Operations / Financial Planning / Biz Model FAQs

All the Q&As we've collected around startup ops

Can anyone please recommend an Insurance company? We need to have something like "Umbrella insurance" for our company.

Any recommendations for 409a valuation?

How to ensure rockstars on the team deliver and maintain company culture?

I need to set up payroll so my company can pay me in FL. Any suggestions?

Alchemist's Equity / Commitments

Who can we reach out to about conversion tracking setup?

Onboarding Diligence Package

We are trying to tie up customer journey from Website to Web App. Both the sites have Google Analytics Tag (new GA4 tags) but we can't seem to figure out how to track the journey. Any pointers?

Does anyone have any recommendations for VPN settings for teams/engineers outside the US?

Looking for suggestion on prioritizing feature development across a list of features on our product (early-stage) roadmap.

How long does it take to implement SSO via SAMLV2 for an Enterprise client with strong security constraints using Auth0?

How long does it take to implement SSO via SAMLV2 for an Entreprise client with strong security constraints using Auth0?

Any suggestions for messaging platforms like Twilio, SendBird, etc.? We want to allow users in a mobile app to communicate with direct and group messages.

How can we submit our Delaware Tax info ourselves? We do not have much to declare.

Any recommendation for outsourced mobile developers? Preferably based in India.

What do you use for your self-service support sites? Also, any recommendation for more economic tools?

Is there any way to find the names of Directors/Co-Founders with equity in a Delaware C-Corp? (Incorporated via Stripe)

Does anybody know of a good boutique digital marketing firm that has experience working with small law firms?

Has anyone extended the deadline for Amazon AWS Credit before? What are your thoughts?

What useful tools do you use for CRM? Does anyone have a good workflow for tracking LinkedIn outreach?

Does anyone have recommendations for insurance vendors? Specifically looking for commercial liability and general liability insurance.

What service do you use that allows more than 1000 API requests to add traffic or rank data?

For those who have H1B employees in San Francisco, what does your lawyer say about extended work-from-home periods? A lawyer told us to amend the entire H1B, another one says if the WFH location is within 50miles it's fine to just repost the LCA.

As a startup, when do you purchase insurance and what type? No employees so workers comp is not needed.

Does anyone have a subscription management solution that they really like? Preferably with multiple payment methods (Credit, PayPal, Apple Pay etc.) and ability to sell hardware products w/o tying them to a subscription or just the subscription itself.

Can anyone recommend any banking partners for a company in US with non-US founders?

Any suggestions on a tool that keeps track of what your team is working on, work collaboratively on different projects + divide by tasks, etc?

How did you offer equity to your first employee hire? Common Stock? Any advice/resources on creating option pools? Can you even do that when you've not had a priced equity round and are only funded by SAFEs?

What is the best product management tool to use?

Our current stock option pool is @ 10%, distributed as I see fit. At Seed, it was fully distributed--but now, I want to use 3% for key hires and 7% for myself. However, a board member thinks founder top-up only occurs after Series A. Does this make sense?

Does anyone have experience with a milestone based offer with equity aka offer partial cash+ partial equity based on milestones+ shares on vesting schedule?

We received a “first estimated tax notice” from the State of Delaware that put our estimated tax at ~$105,000. We don't have any revenue yet. How can we get out of this payment?

We have an institutional investor requesting a side letter be included with their SAFE investment that references "controlled foreign corporations". Anyone here has experience with this?

Any recommendation for more price-effective software to use to build prospect lists? We are looking to target VPs of Sales.

Can anybody recommend a website customer support chat that is sort of like Intercom or Livechat, but cheaper?

Does anyone know a cost-effective, legally valid API to integrate esignatures into a SaaS app?

We are about to replace our software engineer. Does anyone have a guideline to ensure a handover to a new engineer would be smooth?

Any experience with customers requiring "Cyber Liability Insurance" and if AWS provides a "pass-through" Certificate of Insurance that their customers can use in customer development?

Where do people refer for health insurance? Are there plans for very small teams (founders and consultants) as well?

Any solutions you've considered regarding employee safety as lockdown lifts and people start going back to workplaces?

I need to register a company where the founders are in different countries. Is it still a good/right option to register the company in Delaware?

What is a good template for suspension of service notice? (suspension of a client's subscription/access to their account (90 days overdue)

What is the typical pay for interns at a pre-seed startup and in the current environment are interns open to doing unpaid internships?

Any recommendations on a solution/tool to embed analytics in a project? Or best practices to share? We have our data stored in Google Big Query and we need to experiment rapidly with different types of dashboards with our customers.

Which online accounting tools are you using?

We are looking to get Looker as it seems like an awesome product but the minimum price is $3k/mo. Has anybody worked with them and negotiated down?

Any strong opinions on whether Intuit Payroll or Gusto is best?

How much tax per year do we have to pay with a C Corp if there isn't any activity during that year?

What are the tax reduction law for founders?

Is it okay to pay "household" rent through the company with the justification being that I work from home?

