At some point, every startup will have to charge someone something for using their product. The problem? Price is a topic that’s notoriously hard to ask your users for input on. Whatever model and price you settle on tend to be sticky, whereas your product will expand and evolve over time. What’s more, companies coming out of free beta often lose more than 90% of their users when they introduce a price, which can feel very scary.Joining us to share the fundamentals of pricing and monetization is Kun Gao, Co-founder and COO of GGWP. Kun will run through the principles related to revenue models, customers, costs, price discovery and competitive pricing. Then he will reveal the cheat codes for subscription-based models, which are from his time as Co-founder and CEO of Crunchyroll.

In a startup, there are only so many things you can figure out sitting by your desk. Often, you’ll eventually learn that the list was actually far shorter than you initially assumed.Therefore, before you have users, you should spend a lot of time talking to people who could potentially become ones.However, especially in B2C, it might be hard to find people who are willing to spend this much time with you, and even more difficult to get them to give actionable direction on what to build. Who should you reach out to? What should you ask them? What if they question your fundamental premise? How should you interpret their answers?To answer all of these questions with five practical rules on how to talk to users, we have Holly Liu, who co-founded and scaled the gaming company Kabam all the way to a $1B acquisition, spent two years as visiting Partner at Y Combinator, and now invests in early-stage companies at PKO.

Mikael Thuneberg’s journey to building marketing analytics company Supermetrics into what it is today was anything but linear. In fact, between 2010–16 Mikael worked on the company alone. At the time, he may not have known that he was laying the groundwork for a big tech company. However, Mikael was taking a core company-building lesson to the extreme – building a brilliant product and doing very little else. This approach has stayed with the company – Supermetrics hired their first sales person in 2018, at €5M ARR.Now, Mikael joins Builders’ Studio to unpack a peculiar founding story and what other founders can learn.

In the early days, great products are almost always very easy to understand. This is the source of the common adage: you should be able to explain what you do in one sentence. However, simplicity isn’t always easy to reach. What if you know how your product will deliver value when it’s got a number of features and thousands of users, but struggle to see what Act 1 will get you there? What if your customers don’t understand your product and are giving negative feedback?Joining us to unpack these hard choices is Edith Harbaugh, Co-founder & CEO of LaunchDarkly, the €3B feature management platform.

The first 365 days for a founder are full of excitement, uncertainty and hard work. At the same time, any great founder will quickly have to get comfortable saying no. In the early days, very few things make all the difference. Paraphrasing Y Combinator: you should build, exercise and sleep – and do very little else. So, what are the things to do and get good at? Which ones should you ignore?Joining us to share the radical prioritisation tips for the first year of founding your company is Rachel Delacour, Co-founder and CEO of Sweep. These tips are learned from both her first company, Bime (acquired by Zendesk), and her second company, Sweep.

In the early days your team will be the most valuable asset you have, and making the right decisions when hiring is imperative to your success. In fact, a single bad early hire will often kill a company. So, which roles should you prioritise? When do you set up your people function, sales and marketing? Which teams should you begin to scale first, and what is a good balance between them?Joining us to answer these questions and more is Tamás Kádár, Co-founder and CEO at SEON.

A startup’s first fundraise can be a daunting process. First, you have to figure out who to raise from and how much. Angels or VCs? How many of each? Second, you have to break through the noise, land a meeting, and convince investors of your vision. Third, you need to figure out what a fair valuation is and how much equity you’re willing to give away. Last, you have to accept that you might well be working closely with these investors for a decade if your company succeeds.Joining us to make sense of it all and share practical tips for raising your first dollars is David Nothacker, the Co-founder and CEO of sennder. David will also share the top 3 mistakes and learnings from the first fundraising journey of sennder.

At some point, it was very fashionable to claim that startup ideas don’t matter. However, this is almost certainly bad advice. Very few legendary companies go through significant pivots. So, how do you come up with your own billion-dollar idea? Can you force yourself to do so, or should you wait to come across a sufficiently big pain point? Which factors separate great ideas from mediocre ones? How many of those can you actually research, and what can you only figure out by putting an MVP out in the market?Joining us to share her learnings is Vilma Mattila, Co-founder and CEO of 5ire.

Building a founding team is one of those foundational processes that every company has to go through. Famously, a successful founding team will outlast the average marriage, and any startups’ single biggest predictor of success is its early people, so who you found with matters. So, which things are non-negotiable in the best founding teams? Which skillsets are a must among the founders? How do you find and evaluate people if you don’t have friends with those skills?To unpack all of this, Slush President Mikko Mäntylä will sit down with Adam Chekroud, Co-founder & President of the B2B mental health giant Spring Health.

Exits are a famously glorified part of a startup's journey. Whether it be through acquisition, IPO or anything in-between, a startup's life inevitably takes an intense turn upon exit. While we are ending the series with exit, this is ideally the phase in which the startups journey truly starts to grow. Joining us to unravel exits is Jan Rezab, Founder and CEO of Time is Ltd. Having built and exited Socialbakers, Jan will be finishing off the Builders' Studio series with a dissection on an exit truly means for a startup and what founders should look out for, as told by a founder who just went through it all.