Whether you're part of a business, or a business owner, there's still plenty of time to apply for a business award or two this year.
I’ve been a “grand finals” judge for both local and national pitch competitions and startup awards, and as someone who’s been in the shoes of both the applicant, and the judge, I wanted to share my thoughts on key things to consider when writing an awards application, and what turns judges on (and off) as they read through your application! As a startup / small business mentor and provider of entrepreneurship workshops and programmes, I make sure that my mentees and attendees know that if they want the best possible results, it is never "Just do it" (sorry Nike.) It's create a strategy, then execute it! I hope this post can be used as an overview that breaks down the process and helps with your execution! Let me know if you have any further questions after reading it! Why apply for awards? There are a vast number of benefits that can come with winning an award:
However, benefits are not only limited to the award winner. Depending on the competition and the terminology used, being “nominated”, “shortlisted” or named as a “finalist” can also attract press, and raise your profile. Reaching this stage of an awards process is public confirmation that you are among the front-runners in your field. Once you’ve decided to go ahead, let’s put first things first. Pick the right awards… The awards that you decide to enter will play a big factor in your success. Try to even the playing field for yourself by competing in the right arenas. Businesses vary wildly in their characteristics, so you’ll need to be savvy and take this into account. If your business has been going for 6 months and you feel you’re going to strike it big, then focus on rising star, best newcomer, or “One to watch” awards in competitions that are aligned to your size, industry and company type. If you’re a company of 5 people doing amazing work across a single region, don’t apply to awards that attract high-growth startups who have raised millions and doubled their headcount three times last year! If you're a different type of business, trying to go toe-to-toe with companies like that is not a sensible strategy. Know your strengths and weaknesses and understand where you can (and can’t) compete successfully. If you’re an apple, you must firstly recognise that you're an apple, and then focus on competing with other apples. Now you’ve started, go all in! I’d suggest applying for multiple awards if you can. Once you’ve decided to put the effort in to make one application, applying for others will increase your overall chances of success. It also allows you to leverage the effort you put into applying for the first award, so have a look through all the categories on offer, and see if there’s an opportunity to apply to more than one. Award applications may be accepted at any time of year depending on the organiser, but February to June seems to be a particularly busy time with lots of awards opening and closing for applications during this period. This gives you a good window of time to get your head in the “awards headspace” and to submit several applications. The first time we do something, we will rarely be at our best. As a result, you may have some regrets about your first application, BUT now you can take the lessons learned, and make each application better than the last. If you only apply for one award, you won’t benefit from this phenomenon! You will have gambled everything on your “best worst” application. Next, to get off to a good start with the judges, some context is useful! Before launching into answering the questions you need to answer for your submission, take a step back and briefly explain what your business does, the problems it solves, and who it solves them for. When applications lack this, for the judge it feels a bit like starting to watch a film after the first hour has passed! A little background information helps to tie things together and helps your whole application to make more sense. Given that word count limits can be an issue, you’ll need to be creative to ensure that you’re able to include all the key points! Errrm, cut the BS! We have “highly engaged,” “satisfied customers”, “we’re an innovative company…” On the surface these sound o.k., but in terms of substance, they offer little value or reason to give you a “tick” in the box and move you into the “shortlisted” pile. Steer away from bland, commonplace language that says nothing very distinctive or exciting about you, or your business. Judges want to see energy, enthusiasm, dynamism and personality! Remember that your application needs to stand out enough to make it onto a shortlist if you’re to have a shot at winning, so think hard about exactly what your USPs are and how you will describe your business. Every entrepreneur has to work hard to keep the physical (or virtual) doors to their business open, and this almost always requires facing challenges, sacrifice, dedication, and creativity. Also bear in mind that good customer service should be a given, and not a bonus. So, consider what it is that makes you and your business stand out above all the other great businesses that have also applied! (If you’ve gone above and beyond, then give us the details… and if your customer service is truly exceptional, demonstrate this by explaining “how” and “why”.) Proof, proof, and more proof! Stats, revenue, reviews, testimonials… Whatever you do, don’t forget your evidence. Invariably, winning entries tell a tale of success and are usually filled with so many examples, they simply cannot be denied. Without this, applications fall by the wayside. I strongly advise that you start collecting “impact data” as soon as you start your business and if you haven’t up until this point, start today! Review what you’ve achieved so far, gather your data and commit to tracking it on an ongoing basis. For example:
On reflection, exactly how are you making a difference? What progress have you made? You’ll need this data to understand how well your business is doing, and what it’s achieving, and judges need to see this too. Next, you'll want to cherry pick the most impressive information and communicate this to the judges. If you can, weave all this impressive information throughout your entire application. (You'll also want to make sure any new “killer stats” that you uncover are also showcased on your website and in your marketing materials!) Become a perfectionist Perfectionism is the enemy of many an entrepreneur because it results in procrastination, so when I say perfectionism, I don’t mean the type that causes paralysis (otherwise you’ll never actually submit your application) BUT if you’re in it to win it, your inner perfectionist will make sure you bring your “A game”. I started my applications some time in advance of the submission date, then put them down and picked them up again at least 20 times. Seriously! I’d do something totally different, come back to them in a few hours and rip them apart (again.) A hurriedly “fired off” application that would have benefitted from additional drafts and more time to improve it won’t do you justice. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well! Ask for feedback and consult the experts where possible Ask for feedback from multiple people several weeks in advance of the final submission date to avoid stress, as people may not have time to respond immediately. Choose people who are honest and “harsh, but fair”, have some knowledge of business and entrepreneurship, and are eagle-eyed and will pick up on weaknesses in your application. Sending out my 2nd draft, I was told that the info I’d put together was impressive, but not engaging or compelling. I was also treated to a few choice analogies to explain the oomph that they felt was lacking. So… it was back to the drawing board, where I spent time trying to figure out how on earth I could action their comments to improve my entries. In summary, have I “walked my talk” and applied all this advice myself? Yes! Here’s my story: In 2021 I decided to attend training to better understand how to apply for awards. (I tend to come at most challenges like I’m studying for an exam. I immerse myself, read everything I can on the topic, buy books, go on courses or watch videos, then go at it.) In 2022, it was time to take action and to apply the knowledge I’d gained. I researched many awards, and got a massive spreadsheet built which helped me to decide what I would apply for. I am planning to update this post with a link to the spreadsheet I put together in due course! What were the results? I did well, but some final results are pending, so the jury is still out! I applied for multiple awards with 3 different awards organisers and received either a win or a finalist result in one or more of each organisation’s award categories. If you class becoming a finalist as a “result”, that’s a 100% strike rate across the 3 awards. The outcomes were:
Was this time consuming? Yes, but it has been absolutely worth it. The Small Awards, organised Small Business Britain announced that they had received a record number of entries this year, so I felt especially proud of making the finals in two categories. The great thing about the effort expended is that these results and organisations will now be positively associated with my business (and me) forever. Best of luck on your awards journey!
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“While most startups who set up pages on Kickstarter, Indiegogo or a host of other crowdfunding sites are looking to hit a specific goal and then get started making their project a reality, a new crop of businesses are using the platform as a wholly different business model: selling their product before it exists.” Harvard Business Review In this post, we'll cover several topics.
Once you’ve identified your target customers and have them at the heart of everything you do, let’s look at how you might further increase your confidence that your product idea is attractive to your target market and that you’re “on to something” good! At this stage, your focus should be on ensuring that you've done all you can to avoid wasting time and money in creating a product that the market does not really want or need. How do you find out whether your product idea is a “no”, a “maybe”, or a resounding “yes!”? There are many smart businesses and business people that do not advocate spending a penny on product development until they are confident that:
But how do they measure genuine interest? If you progress on to reading Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, we'll be working on creating and testing prototypes in chapters 9 and 10 and talking about running user tests and customer interviews as methods to help you assess interest in your product idea. These activities can also help you identify target customers who will pay for your product in advance by identifying the "essentials" needed to ensure that your product is seen as being valuable. Which of these 5 stages would you like to be at and which one would make you feel most secure about spending your money (or other people’s money) in order to pursue your goals? Every one of these stages may need to be revisited and fine-tuned many times, but it's still very useful to have clarity on what you are aiming for. What are presales? Presales can refer to a technical type of sales which covers an analysis of the customers needs before they purchase a product, presales, preselling, or preorders also refer to the sales of services or goods before their release date which allow a business or entrepreneur to assess the market’s willingness to buy the product. This is done in order to minimise the investment risk in creating the product, as we know that it can be risky to create an "all singing all dancing" product until we know more about how well it might be received. Presales can also be used to fund the creation of the product in full or to contribute towards development costs. Do you think that the odds of success would be in your favour if you were able to achieve this? Here are a few examples of companies and industries who use the presales method all the time:
There are also a number of online shopping sites which allow traders to put their products up for pre-order and crowdfunding sites use this model too. This is seen everyday on Amazon where you can order books months in advance in some cases. There is nothing “scammy” or dishonest about presales or preorders as long as you:
If you’d like to investigate pre-selling in more detail, here are some ideas:
Other finance options As an alternative to traditional bank loans, there are a number of organisations that may be able to help you obtain finance for your business. Take a look at these option(s): For government funded loans: https://www.startuploans.co.uk/ Angel Investors and venture capitalists: https://www.angelinvestmentnetwork.co.uk/entrepreneurs-home http://www.ukbusinessangelsassociation.org.uk/services-for-entrepreneurs/ http://www.venturecentral.co.uk/finding-investment/4583889654 Peer to peer (P2P) lenders are an alternative to going to a bank for a loan. The larger players in the market include:
Equity crowdfunding allows startups and growing businesses to find investors and raise funds. In return, investors receive shares in the company.