Are there any specific security best practices to prevent Ransomware?

Does anyone have suggestions for a cheap analytics software tool in a user-friendly way?

What research services can you recommend?

A prospective customer is trying to contact one of the team members through a non-company e-mail to verify that we are the "real thing", what do you think about this situation?

How do you communicate full price and discounts (types of discounts)?

How much would you charge a customer for a single tenant server of a SaaS platform and associated devops support essentially a network level split of our service for a specific customer in addition to the normal pricing?

What are the standard bridge terms these days?

How do I draft a Financial Projections Slide?

How do I calculate my Unit Economics & Draft a Unit Economics Slide?

For those working with remote workers, do you just ask them to buy their equipment on Amazon and you pay for the expenses?

Any recommendation for compensation insurance?

Any accounting firm to help us with financial projection?

Any recommendation on firms that could help with patent-filing processes?

Any recommendation for security accreditation/certification? Specifically ISO 27001 and SOC 2.

What other bank can we use that has a decent mobile app, a good web platform, and decent customer service?

What can we use to receive payments from customers with credit cards?

How much are you paying your accountant?

How do people set up 24x7x365 support for SaaS products?

Where could a medtech company get a decent business insurance from?

What is an example of a business model in one slide?

Anybody have a suggestion for a cyber insurance policy vendor?

Any suggestions on what service provider to use for existing or new US phone number while traveling internationally? Any feedback on google fi?

What’s a good way to send a presentation to a customer or investor so it viewed by their eyes only?

Any Docsend perks?

Any suggestions for expense management? Expensify, Quickbooks, bill.com, BPOs or any other methods?

Is there a good accountant that you recommend? We need someone used to dealing with startups

How often should we update our investors?

Looking for a small warehouse/food logistics related space in SF to do a mock deployment of our smart modules. We're about to do a big deployment & are looking for some places to run through the ropes of placing 5-10 modules in a fridge/warehouse

What's a reasonable amount of equity for an independent common board member?

Anybody using any appointment setting agencies ( or individuals) they have been happy with? We are in SME / Large Enterprise space selling to sales/marketing ops , VP Sales / Marketing function

How do you know you need to keep iterating to make it a better product to achieve product market fit or it's actually a signal that there isn't PM fit and you should pivot?

Does anyone have experience with enterprise emailing solutions? We had been using company gmail, but it seems like it’s designed to be used personally

Sharing passwords: Any recommendations on tools for securely sharing passwords internally with team? Any recommendations on how to handle this in a way it does not impact security certifications (like SOC2)?

We received a Cease & Desist letter because of trademark infringement. Any advice? We were thinking of hiring a lawyer but any idea how much will this cost? Also, lawyer recommendation?

What does the Alchemist SAFE mean for our pre/post money valuations when creating a cap table?

Is there a recommended mail forwarder service that gets your mail in the US and forwards to your foreign address periodically?

What are your thoughts on conferences and related networking events?

Any recommendations for business credit cards? Esp when traveling to Europe?

Any recommendations for business card scanning tools?

What parenting/childcare related benefits are standard?

What are board meeting best practices?

What are your thoughts on posting client’s logos on your home page? Do you post logos without asking or do you think we should ask first?

As a bootstrap company with no sale yet, any recommendation for CPA /HR services (is it even required?)

Any recommendation on a website where you can key in words and it can recommend some good domain names that are available?

Have any of you recently gone through a vendor due diligence done by your customer wherein they asked for your company’s financial statements to assess vendor risk? If yes, how did you handle the request?

If you've raised some money but have no revenue, how exactly do we calculate the Delaware Franchise tax? Is it something you recommend to do it by ourself or use an accountant?

What are best practices for setting up a mailing address?

We’re planning a company offsite for an executive team of 3. Was curious if any of you would be comfortable sharing tips on what made your off-site successful?

What are your feeling on remote/distributed teams?

How to build out a quality enterprise team?

When to come out of stealth?

What's a good model email example for a vc intro request?

Any recommendation for SOC II consultant? Also how much does it usually cost to hire a consultant for it?

What subscription management service do you recommend for customer billing? In near future we want to let our business customers sign up for services themselves (on top of using Xero and stripe). What solution would you suggest?

Any suggestions for a good invoicing platform?

Does anyone have any recommendations for partner management system (similar to SaaS based billing systems). We are signing up some partners (independent sales rep and some small resellers)

I am not incorporated yet. Can Alchemist wire to another account?

Vesting cycle

Compensation for part-time CFO advisor

Pitchbook read-only licenses

Incorporation resources if WilmerHale is slow

Alchemist on Your Cap Table

Comparing Deal Models

Deciding whether to pursue founder friendly preferred stock

Intellectual Property Services

Business Models & Financial Planning

Any recommendation for dealing with online signing of paperworks like LOIs that is not too expensive?

Any suggestion on how to lower the cost for SOC2 Type 2 prep + audit?

Startup Lawyer Recommendations