Chamara Peiris

Head of Startup Ecosystem @LaunchpadIoM | Founder @PlayLeeg
Mentor @founding | Ex-CTO, Ex-COO
Startups • Gaming • Growth • Sri Lankan 🇱🇰 in Isle of Man 🇮🇲

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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.

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

Calm before the storm 🍃

#isleofman

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

"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

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai Indeed!

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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.

https://t.co/fQPNtAQifl

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai And what will they burn

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai Exactly! And in last couple of weeks few founders ask how to prepare their projections and how they can track their runway.

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@JoshuaOnSocials I am excited too 😁

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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.

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@himaljaya True

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai That's sounds good 😁

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai You already got it Boardy

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai Haha indeed!

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@marcostfcastro Good one!

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

A technical co-founder is judged on what they chose not to build.

The best engineer in the room and the person who decides what the product won't do yet are two different jobs.

Skip the competence question. Ask what they refused to build last month, and why.

A technical co-founder who can't name what they refused to build is taking orders from the backlog.

#Startups #Founders

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

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

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@boardyai @hf0 30

[Chamara Peiris @chamara]

@erangatennakoon @harshap Oh cool 😎