For an overview of the options available, The Business Finance Guide offers a comprehensive table of lending options for businesses at all stages of growth, with further information and videos available for you to explore each option: http://thebusinessfinanceguide.co.uk/finance-options/. Always check the small print before making any commitments! Other options... The next best thing after having advanced sales under your belt, is to set up a Coming Soon landing page. This isn't as good as having pre-orders because you won't have generated "hard cash" in advance, but if you can get a large number of people to sign up to your Coming Soon website or landing page this can give both you, or any potential investors evidence of the level of interest in what you are offering. A landing page is a one-page website designed to convert people to take a desired action. (In this case, people will be providing their email address as the desired action, in order to be among the first to know when your product or service is about to go live.) You will need to set up the page, create some compelling copy outlining what you will be offering, and how it will benefit your target market to excite and inspire them enough to want it, and to care enough to request a notification about when it will be ready for them to use. A percentage of people who sign up will be your very first customers - if you are able to sell your concept and its benefits, and create a build up to your launch which prepares people and gets them ready to buy when the time is right! Wix, Weebly, ConvertKit, LeadPages, and Carrd are just a few of the no-code / low-code website and landing page builder tools that you can use to create one. You can find an article on the core elements of a successful landing page on ConvertKit's website. Take a look at the Wix template below - this example is for a bricks and mortar service, but you can choose an alternative template, or edit one like this and include a mockup of your website and app, along with some key product benefits. You can see the blue button to the top right, which will allow you to copy and then edit this template with your own brand fonts, colours, relevant images, and marketing copy. I chose this example because the Are You Ready? message is quite eye-catching - however an even better structure for the page would have your number 1 Unique Selling Point front and centre, along with your brand tagline, and the classic Coming Soon message (as an alternative to the Are You Ready? text) big and bold so it is unmissable when people visit your landing page. Make sure that what you are offering, and its usefulness is crystal clear to your target market in order to maximise the effectiveness of your landing page. There should be zero ambiguity and no guesswork required! Once you have your landing page up, you will need to drive traffic to it via social media marketing, ads, or other marketing tactics. Originally published as a free resource offered with Don't Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book and adapted for the Purposeful Products blog and published on the Purposeful Group website. Copyright. Purposeful Publishing, K.N. Kukoyi, All Rights Reserved. 23/12/2021 0 Comments 9 Reasons Why Startups And Tech Entrepreneurs With A Mentor Are In A Different LeagueIf you are a startup founder, or tech entrepreneur, do you have a mentor?
Is it REALLY true that startups and tech entrepreneurs with mentors are in a different league? This article will explore 9 reasons why this is the case! #1 The Statistics Extensive research has been carried out and the jury has delivered the verdict - entrepreneurs with mentors do better. We’ve included a few pieces of research here: “Mentored startups grow 3.5x faster and raise 7x more money… The experience and connections of the mentor provide entrepreneurs with a roadmap with a higher probability of success.” Forbes magazine “70 percent of small business owners that receive mentoring survive for five years or more, double the rate of those who do not receive mentoring.” Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative #2 Fresh Perspective A mentor gives you an outside perspective. A startup is a lot like a puzzle, and as the founder, you are the one who has to put all of the pieces together. This can be difficult when you’re too close to the puzzle pieces to see the bigger picture. It's also more complicated if you've never put together a "business puzzle" before! Having a mentor gives you an objective point of view from an experienced person who is likely to have seen similar scenarios play out and can offer you unique insights and raise points that you might not have considered. They can help you identify your blind spots and make better decisions based on other people’s experience and knowledge. #3 Support And Guidance A mentor provides guidance and support at times when it can become easy to get overwhelmed, anxious, or discouraged. As an entrepreneur, there will inevitably be times when things don’t go as planned and you hit a rough patch. This is when it’s helpful to have a mentor who can offer support and guidance. They will share their own experiences of how they, or others overcame and navigated their way around similar challenges and give you advice on how you might move forward. A mentor can provide encouragement when things get tough and offer helpful advice, suggestions and options when you need them most. They will also keep you accountable, which is crucial for success! #4 Time and Energy Savings A mentor has been there before and starting and running a business becomes SO much easier when you are not constantly reinventing the wheel at every stage of building your business! As an entrepreneur, freelancer, or tech startup founder, you will face challenges that your mentor has already faced and overcome, or seen other people experience. This can be extremely helpful, as they can share their wisdom and advice on how to best approach these situations. They may also have a wealth of business tools and resources at their disposal that they can share with you! This is one of the major reasons why Purposeful Group’s tagline is “Start your business the SMART way!” Starting your own business from the ground up will be far quicker and easier if you hitch a lift up the mountain by tapping into existing knowledge, instead of walking the whole way up. Those that get a helping hand will reach their destination faster and will be far more efficient in doing so. #5 Connections And Network This leads us neatly on to benefit #5. A mentor can be an excellent source of connections. One of the most significant benefits of having a mentor is access to their network of contacts. Your mentor has probably built relationships with other successful entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts over the years and can introduce you to them. This can be extremely valuable for growing your new business. The people you know can make a BIG difference in how fast you are able to move forward. Things will be easier for you when you receive help at the times when you need it most! #6 Knowing what to say (and who you should say it to) A mentor can help you raise money. One of the biggest challenges for technology startups is raising money. Still, a good mentor can help make this process much more manageable. They will know who to talk to and what to say to get the funding you need. They can also introduce you to potential investors and provide guidance on negotiating deals and creating a credible pitch that will not “turn off” investors, or raise red flags that will put you in the “no thank you” pile. #7 Credibility A mentor can also give you credibility. Having a mentor lends credibility to your startup and shows potential investors that you are serious about your business. It also demonstrates that you have taken the time to invest in yourself and are committed to learning and growing as an entrepreneur. This can be key when trying to attract top talent to your company. Investors want to know that you have a support system because building a successful business is hard. Someone with no help or guidance and no connections may be a less attractive prospect for some investors unless they have the time to mentor you themselves. #8 Growth & Expansion Advice A mentor can help you expand your business. A mentor may have experience in running a successful business and will be able to share their knowledge with you. In addition, they can provide advice on things like marketing, sales, and operations and help you grow your digital business into a thriving company. #9 Accountability, and someone to “Bounce” Ideas Off A mentor can act as a sounding board. When you’re starting a company, it’s important to have someone to talk to and get feedback from. A word of advice at the right moment can be critical and we see entrepreneurs all the time that have gone off track because there was no-one around to give them the right words of advice at the right time. There is absolutely no substitute for honest input which helps you make better decisions for your business. Accountability is critical in helping you keep up the pace with the things you need to do. Simply knowing that you will be speaking to someone to update them on what you've achieved since your last conversation is great for maintaining focus and staying on track, and on target! Many entrepreneurs find this invaluable as without this resource, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds, or to feel adrift without the structure that regular accountability can bring. What should you expect from a "good" mentor? A good mentor will also not just "tell you what to do", but will collaborate with you and help you gain clarity around what your priorities should be, and will work with you to solve problems, and to figure out the best way(s) to execute on the actions that you need to take, so you are clear and confident about exactly how to move ideas and plans forward. We are often told that this level of very practical help is what differentiates Purposeful Group from mentors who provide less detailed guidance. Ideally your mentor will have mentored a lot of other businesses at a professional level. This will give you confidence about their experience and that they have a breadth of experience that will add additional value to the advice that they give you. Naturally, experience within your sector, or industry could be an added bonus. Finally, a mentor should genuinely care and want you to win! You should feel encouraged, and the mentor should feel like an extension of your company or team - someone in your corner to help you grow from strength to strength who will celebrate your wins, and help you get back on your feet when things don't go according to plan. In summary Purposeful Group was formed by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs and we understand exactly what it's like trying to start a business from scratch! Now we’re motivated to help others to get started the smart way. We've supported thousands of entrepreneurs and delivered professional business mentoring funded by local and central government, including DCMS and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities. Andrew Paradise writing for Forbes says it very well: “You can ignore the rules and tear up blueprints all you want, and many disruptors have become legendary for doing just that. However, even disruptors need a compass to traverse unexpected peaks and valleys.” A good mentor is a valuable resource, and is one of the best things an entrepreneur can have to take their business to the next level. If you don’t have a mentor, now is the time to find one! Contact us to find out more about our mentoring services. Welcome to this Founder Spotlight interview with Christopher Lier, cofounder of the SaaS startup LeadGen. We met when I was running Office Hours mentoring sessions at Techhub, a coworking space for tech startups last year. In the interview Christopher talks about communicating with cofounders, funding his startup, GDPR compliance for business owners, and working with developers in remote locations. Hi! Please tell us a bit about you, and what you do. My name is Chris, I am a digital marketer and cofounder at LeadGen, a web app to empower marketers in building online lead capture forms to improve their campaign performance. I also run a digital marketing consultancy business which specialises in digital strategy development and lead generation for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies. I grew up in Germany, studied in the UK and now I am based in Shoreditch in London’s Tech ecosystem. I’m passionate about entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and personal development. Thanks Chris. How did you first come to recognise that there was a problem that you could solve? We had been managing landing page campaigns for businesses and realised that there weren’t great solutions for building custom multi-step forms, so we decided to build a tool for our own business and clients. Gradually, we realised that there is a tremendous need in the digital marketing space for creating more effective lead capture forms which made us start LeadGen. How did the business develop from that point? Initially, there was slow progress as we didn’t aim to make a business out of it. Slowly but surely, we decided that this was the SaaS business that we wanted to grow. I also realised that building a product business is much more suited to my strengths, for example in comparison to running a service agency. Today we are getting found online and generating new users everyday. The images below illustrate how LeadGen can be set up to create a user journey that supports the capture of new leads. How has life changed since you started your business? Building a business is a commitment. I learned that one has to take full responsibility for whatever is happening. I was always an active and ambitious person, but running a startup demands a lot more follow-through and critical thinking to be sure your actions are pushing you in the right direction. Many people think that running a business takes a toll on other aspects of your life. For me, the opposite is true. You have a lot more flexibility and get to do more things. The trick lies in not trying to compromise or balance what you do, but to just go for whatever is important to you. Before I started my digital agency Leadcube in 2017, I was still studying. I gradually found my path and a business partner in the following months after University when I joined a local co-working space in Essex where I used to live at the time. So you started quite young! It also sounds like you’ve also figured out how to work productively so you can get some form of work life balance. The eternal struggle when your business is your baby... You have a co founder at LeadGen. How do you divide work between you? We work based on different responsibility fields and divide the work accordingly. My colleague is in charge of product development, whilst I handle the marketing and growth of the business, which suits both our natural strengths. Having a complementary skill set between co founders when building a startup is way better than coming from the same backgrounds in my view. I agree! The benefit of having a co founder is an alternative perspective and a