Launching a startup is hard. And unfortunately, getting help with it isn’t easier – especially when you are bootstrapped with little to no cash and no idea about which direction to go next. To make matters worse, advisors generally do not put their name on a startup without a full team, or a fully functional product.
Having a failed startup is a burden that doesn’t fall on the founders alone. An unsuccessful business endeavor affects the reputation and even the morale of advisors as well. Sometimes, founders of failed startups miss this crucial point – reputation does matter and shouldn’t be taken lightly. This makes getting advice about a startup launch that much more difficult.
In order to fill this gap, Luke Fitzpatrick created Ghacklabs, a company that offers startup help for $1. The way it works is actually very simple: clients just need to fill out a form on the Ghacklab’s website with a question, and they will get a detailed response. And to eliminate the risk of taking advice, clients only need to pay if they are satisfied with the advice they received. In the words of Fitzpatrick himself:
“Customer service is everything. Not only do we give startups an amazing service, we also go out of our way to help them by doing little things that do really matter, like throwing in extra goodies, introductions, and additional recommendations that are unrelated to their question. In short, we go out of our way to help, even jump over lakes if we have to.”
Fitzpatrick is also in the process of developing new startup theories and has been guest lecturing some of these concepts at Sydney University. One theory he is testing now is called “An Investor Hedge Bet”.
“Startups often just take investors money, and do not focus on the most important thing: relationships. In order to create a hedge bet (safety net) for an investor, you should go above and beyond the relationship and see if there are any additional things that you can add to angel investors that make the early seed investment less risky. Or, in other words, create a win-win situation.”
Fitzpatrick has applied this theory to Ghacklabs and offered his services free of charge to any investor that gets on board with Ghacklabs – including an investors’ entire portfolio. This means that investors do not only get a stake in the company, they also get the added benefit of receiving help for their own portfolio investments.
Ghacklabs may just seem like a startup consulting agency, but Fitzpatrick plans to turn it into the number one place startups live on – everything a startup needs, found in one place.