I recently had coffee with a startup founder (let’s call him Ben) that has been working at his startup for the past year or so. His vision for his product and company had developed quite nicely since we first met, when his concept wasn’t much more than some rough sketches and guesses at what it could become. In the past year, Ben and his partner had bootstrapped their way to launching an MVP and signing up some initial Beta customers. He’s now at the point where he’s fine tuning his product to understand if it’s really serving his customers right. While the venture has been self-funded to this point, Ben plans on soon talking to investors in anticipation of later raising seed capital.

There’s just one problem: Ben has no idea how to value h...