different set of skills, among other things. How do you work through differences of opinion? It’s actually not too hard when you have a culture of open communication. It’s very important to have the ability to think rationally and aim to keep any personal biases out of discussions. That’s not always easy for sure and requires work on yourself. Disagreement in itself shouldn’t be a problem and is necessary to grow. Also, founders should openly address and share what’s bothering them with their business partners, instead of letting it stay in their minds. This way you can avoid a lot of problems in the first place. These are some of the principles we have that have helped us in our business. It’s an excellent basis for all relationships, and a very healthy way to deal with concerns and disagreements! What else can you tell us about your app? What we want to achieve with LeadGen is to build a tool that marketers can’t live without. The web app is built for marketers to build custom lead capture and multi-step forms for improving lead generation performance. Online forms are essential for web-based businesses. They are the key interface for potential customers to get in touch with companies and their offers. Marketers can use LeadGen to build lead forms, branded in their own company style to match with their web content. This creates a better user experience. LeadGen Forms can be embedded into landing pages and websites to start capturing leads. The forms can link to custom Thank-you messages and can be integrated with any kind of other marketing tools, including CRM systems and email marketing software. There are other cool features like displaying LeadProof messages with the most recently generated leads on landing pages as pop-ups. This creates social proof and helps in capturing more leads by enticing people to fill in the LeadGen form on your page. We also generate stats for our customers using the LeadGen metric dashboard: So..., GDPR! Many email capture forms are no longer compliant and do not cater for the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws, which is a nightmare for companies trying to stay compliant and operate within the law. It's amazing how many lead capture forms and landing page builders STILL have not been adapted to accommodate the new rules. (Rant over!) Can you tell us how companies can make use of your product and still remain compliant with the General Data Protection Regulations? Sure. Many marketers get overwhelmed or intimidated by GDPR. This shouldn’t be such a big problem to spend time worrying about. It should be easy for marketers and companies to cope with the changes that GDPR has brought. In LeadGen forms, marketers can easily enable tick boxes for obtaining the user’s consent to subscribe to newsletters or lists as part of lead offers. In this part of the lead form, links can be added to refer to legal agreements, including privacy policies and terms and conditions. Lead forms can also be customised with text sections to specify the offering and a note about opt-ins for email marketing. That's really great to hear as it means that your clients have one less thing to worry about! I also wanted to ask you about your involvement in startup competitions. Have you taken part in any pitch competitions? What was your experience like? I’ve taken part in a few competitions. Right at the start of my entrepreneurial journey, I managed to win a startup grant from the University I studied at, which was nice in the early days. I also participated in Techhub Demo night at Google Campus in London, where startups present in front of an audience of tech enthusiasts and investors. I can recommend pitch events and startup competitions to gain experience and get feedback in front of audiences. The more you practice, the more likely you are to “nail” it when you have to do a really important pitch, so I’d advise readers to practice whenever you can! How are you currently funding the growth of your startup? We haven’t raised funding, we’re using the profits from providing digital marketing and web design services to cover R&D investments. My best tip for fundraising is to go through connections and introductions rather than pitching directly to the investor. And obviously be extremely well prepared and able to answer any type of question about your business. Let’s talk about product build and developers next! Your development is done from India, correct? Can you tell us more about this, and about what your experience has been like? Yes, we have developers based in India. I can say that having remote staff is a great way of growing a business. I can’t see much of a difference vs. having everyone together in one place. Regarding the Indian market, it’s mainly my co-founder dealing with it. He knows the local market which is a tremendous help. For a founder from Europe with no background or experience in this market, cultural differences can be a real challenge and it might be better to start building the business from other locations initially. What stage are you at with your business today? We are still at an early stage. The product is live and we’re continuously building a bigger user base. The main priority will remain the improvement of the product, and the user experience until we can concentrate more on marketing. We have close contact with users and also have a Facebook group where we gain a lot of insight into the experiences that users have with the tool and what features they request. Feel free to join at this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/leadgenapp. Thanks for sharing! What’s been the best thing about your journey so far? Without doubt, the people I get to meet on this journey. I really enjoy building a team and striving towards goals together. But even beyond that, as a founder you can get to know many entrepreneurs and interesting people to learn from and work with. What has been your biggest challenge so far? Balancing short-term and long-term results. On the one hand, you know that you need to build a great product, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Sales do not come quickly in a product business when starting it from scratch. Since we are self-funded, we need to find other ways to provide value to the marketplace with services. Balancing those two goals and activities is difficult. What would you do differently if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice? To start earlier while I had more time available, e.g in University. Ideally, getting a mentor early on in the journey and also finding the right environment to work from. What’s next for your business? A lot of work on the product, improving the user experience, and hiring more staff so we can grow. Where can people find you online? For marketers and anyone interested in digital marketing, the best place to go is our website www.leadgenapp.io where you can start testing our tool LeadGen App for free. The Facebook community Lead Generators https://www.facebook.com/groups/leadgenapp is a great place to connect with us and other digital marketers. Thanks Christopher! We wish you, your cofounder, and LeadGen all the best for the future. 12/4/2021 0 Comments Founder's Spotlight with Miriam Pierre: The lowdown on hiring and managing interns!Our latest Founder's Spotlight interview features Miriam Pierre from Nurture Collective. Miriam and I met through We in Social Tech - a tech for good accelerator for female-led businesses where we provide our mentoring services and deliver our Tech Startup Academy™ workshops. Miriam was selected as one of twenty entrepreneurs to join Cohort 2 of the programme. Hiring interns is a popular way to get much needed help with building startups, and Miriam gave us the scoop on her first experience with hiring and managing an intern. Hi Miriam! How’s it going? Please tell us about your business. Nurture Collective is an online marketplace for ethical children’s clothing, toys and gifts for those aged 0-12yrs. We want to empower mamas to make informed choices when buying products and make it easier for them to shop more consciously. What is your opinion about the value of hiring interns? For my business I would see the hiring of an intern as being super positive. It gave me what I was looking for – freeing up some time to work ‘on’ and not ‘in’ the business, but equally led to some things I wasn’t quite expecting. It’s lonely being a founder and it was great to be challenged and to be able to talk through proposed approaches with someone else. For my intern, hopefully it was positive in building their CV and enabling them to be right at the heart of a growing business. I’d love you to tell us about some of your highs and lows with working with interns. What have you learned, and what would you do differently if you were starting again from scratch? The highs have been: 1) the challenge and companionship 2) having taken the time to hire a really high quality intern, spending the time to nurture them, and now being in a position where things are happening in the business and I’m not always having to do it – it sometimes it feels magical! I guess there haven't been many lows but there are times early on where you are investing precious time when you are hoping the returns will come – for me it certainly worked out. One of the lows which is yet to come is when my intern has to move on to a permanent role – I will miss her as a person and for her support, but I will be so grateful for her contribution to Nurture and hopefully we have helped on her journey as well. I hear you! Things happening that you didn't have to do yourself? It's almost luxurious after the slog of pushing the rock uphill all by yourself! It's a great point. You have to invest, to reap the benefits sometimes. Often interns may not be productive from day 1, and entrepreneurs that expect this can end up frustrated and disappointed. Founders should expect to provide training, and very clear direction… You need to be able to communicate effectively remotely - there are some great tools to plan and organise and I personally recommend Google docs and Trello. It’s so important to be really clear on what you want to achieve with your intern and then how they are going to complete tasks within a realistic time frame. Specifically, if it's a marketing role you need to be really clear on your brand guidelines and then have it written on a doc you can share. I recommend Trello. Then your intern has this as a reference to better understand your brand. Absolutely. I'm delighted to see you're doing so well with that. It's something I always talk about in our Marketing for Tech Startups workshop. It's an approach which prevents a lot of confusion and wasted time. Coming from a corporate background I see no reason why small businesses and startups should not develop systems and frameworks as soon as possible to keep things organised. Miriam, what kind of work did you hire your intern to do? We hired an intern to help with our digital marketing which can definitely seem overwhelming - particularly as we are on 4 platforms! It’s great to have fresh eyes and input into the planning and creating of our content. Can you share your top tips on how and where to hire interns from? I think treating it like a normal recruitment process is really important. I prepared a job specification, interviewed candidates, gave feedback and set a task for interviewees to undertake. It really gave a strong framework to assess people fairly. In terms of the actual platforms, I used Indeed, which is a well-known job site. It was free to place the ad and quite straightforward to post it. You can even talk to a recruiter to help you with wording and placement and I had a really good level of interest. Thanks, that's a great tip to end on! Having a recruiter to advise is extremely helpful, especially if you're new to hiring staff. Thanks for sharing your experience Miriam, and best of luck with your business. You can find out more about Nurture Collective here: https://www.nurturecollective.co.uk/ Before you go, I'd like to share some more information about interns. Internships usually run for 4-12 weeks. You will need to observe the minimum wage based on the intern's age, and even charities may need to cover travel expenses and lunch for interns as a minimum. Please take a look at the latest guidance from the government on these matters on the Gov.UK website. Work placements may be quite short, and be paid, or unpaid, and run for between 1 and 4 weeks, however, some industrial placements that take place as part of a higher-education course may continue over a longer period, often up to a period of 1 year. Indeed was mentioned as a place to hire interns in this post, however you might also consider Workinstartups.com, and contacting local university career and employability teams. These department(s) will discuss your role(s), explain how they can help, and let you know how much you will need to pay to hire students. In addition to explaining your requirements, you may need to complete paperwork related to student risk assessments, and health and safety (in the UK you don't need to have a written health and safety policy if you have five or fewer staff), and to confirm that you have employer's liability insurance, which may be required if the university itself does not provide this cover under its own insurance policy. We recommend that you request access to forms and paperwork up front so you can look it over, make sure that you can comply, clarify requirements, and ask questions before you attempt to start the hiring process. Work experience gives young people exposure to the world of work for a shorter period of time, and may be paid or unpaid based on the nature of the work, and the young person's age. Getting access to advice about hiring Understanding all the terminology, and do's and don'ts associated with hiring can be a minefield! We have briefly discussed internships, work placements, and work experience, but these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. There are a huge number of "work statuses" that can be assigned to people who work for you, and it is important to understand the implications associated with them. You may find it helpful to get some free advice from Acas, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (UK) based on your own specific circumstances. According to the Gov.UK website: Acas provides free and confidential advice to employers, employees and their representatives on employment rights, best practice and policies, and resolving workplace conflict. The helpline has a free translation service for over 100 languages. They can be reached via telephone, or contacted via email. You can find information about the Acas helpline here. If you are looking for interns, Purposeful Group is currently powering Capital Enterprise's Talent Incubator to support students and recent grads with upskilling and finding positions as interns this Summer. If you'd be interested in interviewing any young people to work at your business who are highly motivated and have undertaken a number of practical assignments and attended live online workshops to develop their workplace skills, please contact us at hi@purposefulgroup.com, or contact Capital Enterprise. Author: K.N. Kukoyi Last year was an eventful year for Purposeful Group (formerly Purposeful Products).
