitch, and raising investment. Look forward to seeing you there! Tue 27th 6PM @ Fabrik DUMBO Founder Pitch Clinic with Anthony Rose & Dave Wolovsky Interactive masterclass to help you conquer your nerves, get confident on stage and deliver an awesome pitch. luma.com/dehgirvb?tk=uNDrLr Wed 28th 6PM @ 26 Broadway, downtown Plug and Play & SeedLegals: Pitching Masterclass Do a 3-minute pitch to Plug & Play and SeedLegals, get immediate feedback, watch and cheer others. luma.com/w6eyybfk?tk=GsCR3l Thu 29th 10AM @ The Wilson, Chelsea SeedLegals Power Hours with Anthony X Wayo 1-on-1 office hours with Anthony Rose, CEO of SeedLegals. Bring your pitch deck, website, fundraising questions, ask me anything. luma.com/5g4kolnf Fri 30th 1PM @ Edge Studios, 45th St Your Investor Pitch: what to say & how to say it. A free, two-hour workshop for founders who want to build a stronger investor pitch and deliver it with confidence. luma.com/xkp2ppvs

Fundraising is broken. Founders have an idea, tell investors they're raising $500K to fund the next 18 months. Investors wire their entire amount up front without any idea of whether it'll take off. But founders don't need $500k. If they had $50k a month, that would be awesome. So founders struggle to raise because they're asking too much, and investors lose their investment by giving it all up front rather than based on validation and traction. Welcome to Steadily, the milestone-based fundraising platform. gosteadily.lovable.app And introducing the Steadily SAFE, the world's first milestone-based SAFE investment instrument. ☝ Before you get too excited, everything above is a concept we put together at a hackathon in New York today. Thanks to vibe coding, in the space of 5 hours, we came up with a concept, made a Lovable web page, and built an actual working app. Well, mostly working. If enough people like this, we'll go and build it! Thanks to Hunter Peress, Paula Bejarano, Femi Palmer & Shubh Khandhadia who collectively brainstormed and built this together with me at Deal Flow: NYC's First VC Hackathon here in New York, arranged by the amazing Somya Gupta.