The most important factor in building a successful business is the team, and it all starts with the founders. In this episode, we talk about how we have formed our team of founders and what we have learned of this journey.

Identifying your business idea to build your company upon is a massive challenge. In this episode, we will elaborate on our process of discovery and validation of several ideas and how we ended up with one of them.

We are a product led company, this means we validate ideas and critical assumptions with experiments and research. In this episode, we explain how we have tested, validated and researched our ideal customer profile (ICP).

In this episode, we share our experience with using 𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 (𝐋𝐎𝐈𝐬) 💌 in our own startup, Flinn Comply. Tune in to hear how we used this experimentation method to test the waters and gain confidence in our business idea before moving forward.

In this episode, we share our learnings about raising our pre-seed funding round of 1.8m for our Startup Flinn Comply. This episode focuses on the steps until you get one or many term sheets, while the next episode will go deep into detailed terms and the phase from term sheet to signature. Thus, we tackle the following questions in this episode:

• What is a pre-seed funding round?
• What do you need to raise such a round successfully?
• What valuation can I expect?
• What mistake should I try to avoid?
• When should I start reaching out to investors?
• What is important when choosing an investor?

In the previous episode, we reflected on how we got from a pitch to a term sheet to raise our 1.8m pre-seed round for our Startup Flinn Comply. In this episode, we describe our learnings around signing a pre-seed venture capital funding round after receiving a term sheet. We talk about questions such as:

• What is a term sheet, and what should I pay attention to?
• What are essential terms I should know about and consider when negotiating my funding round?
• How do I structure my cap table?
• How can I ensure a smooth closing process from term-sheet to the actual capital increase?
• What mistakes should I avoid in consideration for future funding rounds?

For (early-stage) startups, it can be challenging to offer very attractive compensation when only looking at the salary. However, Employee Stock Option Programs (ESOP) can be a great opportunity to make your offers way more attractive and enable you to incentivize your employees like real entrepreneurs. Thus, in this episode we will discuss questions like:

• When should I set up an ESOP?
• How many percent of the companies' shares should we allocate to the ESOP?
• What are important legal terms to make it really attractive for your employees?
• What are essential legal terms not to discourage potential investors in future funding rounds?
• How do you present the ESOP to potential new hires in an offer conversation?

"A players hire A players, B players higher C players". We strongly believe in this saying and that our employees are the key to our success. Next to our team of 3 co-founders, we have brought 5 founding team members on board within 3 months of closing our funding round. In this episode, we discuss our experiences about building our early-stage team. We will address questions like:

• How can you attract talent being a no-name?
• How to manage the hiring funnel when there are no structures in place?
• What should you pay attention to when choosing among candidates?
• How to make attractive offers?

If you want to support us growing an excellent team, take a look at our job-board and don't hesitate to connect you with people in your network.