I'd like to say a huge thanks to all the clients we worked with in 2019, it was an a pleasure to work and collaborate with some amazing pre-accelerators, accelerators, universities and enterprise hubs, and other organisations supporting entrepreneurship, along with an incredibly diverse and impressive range of founders. In 2019 we:
In 2019, we launched our international Community and Centre for Learning for non-technical founders, our Tech Academy™ business school offering professional guidance to tech startups, and had over 100 software entrepreneurs progress their businesses with our tech specific workshops and programmes during our pilot phase, with more entrepreneurs giving our content an excellent rating than any other score. We are recognised and registered as a provider of adult learning and education. Our content has also been certified, and we are able to offer accredited diplomas to entrepreneurs that wish to have an official record of their learning. In November 2019 our CEO & Founder, Kay Kukoyi CSM FITOL, a software delivery specialist, global tech startup mentor, speaker, author, and lecturer was recognised by the Financial Times, Inclusive Boards and Tech Alliance on the #IB100 list of the 100 Most Influential BAME Leaders in the UK Technology Sector. In 2019, Kay also had the honour of being a grand finals judge at the national pitch TATA Varsity Pitch competition, deciding the winner of a £15,000 equity-free prize along with Tim Jones CBE - Executive Director of Tata Ltd, and Angelica Malin Editor-in-Chief of About Time Magazine and Founder of the About Time Academy. If you are interested in accessing specialist, quality content for your cohort of tech startups, we have over 60 hours of content to support tech founders, small business owners, and freelancers in achieving their desired outcomes. To join our fast-growing public-facing community, you can join us here: UK / Europe: https://www.meetup.com/techstartupacademy/ North America, Rest of the World: https://www.meetup.com/techstartupacademy-intl/ 5/9/2019 0 Comments STJOHN DEAKINS OF CITIZENME - HOW WE PROVIDE powerful research INSIGHTS FOR BUSINESSESAs a tech startup mentor, I recommend tech, resources, and tools to startups to support them in building their businesses. For this reason, I was excited to interview StJohn Deakins, who is the Founder and CEO at CitizenMe, a product that helps brands to connect and engage with their audiences through their web and native mobile apps. I believe there's a huge amount of potential for startups to use tools like this to help validate their ideas and increase the amount of quality information available to aid decision making. Is that idea hot, or not? Are you picking the best possible features for your MVP? The answers to these questions need quality external input to make sure that your assumptions are correct, and that you're steering your product (and business) in the right direction. I have a market research background, and used to interview MPs, journalists, corporates, and SMEs, as well as running focus groups with members of the public. In this post, I'll be drawing on expert insights from CitizenMe! Welcome StJohn! Thanks Kay, it’s great to speak with you! What exactly does CitizenMe do? In a nutshell, CitizenMe is working to empower individuals and organisations with data to create a sustainable digital future. We believe that data has immense potential to help us all perform better, both in business and our lives. To enable this, we built a two-sided personal data marketplace consisting of a Citizen (consumer) facing mobile application (iOS and Android) acting as a distributed data store, and a customer web interface where clients (companies, health researchers and other organisations) can request data globally. This all happens in a fair and secure way which brings value to everyone involved. What are the key problems that your product solves? Data has immense value for us all because it can uncover deep insights into behaviours, preferences, trends and more. However, the data exchange industry as it exists now is highly flawed. Data is being bought, sold and resold without individuals’ consent, awareness or participation. This is not just ethically wrong but also impacts the many organisations around the world who depend on this low quality data being sold to them to make important business decisions. Additionally, the benefits of deep data insights, both at a professional as well as individual level, are currently only accessible to a marginal group of large corporations. CitizenMe wants to solve these challenges. Our Citizen-facing app empowers individuals to better understand, control and benefit from their own data. This in turn improves the quality and accuracy of the data that our clients can request. And on both fronts, we make gathering data insights more accessible and affordable to all. Can you provide a few practical examples of how your tool is used by businesses? Sure! We’ve worked on a range of projects for different types of clients. For example, a small London-based health food company used our platform to carry out some concept testing for new packaging. We provided some support with the questionnaire, it then got published to a custom audience of Londoners and our client saw results coming in within the hour. Another example would be the advertising agency, OMD who integrated psychometrics, smartphone and app usage data and social media activity, to better define and understand audience profiles. Using this combination of survey data and digital behavioural data available on our platform, they were able to unlock new insights about their client’s audiences, defined around customer interests and digital behaviours. Those are really meaningful insights, but that's also super fast - data on-tap! Which scenarios do you think best suit your product? Our self-service exchange platform is very versatile so it suits many different scenarios. For instance, an SMB / SME looking to do accurate, in the moment concept testing would find our platform ideal. The same is true for a large multinational looking to run cross-country opinion research on a new product concept. CitizenMe's Exchange platform Can your app be used for A / B testing? How would that work? Absolutely! Just set up a survey in your CitizenMe account, selecting the audience that you wish to target. Duplicate the survey and amend the item to be tested and launch both surveys at the same time. I’d recommend trying the “Concept question” function if you also want to show images or videos. Excellent! Thanks for explaining how to get that done. The way that questions are posed during customer interviews is important to avoid introducing bias, which can lead to founders gathering inaccurate results, or drawing the wrong conclusions from the data they collect. What would you say are the biggest mistakes made by companies trying to conduct research, and gather data for their businesses? For me, having a well defined brief is the most important aspect of any research project. If you don’t know for certain why you are conducting research, it becomes really difficult to design a well thought out research project and to ensure you are obtaining the data that will help you to understand your research problem. We’re very happy to assist clients in defining the ‘why’ on a project to ensure we deliver the right answers. When it comes to bias, it’s really important to ensure there is a balance. Not just for data quality, but also for the experience of the participants. If you’re concerned about being given the reigns on a research project, reach out to us. We provide research best practice workshops and drop-in sessions packed with questionnaire design tips. Not only that, we also have a professional services team who are happy to help at any stage of the project. That's great - really useful and will give businesses the confidence that they done things the right way, and haven't made any fundamental mistakes! Do you have any killer tips on research best practice, and for succeeding with your platform? Yes! Book a research best practice workshop or drop-in session with us. Other than that, it’s all about having that well-defined brief and working from there. A brief can be anything from an internal plan (if using self-service), an email to a market research agency or an official document… but there are always important factors to consider, for example the: End goal – why are you planning to conduct market research? Timings – when do you need to deliver on the results of the research? Cost – what is your budget? Sample – who do you need to speak to? Data – what information do you need to know? Can you tell us more about the support with question design and planning that you offer? How does this work? Our Exchange platform is built to be self service, but we offer a range of services ranging from basic support to consulting, access to an expert research network and full services. We can cover reporting, translations, writing up survey questions, reviewing surveys, inputting the information onto the platform on your behalf and more. You can also check our our guides that provide helpful tips on how to conduct different aspects of research. What is THE coolest feature that customers gain access to when they use your product? Being able to gather deep insights, in real time. When we do live demos, the speed at which we get the deep psychographic data on top of the replies to more traditional questions, is what gets people’s jaws dropping! We also have a very exciting self-service A.I. analytics feature being developed that will enable you to analyse different clusters and trends in your data to a whole new level… It’s coming out soon so let us know if you’re interested, we’d love to give you a sneak peak! Yes, please - I'll look forward to having a preview! What's the best way for people to get in touch with you StJohn? Simply drop us an email at insight@citizenme.com, or sign up free of charge to the client CitizenMe Exchange platform to start having a look around. You can also download our app for personal use. Thanks StJohn, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks Kay! AuthorKay Kukoyi (K.N. Kukoyi CSM FITOL). 4/9/2019 0 Comments The "CTO blues" are real! :(I design and run specialist workshops and programmes which simplify the process of starting and running a tech startup business. I do this mainly for the non-technical founders of tech startup businesses, and of all the workshops I run, the one on working with developers gets the most extreme reaction. On several occasions I've seen both men and women shaking with laughter in their chairs, and even (very literally) crying with laughter. Why? Well, when I go through all the horror scenarios, common mistakes, and things that go wrong during the hiring, and build processes, people identify with the stories of woe because they've been caught by the same pitfalls themselves. (Sadly, it's not because I missed my calling as a standup comedienne!) Whilst I'm glad they see they funny side when they reflect on their experiences, I'm on a mission to catch people before they experience these "tech startup dramas." The CTO blues are "a thing". They are a common phenomenon - so common I came up with a name and a song about them(!), yet for each entrepreneur who gets into trouble in this area, it will feel like a unique and lonely experience, and despite entrepreneurs' laughter, the CTO blues are not funny at all. So what are these CTO blues? This is a term I use to describe a scenario where founders are experiencing difficulties with their CTO or developer. Sometimes things get serious - screaming matches and stress related illnesses caused by breakdowns in developer-entrepreneur relationships are not uncommon, and neither are lost investors due to delays. Tech can be complex, as can working with other people, especially when you don't speak "tech" and haven't managed a technical project or technical people before. Don't wing it - come along to the workshop BEFORE you get burned, rather than seeking help after you have a negative experience! The next How to Hire a Developer & Manage a Technical Team workshop is on Wednesday, 11th September at 6 p.m. and there are just a few spots left. We'll take a deep dive into hiring, and managing your tech team - there will be lots of discussion, you're free to ask me anything you like, and you'll come away with a rich picture of the dos and don'ts, and a structure you can use to move forward. Make sure you set yourself up for success, and avoid painful misadventures as the CEO and founder of a tech driven business. Book your ticket on Eventbrite here: http://bit.ly/hire-manage-developers, or send us a message if you have any questions! 