Chamara Peiris

Building startups? I’ve spent 18+ years starting, scaling & supporting them. 🎮 Founder @PlayLeeg 🚀 Helping founders grow at @LaunchpadIoM 💬 DMs open for collabs, mentoring, or partnerships.

A startup's first employee takes a founder's risk on an employee's pay. Before you sign, ask how many months of cash are in the bank, who decides at month three, and what your shares cost to exercise. I've cut my own salary to stretch a startup's runway. I'd have liked to see it first. A first employee is a co-founder who didn't get the paperwork. Price the job that way. #Startups #Founders

You got to have a little bit of luck to do a fireside chat with someone like Chris Hall 🚀

You don't have to learn to code to build with AI. You do have to know when it has built the wrong thing. Read what it does with a customer's data. Know what happens when the input is wrong. Learn those parts first. A founder doesn't need to write the code. They need to know when the code is lying to them. #Startups #Founders

The northernmost tip of the Isle of Man, and the locals couldn’t care less about visitors. 24x zoom. #isleofman

A founder who hires people like themselves has hired their blind spot twice. "Someone I'd enjoy working with" usually means "someone like me". Before the next offer, write one line: what do they do that I can't, and do we need it this quarter? If the line stays empty, you're hiring a mirror. #Startups #Founders

I am looking forward to talking to Chris tomorrow 🚀

Twenty years of being good at your job is not a head start on a startup. The contacts transfer. The respect, the clean inbox and the certainty you're right stay behind. Experienced founders get stuck where graduates do: the first stranger who says no. Sell one thing to one stranger before you resign. Experience shortens the job. It doesn't shorten finding out if anyone wants it. #Startups #Founders

I am curious... youtube.com/watch?v=keAEh70a…

Hiring a head of sales is the most expensive way to avoid asking why nobody is buying. Sales are short, so the founder hires. Six months on, nothing has moved, and the diagnosis becomes marketing. Before the job advert, write one paragraph on why sales are short, in a customer's words. A founder who can't explain the problem has hired someone to guess at it on a salary. #Startups #Founders

After the storm 🌝 #isleofman

What do you think of this? youtube.com/watch?v=2176dnVR…

A startup only spreads wealth if the people who build it own part of it. Give every hire shares. Then say four numbers out loud: the count, the percentage, what sits above them, the cost to exercise. Can't explain the fourth? You've handed out a lottery ticket and called it ownership. A startup that keeps the equity at the top has only moved wealth from one small group to another. #Startups #Founders

The product you built is rarely what your customers are paying for. Leeg licensed games anyone could play free. About 70,000 registered, ad then this 200 users. Not all, but they paid for the weekly tournament, not the game. Ask your last ten customers what they got. Price that. A startup that knows what its customers are really buying stops competing on features. #Startups #Founders

Calm before the storm 🍃 #isleofman

"I know a few people with money" is not a funding plan. A founder told me the round was step one. No product, no customer, investors not yet asked. Reverse it. One customer who paid. What the money buys that revenue can't. The date it runs out. A startup that plans the raise before the first sale has handed its hardest decision to someone who's never met its customer. #Startups #Founders

Hi all, I've built a tool that tells founders how much to raise and how long their money lasts based on my experience and learnings. Would you try it and tell me what's confusing? It's free and takes about 15 minutes. preseedhq.com

A startup's first product is trust. Something breaks and the founder goes quiet until it's fixed. That silence is what customers remember. Send the message first: what broke, what it means for them, the date they'll hear next. Signed by you. Customers forgive a startup's delay faster than they forgive finding out about it. #Startups #Founders

Working alone, your plan passes every test you set it. I've carried one in my head for weeks. Every test it took, I wrote and marked myself. Said it out loud once and it split into three decisions I'd been calling one. Find the person who asks what breaks it. Then write it down. A startup plan nobody has argued with is the founder's opinion, written neatly. #Startups #Founders

I've mentored many founders and never written down the problems they keep bringing me. The same few come up again and again. I answer them in the moment and move on. Meanwhile I've been planning my own work alone, from my own assumptions. That's the exact thing I tell founders not to do. So I'm doing 30 Days of @boardyai in public. Every day until Nov 30, @boardyai is my thinking partner, and I'll share what I learn here.

The week after a launch is the only week you can still see what went wrong. By month two, memory has rewritten it into the version that flatters you. Four questions, within seven days, everyone in the room: what happened, why, what we'd change, what we'll do next. A founder's review this week costs an hour. The one they skip costs the next launch. #Startups #Founders