19/8/2019 0 Comments FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT - INTERVIEW WITH IoT entrepreneur nassia skoulikariti: how i got started & hired my all-star female DEVELOPMENT teamWe're excited to announce that this blog post is the first of a new category of interviews focused on showcasing the tech startup talent that Purposeful Products and Tech Startup Academy™ have worked with. Following our interview with Founders 50 entrepreneur Sheena Shah, we're pleased to have another interview with a female founder in tech, Nassia Skoulikariti, the CEO and founder of the Internet of Things startup Apiro Data Ltd. Some fast facts - Sheena's tech team is 50% female, and Nassia's tech team is 80% female! Nassia talks about this during the interview, so let's begin! Welcome to the Purposeful Products Blog Nassia. Can you share your origin story with us? I have more than 25 years of international experience in Telecoms, Cloud communications and IoT, helping global organisations to develop and grow. Prior to founding Apiro Data Ltd, I worked for several global companies in countries including the US, UK, The Netherlands, Greece, India and Hong Kong, and managed culturally diverse commercial and technical teams globally. As a result I have developed a “people first” attitude, and I'm on a personal quest to find ways to humanise technology and make it easy to implement and manage. At Apiro Data we connect people, places and things through our End2End Internet of Things (IoT) platform, Infinity Core and our partner ecosystem. Our modular, flexible solutions allow customers to expedite their connected device plans, chose what fits their needs, KPIs and budget, and grow at their own pace while minimising their investment risk. We work with businesses to create a proof of concept based on where they are on their digital transformation journey, which they can then pilot, and scale. An iterative process that gives the client something to work with from a simple starting point... Clients are often nervous about the result they will get, especially with higher-ticket / enterprise software solution. Nassia has a backgroud in this area, but if you're an entrepreneur who's new to enterprise solutions, offering a paid service to clients to provide a tailored poc (proof of concept) is a good way to address concerns. How has life changed since you started this business? I'm living a better version of my life. Since starting Apiro Data I feel more empowered. I went through a deep introspection to understand where I am, what I know, and how I could apply all my previous experience to my start-up. The company is bootstrapped, so I take on many different roles; some I had prior experience in, others I didn’t and had to take classes to gain a better understanding. I've realised it takes a lot of courage to put your money where your mouth is, and take action while staying true to your beliefs and values. I enjoy building and creating things, so founding a company that's building enterprise software and utilising IoT and AI is like planting a seed and watching it grow. What else can you tell us about your app? Although IoT and M2M (machine-to-machine communication) has been around for some time now, there is still a lack of qualified IoT experts and solutions architects to assist with planning and designing software for clients. We work with the customer to accelerate their digital transformation and deployment using an agile approach from exploration, and deployment to commercialisation. With Apiro Data solutions and products, companies can start small and focus on their needs, KPIs and budget. Our solutions are easy and fast to integrate - it's a model that allows customers to grow at their own pace. As a result customers are able to reap the significant gains of IoT faster, save money and increase their customer satisfaction and retention. How did you first come to recognise there was a problem that you could solve? IoT and IoT services have been around for several years. However, the expertise pool is still limited. There are a lot of people claiming they know IoT but very few do. I saw the need for modular solutions which work well and are easy to use. The market is crowded, and 80% of the business is run by the Big 3 (Amazon, Google and IBM.) We're a boutique IoT company, and are very nimble - we help customer stop wasting money on platforms they can’t use due to complexity, or lack of integration. How did the business develop from this point? It's key for us to have a strong partner ecosystem, so we've been working on two fronts, building our platform and companion app (Infinity Core) and building our partner network for the elements we don’t cover directly, such as the sensors needed for connected devices, and the connectivity for the communication between the smart devices and the platform. What stage are you at with your business? We have the first version of our platform and app developed and we're working on a handful of fascinating projects across different industries, such as logistics, healthcare and utilities. What’s been the best thing about your journey so far? Where do I start? There are so many things I can choose, from the way I feel, to the energy it gives me… However, one of the best things is that at Apiro Data we are mainly females, and my development team is all female. I always wished to find a way to share my experience and empower other women and Apiro Data is giving me that chance to give a little bit back. Achieving gender parity in teams is particularly challenging in tech due to the relatively small percentage of women in the industry. How did you achieve this?! Actually, we do have a man in the company, Swapnil. He's a great guy, and is our SVP of Product. Out of the 5 people with Apiro Data, four are females. The challenge was to find strong female developers that were willing to work for a start-up and also work remotely. It is not the done thing in India, and I have to give Swapnil the credit for helping me find the right candidates. We used a recruitment agency, and personal referrals. I'm really curious to hear your answer to this question... Is there a difference in how the genders approach development work? All my previous technical teams were mainly male, so this is a first for me! Females are more empathetic in their approach to problem solving. They are not as vocal and require nurturing, time and space to grow and flourish. At the same time, they focus on getting what we need to get done completed on time, and with great attention to detail. Females need to understand what we are building on a deeper level before they start developing. That sounds great - I strongly believe that developers with a strong drive to understand and clarify what's needed really help themselves and their employer (or client) to succeed! What's been your biggest challenge so far, Nassia? Concentrating on one new idea at a time… IoT solutions are wide and varied. There are so many challenges we can solve with connecting, monitoring, and analysing the world around us. It’s extremely important for a young start up to concentrate on concrete and tested solutions based on customers' needs. I agree. I think this is a curse of the entrepreneurial mindset - on the flip side, it can actually be crippling, because you may be able to see too many paths that you might take. It's advisable to stay focused in order to get the business off the ground. That doesn't mean not being innovative, but it's about risk reduction and producing a stable, reliable product in the minimum amount of time so you can take your product to market quickly! What would you do differently if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice now you’re “older and wiser”? Start sooner / earlier. Always trust your abilities and your determination to get things done! What’s next for your business? We have very ambitious plans for the future, the next phase for us is to use AI power our platform. Impressive. I wish you and Apiro Data all the best, Nassia! Where can people find you? People can reach out to us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and via our website: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nassiaskoulikariti/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/apirodata/ Web: www.apirodata.io If you're interested in IoT, you may also be interested in this article about the latest trends for IoT for startups. AuthorKay Kukoyi (K.N. Kukoyi CSM FITOL). As a tech startup mentor, I'm often invited to attend pitch events. I've attended several this Summer and wanted to write a short summary about them. The Startups for Africa Showcase, Google Campus There were 5 startups, each delivering 5 minute pitches, followed by a Q&A session. Startups included: • Smiling Through Light, which employs local women to provide clean, reliable and sustainable energy in Sierra Leone and Africa. Mariama Kamara. #smilingthroughlight • Survey54, that provides research data for businesses operating in emerging markets, including Africa, and the Middle East. Stephan Eyeson. #survey54 • AfriClick, a networking and dating app for black African and Caribbean professionals and creatives. Dayo Akinrinade. #africlick • Kapsule, a pharmaceutical distributor assuring affordable, authentic and accessible medicines delivered to patients in Africa via blockchain technology. David Chen. #kapsule.life • FroHub, the social marketplace for black hair, beauty and fashion. Rahel Tesfai. #frohub Some interesting highlights: Mariama explaining her company's focus on stories to develop rapport and promote sales. Western consumers have reached the point of “survey fatigue.” However, this trend is not prevalent in Africa yet and many Africans are happy to chat with researchers! AfriClick allows sickle cell carriers to date safely. Africans pay around 20x more for their medicines, but as many as 1 in 6 products are counterfeit which leads to many thousands of deaths every year. Thanks to Bayo Adelaja of #doitnownow for hosting such a thought provoking showcase! Contact her, or the founders to find out more, or if you'd like to invest!A shout out to new and diverse tech startups! This week I attended the Startups for Africa Showcase at Google Campus. There were 5 startups, each delivering 5 minute pitches, followed by a Q&A session. Startups included: • Smiling Through Light, which employs local women to provide clean, reliable and sustainable energy in Sierra Leone and Africa. Mariama Kamara. #smilingthroughlight • Survey54, that provides research data for businesses operating in emerging markets, including Africa, and the Middle East. Stephan Eyeson. #survey54 • AfriClick, a networking and dating app for black African and Caribbean professionals and creatives. Dayo Akinrinade. #africlick • Kapsule, a pharmaceutical distributor assuring affordable, authentic and accessible medicines delivered to patients in Africa via blockchain technology. David Chen. #kapsule.life • FroHub, the social marketplace for black hair, beauty and fashion. Rahel Tesfai. #frohub Some interesting highlights: Mariama explaining her company's focus on stories to develop rapport and promote sales. Western consumers have reached the point of “survey fatigue.” However, this trend is not prevalent in Africa yet and many Africans are happy to chat with researchers! AfriClick allows sickle cell carriers to date safely. Africans pay around 20x more for their medicines, but as many as 1 in 6 products are counterfeit which leads to many thousands of deaths every year. Thanks to Bayo Adelaja of #doitnownow for hosting such a thought provoking showcase! Contact her, or the founders to find out more, or if you'd like to invest!A shout out to new and diverse tech startups! This week I attended the Startups for Africa Showcase at Google Campus. There were 5 startups, each delivering 5 minute pitches, followed by a Q&A session. Startups included: • Smiling Through Light, which employs local women to provide clean, reliable and sustainable energy in Sierra Leone and Africa. Mariama Kamara. #smilingthroughlight • Survey54, that provides research data for businesses operating in emerging markets, including Africa, and the Middle East. Stephan Eyeson. #survey54 • AfriClick, a networking and dating app for black African and Caribbean professionals and creatives. Dayo Akinrinade. #africlick • Kapsule, a pharmaceutical distributor assuring affordable, authentic and accessible medicines delivered to patients in Africa via blockchain technology. David Chen. #kapsule.life • FroHub, the social marketplace for black hair, beauty and fashion. Rahel Tesfai. #frohub Some interesting highlights: Mariama explaining her company's focus on stories to develop rapport and promote sales. Western consumers have reached the point of “survey fatigue.” However, this trend is not prevalent in Africa yet and many Africans are happy to chat with researchers! AfriClick allows sickle cell carriers to date safely. Africans pay around 20x more for their medicines, but as many as 1 in 6 products are counterfeit which leads to many thousands of deaths every year. Thanks to Bayo Adelaja of #doitnownow for hosting such a thought provoking showcase! Contact her, or the founders to find out more, or if you'd like to invest! All hashtags are for Instagram. SETsquared Graduate Acceleration Showcase 2019 I was invited to attend a series of pitches at Deloitte's auditorium at New Street Square, London in June, where 19 startups from the universities of Southampton, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, and Surrey pitched their startups. The shadow minister for BEIS Dr Alan Whitehead MP attended, and gave an introduction to the final pitch session of the day. Just a few of the startups that pitched included:
It’s great to see all the fresh ideas coming our way! If you're a VC, or Angel, please get in touch with SETsquared regarding investment opportunities. Zinc Accelerator, Show and Tell The aim was to showcase Zinc's mission lead startups, focused on supporting people and locations at risk of being left behind by globalisation and automation. From mental health and unemployment, to the exposure of sexual harrassment, and the difficulties that poor access to transportation creates, it was an enlightening un-demo day. The entrepreneurs did a great job of painting a picture of what life looks like for the people and communities affected by these issues. AuthorKay Kukoyi (K.N. Kukoyi CSM FITOL). Last year I interviewed a number of tech startup founders from around the world, and we discussed their stories, strategies and approaches to building their businesses. I had some great conversations, and there was a LOT of valuable knowledge shared (so much in fact, that the interviews became a book), however, none of the interviewees were female! This year I will be featuring more interviews with female founders in tech on the Purposeful Products blog. The very first interview with a female founder starts here, with Sheena Shah, the founder of ElevatHer, a networking app available on the web, and as a native app in the Google Play and App Stores. Sheena is featured on the FT Founders' 50 list, which recognises fintech's most inspirational founders. Hi Sheena, welcome. It's great to speak to you! Please tell us a bit about you, and what you do. Hello! I'm the founder of a networking app called ElevatHer, which empowers women in fintech and finance by giving them the edge, both through the power of networking and the tools for staying ahead of the curve by keeping up to date with the latest industry events. Prior to that I was working at a proprietary trading firm for 4 years. I’ve been the only woman in my team in many of my roles in tech. What was that experience like for you as a woman on the trading floor? Honestly, I worked with a great bunch of talented guys that would go out of their way to make me feel included, plus the upside was that there was never a queue for the ladies’ bathroom! But on a serious note even though I loved working with my colleagues, I did miss the connection and network of females that bring a different perspective. It sounds like your experience was a good one. I ended up becoming one of the lads in some of the companies of the companies that I worked for, which was often very amusing, but as you say, it can be nice to have female company as well! When did you first start working on the idea for ElevatHer? The idea came to me about a year ago, from both my personal and professional experiences that I’ve had over the course of my career, which included moving from sell, to buy side and taking jobs across continents. One of the aspects I really cherish is the network that I've built over the years, but it became a real challenge to maintain and expand that network when I grew in my role, which helped me spin off the idea of developing a platform where women can connect on both experiences and common interests instead of just name and company. What was the defining moment that helped you decide that it was time to leave your day job? I kept thinking to myself: "When is the perfect time to leave?" There never really is one! I started to burn out doing 2 jobs while juggling personal commitments and left in January, 2019 after one year of working at both my day job and on ElevatHer. I knew International Women’s Day was coming up, so for me that was the perfect date to launch which gave me the motivation to leave and go all in. I don’t think I would have ever left if I hadn’t given myself that deadline. What was it like for you when you finally quit? How do I even put it into words?! Every emotion possible was running through me – I was nervous, scared, excited with my adrenaline sky high and the weird thing is, I still feel that 7 months in! What has been your biggest challenge so far? As someone who is very new to the startup world I knew there would be plenty of challenges but what I never expected it would be so daunting to be a spokesperson/ambassador for your brand. You've got to learn to be confident, which is a hurdle in itself, and imposter syndrome doesn’t help! It's a challenge that hopefully will get easier with experience, but I doubt will ever disappear. Thanks for sharing that. That's really honest feedback. I'm a big believer in repeating the message that it does feel challenging to step into all these roles and that it's 100% normal to feel this way. When people don't talk about this stuff others are left thinking that they're odd and that it's only them that struggle. It's a false story to tell ourselves that everyone else has it figured out. The phrase: "Feel the fear and do it anyway", is as relevant as it ever was. Running a business and stretching yourself IS going to be uncomfortable, but you've got to do it regardless - for your own happiness, progress, personal growth, and to get where you want to be! You can't not move forward just because it feels uncomfortable, right? O.k. I've stepped off my soapbox now! What's been your biggest tech related challenge, Sheena? I like to be hands on, so the main challenges and frustrations I found were my own limitations having not come from a tech background. A lot of my time went into educating myself and having on the job training from my developers. You do have to get up to speed on the tech side, at least to a degree, otherwise you can end up owning a business you don't fully understand. From working with tech founders I know that the developer - entrepreneur relationship can be a source of conflict, so it's great that you've had a positive experience! What do you wish someone had told you before you started your business? That you learn more from failing. I was so paranoid that I had to get everything right the first time, which ended up costing me a lot of time and unnecessary worry. What’s been the best thing about your journey so far? Every person that has come into my life has influenced or taught me something. They have come from different walks of life and had different experiences. Everyone can teach you something new, it’s up to you to be open minded and learn from them. That's a great philosophy. On that theme, someone once told me that people enter your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime... Where did you find the developers that helped you build the ElevatHer app? OK, so a bit of background before I answer that question… The reason I created ElevatHer is so the industry can widen the diversity talent pool and open up opportunities for women to progress up the career ladder, and to support women through a network. We all have different attributes and skills-sets, and businesses will not adapt, innovate or progress as quickly, or efficiently if everyone in the pool is ‘the same’. With that in mind, it was vital that my developers mirrored ElevatHer’s goal and understood the gravity of what we were trying to develop, which is why I looked high and low to find a team with a 50/50 gender split. Equality starts at home! I did a lot of research online to find the developers and in the end, I was introduced through a family member. I went over to their offices and we had a chat about the app. Not coming from a tech background meant I was testing the developers’ abilities through softer skills as I knew this would be a constant challenge. They took their time to explain how the process works and showed me a few examples of their previous work. We have a really good relationship, which became more apparent especially in the initial stages of making the app. I would work from their offices because I wanted to learn the more technical side of things, and they needed me to explain how the algorithm should work with the app’s interface Hold on to that team! I’ve even heard of people who’ve had a personal introduction having to fire their developer and start again from scratch! It's a real problem, and I created a workshop on how to hire and manage software developers to ensure that non-technical entrepreneurs get better results with less drama! The next workshop will run in August / September and you can contact us to be notified of the next workshop date. You can find an example of the workshop here. So... Google Play Store or App Store? Which gets your vote? As a tech company which needs to push through updated versions of the apps - always Google Play, but as a user App store! Definitely! If you're publishing apps to the App Store, allow lots of extra time for failed submissions of your app. Apple are known for being very strict in reviewing apps and managing their app submission process, and it's common for them to frequently bounce app back to development teams with a list of amends that need to be made to your app before they'll even accept it into the App Store. Sheena, what drove your decision about which platforms to be on? I wanted the app to be user friendly and have an inclusive community so the decision was easy… be everywhere! Hence why we are both on iOS and Android, but are also web based too. (A quick note here that managing what is essentially 3 different pieces of software can be time consuming, and expensive, so if you're planning an MVP you might also want to consider which platforms to build traction on first.) What’s next for ElevatHer? Expand, expand expand! We're currently available in the UK but are looking at expanding into other countries. Where can people find you? You can find us at https://elevather.com/, which has links to both our Android and iOS apps. AuthorPurposeful Products is a business and technology consultancy that supports pre-seed /early stage tech startups led by founders without a technical background. 20/6/2019 0 Comments opportunities for Startups / Tech Startups on incubators & accelerators in london, June 2019I’ve been putting together a list of opportunities on startup incubators, and accelerators for the members of some of my tech meetup groups, and thought it made sense to share it more widely. At Purposeful Products we run our own programme with specialist content for tech startup founders / entrepreneurs running tech driven businesses, but we collaborate with a number of accelerators and actively cross promote services and resources because it's important to share knowledge! If I’ve missed any hot opportunities, please comment, or message me, and I'll add them here, and if you know anyone this information would benefit, please share the love - send them a link, or post on social channels so people can apply! NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator Hub (national coverage) NatWest runs 3 fully funded programmes for new and aspiring entrepreneurs. Pre-Accelerator – an 8-week online programme for early stage startups, including webinars and workshops. Entrepreneur Accelerator – a 6-month accelerator for high growth startups looking to scale, and includes desk space, support from mentors and advisors, and talks from external experts. The Fintech programme runs in Bristol, Edinburgh, London and Manchester twice a year in April, and October. Start date: Various Duration: 8 weeks, to 6 months depending on the programme Applications open from: Now open for the Accelerator Application cut-off date: Enquire for details https://www.business.natwest.com/business/business-banking/services/entrepreneur-accelerator.html Tech Startup Academy™ Incubator Programme by Purposeful Products (Camden, London) Our programme actively addresses the major pitfalls that affect entrepreneurs new to the tech space. We offer a flexible, “open incubator” which is modular in nature, enabling early stage tech founders from all sectors to explore their most pressing needs via a range of workshops designed specifically with tech focused startups in mind. Our content has been externally assessed, and the Academy has been approved to offer an accredited diploma to entrepreneurs who wish to make their learning official with one of our certified programmes. Purposeful Products is also a service provider, offering access to 50+ hours of tech-focused content to augment existing programmes run by accelerators and other organisations that support entrepreneurship. Benefits include: content focused on the practical aspects of starting and running a tech driven business, founder resources, introductions / connections, community membership, and 1-1 / group mentoring. Start date: Available to the public in London from July 2019, global from August 2019. Currently available to startup accelerators and 3rd party service providers. Duration: Flexible. 8 weeks – 12 months Applications open from: Now open, contact hi@purposefulgroup.com for details. Application cut-off date: None. Each individual will follow their own personal timeline. https://www.purposefulgroup.com/tech-startup-academy.html EIT Changemakers Programme (King's Cross, London) Are you interested in the FoodTech or AgriTech sectors, and in solving major world challenges? EIT Food is Europe’s leading food innovation initiative, supported by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology. The Change Makers Programme gives diverse talent (women and non-binary, LGBTQI+, and black, asian and minority ethnic people) the chance to become agrifood tech innovators and entrepreneurs, through events, mentorship and participation in a "startup weekend" of support and training to tackle the most pressing issues facing the global food system (food, agriculture and fisheries) from how food is produced, distributed, consumed and disposed of, and making the food system healthier, more trusted, and more sustainable. To apply for the EIT FoodTech programme you don't need to have an idea, but need to be enthusiastic, ambitious and interested in launching a startup, or joining a team. The programme is being delivered in collaboration with YSYS, and Impact Hub King's Cross. Participants will pitch their sustainable business ideas for a chance to receive a mix of grant funding and support, worth a total of 25,000 euro, split across 3 winning teams. Start date: There will be meetups in July and August, 2019, with the Changemakers Programme taking place from October 4th-6th, 2019 Applications open from: 24th July, 2019 Application cut-off date: 1st September, 2019 EIT programme details: https://www.eitfood.eu/Entrepreneurship/projects/change-makers Food & Health Meetup (July, 2019): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/eitfoodchangemakers-food-and-health-meetup-tickets-64183504590 Hatch Enterprise programmes (South London) Hatch Enterprise is currently running multiple programmes which offer 3 levels of support to assist female entrepreneurs: Launchpad - (October 2019.) Test your business idea and get access to business workshops and mentoring to develop your idea into an MVP with additional marketing, finance, pitching, and sales support. Incubator - a 6 month programme to grow your business with workshops, 1-2-1 business coaching and mentoring. Accelerator - receive a business audit, and get prepared for scaling and funding with tailored business coaching, financial and legal support, and an opportunity to pitch your business to investors. Start date: October 2019 Application cut off date: See website for details. Applications are now open. Apply here: https://femalefounders.london/ The Company, The Winch (North London) This is a programme for 18-25 year old entrepreneurs. The Company supports young adults with an entrepreneurial spark to take the first (or next step) towards becoming their own boss. The Winch take a holistic approach to working with young entrepreneurs, ensuring that Associates have the professional skills and personal development support needed to succeed. It's a brilliant approach that takes into account entrepreneurs' whole lives, and not just the "business compartment!" Apply here, and please feel free to spread the word to any young people you know that have an idea, and are interested in running their own business! Benefits include: The 12 week programme includes workshops, mentoring and activities, office space, up to 3 years additional support, and the chance to pitch for investment. Start date: September 2019 Applications open from: Open now Application cut off date: September 2019 Duration: 12 weeks Website: https://thewinch.org/services/the-company/ LinkedIn company page: https://lnkd.in/ehRRKk8 We in Social Tech Accelerator (Wood Green, London) Closed for cohort 2, but included because it's well worth keeping an eye out for applications for cohort 3 in Autumn, 2019! We in Social Tech (WiST) is a free 6-month accelerator programme in North London for female-led businesses and applicants can apply if businesses are either female led, or teams are at least 50% female. The programme accepts entrepreneurs who are idea stage, and those that have an existing business, who are social enterprises, community enterprises, or in the "tech for good" space. Benefits include: access to two mentors per business, work space, regular workshops and more. Start date: Cohort 3, January 2020 Duration: 6 months Applications open from: Applications will open again later this year Application cut-off date: TBC https://www.weinsocialtech.co.uk/ Now closed... OpenDoor, Plexal (Stratford, London) Plexal was officially opened by Mayor of London in 2017 and is based on the site of the press centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games in East London. OpenDoor from Plexal is a new programme for startups working on ideas that improve social inclusion. The focus of the first OpenDoor programme is to make work inclusive for everyone and teams should be user-centric with an emphasis on delivering impactful solutions. Qualifying teams need to deliver solutions that: · make it easier for people from under-represented groups to find quality work and thrive in their roles · make workplaces more inclusive · support entrepreneurs with inclusion challenges to start and grow successful businesses Benefits include: support from business leaders, introductions and connections to investors, mentoring and free desk space. Start date: September 2019 Duration: 12 weeks Applications open from: now open Application cut-off date: midnight, 12th July, 2019 https://www.plexal.com/apply-now-for-opendoor-our-inclusion-accelerator-programme/ FoundersDoor (East London / City) FoundersDoor is a pre-accelerator that support 18–24 year olds from diverse backgrounds, helping them to get their startup ideas off the ground. The programme is funded by OneTech, part of Capital Enterprise, and supports underrepresented tech founders in London, and is a stepping stone for young founders to prepare for a full-time accelerator, or their first investment round. Benefits include: Saturday workshops and masterclasses to accelerate startup growth, support and coaching mentorship, invites to events, funding support, free office space at WeWork for 2 months, a network of entrepreneurs, technical experts and investors, a chance to receive equity-free funding and prizes at the end of the programme. Start date: 6th July, 2019 Duration: Ends 18th August, 2019 Applications open from: Now open for the Accelerator Application cut-off date: W/c 24th June. Only startups who have taken part in FoundersWeekend will be eligible. Follow this link to attend the founders weekend: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/onetech-talent-founders-weekend-28-30-june-18-24-year-olds-tickets-60526321858 Zinc – Mission 3 (East London / City) Mission 3 - To add 5 more high-quality years to later life. Zinc is a mission led accelerator that supports entrepreneurs in creating companies that address major social challenges in the developed world. For their 3rd mission they are looking for 50 creative and entrepreneurial individuals who want to transform the quality of later life and have identified 10 opportunity areas. They want to hear from people from across all backgrounds and skill sets including medical and social care professionals, creative technologists, entrepreneurs, designers and creatives, and social scientists. Benefits include workspace in the City of London, connections, coaches, advisors and experts. Entrepreneurs are paid a stipend of £12,000 over the duration of the programme, and Zinc takes 8% equity as a founding shareholder. Start date: 30 September 2019 Duration: 9 months, split into 3 phases – match, hatch and accelerate Applications open from: Now open Application cut-off date: 30th June, 2019 https://www.zinc.vc/mission-3 AuthorKay Kukoyi (K.N. Kukoyi CSM FITOL). Today I wanted to share some information about finding investors. Have you heard of Decksender? It's a brilliant resource for tech startups seeking to raise investment and sending out pitch decks. You can get access to a massive list of investors here. Decksender allows tech startup founders to describe their startups. The app will then match you against every investor on the platform and will guide you towards the best investors to send your pitch to! Here's a huge tip for software entrepreneurs new to raising business investment: focus on angels and "pre-seed" VC's if you're at idea / prototype / MVP or are just launched and still building traction. It's common for entrepreneurs to approach the wrong types of investor, which reduces their strike rate, and is an inefficient use of time. Unless they have a focus on early-stage businesses, most VC's have little interest in startups without any revenue or track record of success as they are classed as too high-risk as an investment. VCs generally invest in more established startups, so unless the VC states otherwise, Angels, friends and family are the best places to secure your first round of investment. To increase your chances of success, align your fundraising efforts to match the specific industries and startup / business stage that investors are most interested in. Many investors state the sectors or types of startups they invest in on their LinkedIn profiles or websites. Investors looking for "seed" stage startups are looking for more established startups with early traction, and those already generating at least a minimum level of monthly revenue, with a clear and realistic strategy to ramp this up. (Once again, it's all about research - read up on the investor / investment company to check whether you qualify.) Series A and B fundraises come much further down the line and startups have usually gone through several rounds of fundraising before reaching this point. https://decksender.com/ 15/5/2019 0 Comments THE AMAZON AWS SUMMIT LONDON, 2019I attended the AWS Summit for the second time last week (Wednesday, 8th May). Here are my notes! I would estimate that it was at least 3-5x larger than last years’ event, based on the number and size of the “theatres” used as breakout rooms and the mini Wembley stadium that was the main auditorium! As a mentor and provider of workshops and a programme for tech startups, I want to be able to point entrepreneurs in the right direction and to help them to understand their options from idea stage right through to planning, prototyping, build, launch and beyond. AWS is THE major player in terms of the number of cloud service offerings available, offering access to many of their services for free to startups for 12 months via their “AWS free tier” initially, and at non-prohibitive price points thereafter, based on pay-as-you-go usage rates. The number of services AWS provides is evolving at an impressive rate, so I attended the Summit to ask questions, and get a handle on new services. It was tough to choose which breakout sessions to attend, (please see the images below) but I chose ones covering machine learning (Become a machine learning developer), computing storage (Amazon EC2 foundations and cost optimisation), microservices (modern application architectures), systems architecture (Are you well architected?), and the use of AI services in applications (Build intelligent apps using AI services). Summit attendees were free to engage in a little "lightning learning" at set times just by sitting in front of the screen and putting on the head phones provided... Breakout sessions A book could be written to cover all the AWS Services and their applications (and I have promised myself not to write any more for now!) but I have summarised some of the sessions I attended and some of the use cases presented, along with links for further investigation. Session 1 - Become a machine learning developer Presentation from Lars Hoogweg, CTO, Lebara. Lebara presented their own case study, discussing the different categories of fraud that the business faces on a regular basis. Lars explained that as a result of using SageMaker, (AWS’s machine learning service) and bringing together subject matter experts from AWS and Lebara, this had enabled them to detect new cases of fraud AND identify further opportunities for fraud detection within 3 days of using the tool. They are currently planning to put these learnings into production. Amazon SageMaker is part of AWS’s 12 month free tier for startups: https://aws.amazon.com/free. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/how-it-works-mlconcepts.html Session 2 - Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) – Computing storage at scale AWS offer pay-as-you-go services, but for larger, and very resource intensive activities, this payment model can become expensive. This is less of an issue for early stage startups, but it’s important for all businesses to forward plan, and I strongly recommend that new startups consider whether the free, or low-cost services they are using today will still be a viable option as they grow. Usage levels increase over time, which can push businesses onto higher price tiers. It’s important to do at least a few sums and some due diligence based on projected future use to see if the service will still be affordable in the future – if not, it means uprooting and moving away from a service you may be otherwise satisfied with to search for alternative suppliers, which can take time, and tie up internal resources. AWS actively supports clients in understanding the value of rightsizing – optimising usage and performance for the most economical price, and offers autoscaling options to achieve a balance. The service assists in a number of ways including scaling dynamically which adjusts services based on “targets” set, and predictive scaling based on trends, and spikes in traffic. The scheduled scaling service can be used to scale and cope with load, adjusting at the right time(s) based on usage trends which are known and already understood by your business. Amazon also offers various instance purchasing options, including Spot – effectively a borrowed, but cheaper resource which Amazon can take back with 2 seconds’ notice, but which is useful for flexible, fault tolerant services running within a business, On demand – useful for handling spikes in traffic, and Reserved Instance (RI) – for steady, ongoing use. Session 5 - Build intelligent apps using AI services I went 50/50 on the 4th and 5th sessions of the day, and moved on from the Are you well architected? session, and luckily managed to catch the live demonstration and case study delivered by Gareth Butler, Senior Programme Manager, at HSBC during this session. With over 235,000 employees, HSBC have a heavy requirement from internal staff for information. The number of queries is both large, and repetitive in nature. HSBC have used AI to create their HSBC Risk Innovation Assistant - a text and voice based information service for staff. Results are returned with matches highlighted in text, and the assistant is also able to “reply” with answers to employees. The assistant is multi-lingual – it detects the language of the query and returns results in this language. (Amazon Translateoffers more than 12 languages including 2 Chinese languages, Arabic, Turkish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.) We saw a live demo of the assistant – Gareth asked it a compliance related question from the stage. The system then replied back to explain the nuances of the relevant compliance rules, and highlighted the potential exposure of HSBC to reputational risk. To set up this sort of service, documents first need to be ingested into Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service), where the content is tagged. It must then be passed to Amazon EC2, which then allows the data to be utilised by Elastic search. The “conversational” part of the service is made possible thanks to Amazon LEX which handles automatic speech recognition, ASR, and its understanding of natural language makes it possible for LEX to understand the nuances of speech. The demo was pretty impressive from this perspective - Gareth’s question was answered with the briefest of pauses and LEX understood the context of his question, providing a direct answer to the question asked. Other observations The large number of data warehousing companies presenting at the Summit. I didn’t count them, or compare the relative ratios of DW companies to other types of business (sorry, I'm being a nerd here, but that’s how you’d prove this objectively, right?) However, I don't recall seeing as many of these types of companies in attendance last year. Does this reflect a growing trend as more businesses recognise the importance of making data driven decisions, and collect increasingly large data sets in order gather more insights? In addition to data warehouses, businesses are now also using data lakes, whereby data is pooled ready to be prepared and utilised for different purposes when needed. (The link provided goes to a site which offers a neat description of the differences between data warehouses and data lakes.) Some more images! The innovation flywheel Idea - experiment - feedback - repeat! This was taken in the main auditorium - the "mini Wembley stadium" I mentioned earlier - look at the size of the screen relative to the speaker - it was monstrous! The main conference area and exhibition stands Characteristics of a well architected system This year there was a nice startup section helping startups with the setup of their basic systems architecture... Did you attend the AWS conference? What was your impression? Welcome to interview 4 in the software buying series, and our second interview about the things you should consider when using app builder software to create software by yourself - without needing to know any programming languages, or write any code! Robert Cardiff is the Director of Sales at BuildFire, a mobile app builder platform which describes itself as “The world's most advanced mobile app builder.” We’ll find out more about Buildfire, and the app builder market in general, which empowers non-technical entrepreneurs and business owners, and allows them to create their own mobile apps from scratch. Welcome Robert! Thanks for joining me today. What can you tell us about BuildFire? Buildfire got started about 5 years ago. Our 2 co-founders started off building apps, and got some customers who were asking for iOS and Android mobile apps. They found developers from overseas, and started building apps for their customers from the ground up. A few apps in, they started to realise that they were building the same things for every customer. Separate code bases are needed for iOS and Android, but they needed to build a dashboard for the clients to manage typical things like push notification messages used to send updates to users, and content management tools to manage the text visible in the apps. Every time changes were required for these elements, a developer was needed to push the new updates, or files. So they thought: “Why don’t we build the fundamental pieces needed for mobile apps and then we can customise the apps from there to change the layout, and add additional features?” So they built Buildfire 1.0, which:
Our purpose statement at BuildFire is: "BuildFire empowers the business professional to solve complex problems with elegant mobile solutions that are simple to build, easy to manage and available to everyone." Today, we have apps being used in every single country except for North Korea. We’ve had great success, because we’ve already created all the fundamental mobile components that typically take many months to develop. If you’re serious about developing a mobile app, chances are we are a perfect fit! Maybe we’ll see the North Koreans using BuildFire in the future! I can see how having these common reusable components is a pretty smart idea. It’s efficient! Every app needs login / logout screens, password management / reset functionality, basic navigation and settings management etc. Every company with a decent app will expect to create these items, they’re pretty much universal, so it makes perfect sense. How would you describe the app builder market today, and how would you describe your positioning in the market, in comparison with your competitors? We’re very aware that there are tons of competitors in our space, and you have 2 different options: i) rigid platforms where you’re quite boxed into the functionality offered, or ii) huge monster companies like IBM with products where you still need to build everything up from scratch using their tools, although for small businesses, spending several hundred thousand dollars on tools like that just isn’t a realistic investment. Definitely not! With Buildfire we sit in the middle, we have a quality product, and scalable core infrastructure, we provide customers with a management dashboard, and we have a bunch of features that can be used across a range of apps to solve problems, or to capitalise on opportunities that are relevant for businesses. Just to clarify, what kind of volume of apps does BuildFire manage? We have 5,000 apps in the App Store, and over the course of 5 years, over 10,000 apps have been created. Thank you. So, what should a person know before getting started with Buildfire? Be aware of the options available. When we do a demo with a client, or prospect we’ll educate them and say: “You can hire a local developer in your own country, and potentially get a great product, and the developer will speak your language, and be in your time zone, but you’ll be paying a high hourly rate. Or, you could outsource the development overseas for $30-40+ an hour. Then there are the app builder platforms which are quite rigid, and whales like IBM, and the more full-featured ones like ours. Do you class yourselves as a SaaS business? We are a SaaS platform. We have apps that have millions of end users on them. We can set up your app, and develop code for you, or you can have your own developers, or designers do the work for you. Alternatively, you can figure things out for yourself. Could you give us an example of how long it might take to build an app using your platform? You can build an app in less than a week! That's fast! What kind of app? To give you an example, an education app. Without any technical, or coding knowledge, you can go to our website, click on the button in the top right hand corner to say you want to build an app, say you want to build it yourself, choose an education template, name it, and start putting in your app icon design, your landing screen designs, and start uploading your YouTube videos, and your PDFs and you’re done! We do have people come onto the platform and create apps very quickly. As an example, there’s a blogger with a pretty good online following, who has scaled their app to millions of end users without doing any custom development on the platform, they just used the templates that we have. At the other end of the scale, if you want to develop a custom app on our platform, you can spend 3 to 6 months developing custom integrations with different back-end systems, pulling in the relevant data, and displaying the data how you want it. Once you’re ready to deploy to iOS, or Android, there are additional costs, and you’ll need to get the app approved. There are some limitations to approval, and app marketplace submission costs to pay. The approval process can take between 1-3 weeks depending on Apple and Google and how they’re feeling! (If you're wondering about app submission costs, these are $99 USD annual membership to have an app in Apple's App Store, and a $25 USD one off registration fee for the Google Play Store.) Yes, I talk about that in Don't Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, my handbook for tech startups & entrepreneurs. If you’re not careful, you’ll play “app ping-pong” with Apple in particular, who will bounce your app back to you repeatedly if it’s not up to their standards. Allow plenty of time for app store rejections - especially if you’re new to app development, because you’ll have to keep resubmitting your mobile app until the folks in the app marketplaces are 100% satisfied. This is also why product, and usability testing throughout the development of your app is so important. Even if you’re blind to the bugs, usability issues, and kinks in your app, the app stores won’t be and you could end up with a long list of amendments to make before you’ll be allowed into the app marketplaces, frequent feedback means that you can “clean up” the app as you go along, rather than having a shocking amount of rework to do when you mistakenly thought the app was ready for use! The “back-end” of the product, and what goes on behind the mobile screens is the backbone of an app, so when I prepared my questions for you, I wanted to consider how well different app builder tools can support long-term growth. These NFRs, or non-functional requirements, are capabilities, qualities, and boundaries that a system should have that go beyond the functionality and features that an app user can see, or touch. Often people don’t give them a lot of thought, but without these, most software would be unusable, or of extremely poor quality. You can download a list of NFRs to consider when building software here. EXTENSIBILITY is about the ability of an app to be extended so, I’d like to confirm whether it’s possible to hire a coder to do major coding on top of the existing platform, or to add custom code within the app? How would this work? If you wanted an ecommerce store, there’s no way you’d build an ecommerce platform from the ground up, you’d go to Shopify, and if you were going to go and start a blog, you’d probably go to WordPress, because they power something like 30% of the world’s websites, and it has templates, and plugins. We also offer templates and plugins, and we say that what WordPress does for websites, we do for mobile apps. If you need something that’s custom, we can help with that. People come to us and say: “I only have $1000 and I just want to set up an app to help us communicate more effectively with our customers”, then 6 months down the line they say: “Hey, I want to integrate our back-end ordering system into the app, so customers not only get announcements about new products, they can order products using the app.” We can then do that custom back-end tie-in for them. You can also use your own developer to create the features you want, and integrate that feature into our core. We have a developer portal that allows for a fully custom mobile app on the front-end to be built while leveraging our core solution. MAINTENANCE, AND AVAILABILITY OF THE SERVICE What is the standard uptime / availability of your service? It’s 99%. (If you're wondering, that translates to just over 7 hours of unplanned downtime per month...) How do you monitor app health and maintenance for each customer? We have a DevOps team constantly running tests on the servers to ensure that each app is healthy. When there is an issue with a feature the customer reports the issue and our support team creates a development ticket and our developers fix the issue. How would I report an issue and get it resolved? Each customer has the ability to reach out to our support team through the BuildFire Web Control Panel, and to notify our support team of an issue. Our support team reviews and confirms the issue, and then creates a development ticket. When the issue is fixed we notify the customer and ask them to test the fix. What’s your average turnaround time for fixing production bugs? It varies depending on type of issue. SECURITY What security measures exist to prevent app cloning, hacks, and to keep customer data, including credit cards safe? We run penetration tests regularly (this involves hacking, or attacking one's own systems, or hiring testers, or specialist testers such as "ethical hackers" to do this for you, to identify vulnerabilities so they can be addressed.) We maintain the most up-to-date standards related to data compliance. SCALABILITY is the ability of an app to grow, and to support growth in terms of increased users and other increases in demand for resources such as database storage, memory, and other computing requirements.) How does BuildFire enable users to scale their apps? Finding an app builder product that you can grow with is something that I’d encourage every business to be conscious of as they develop their mobile strategy. With BuildFire, you can start small, and grow, so that mid-way through the process, you don’t have to switch platforms, because you can’t scale and have to deal with that headache. We have a global cloud infrastructure that handles scalability and any latency issues related to geography. Latency issues present themselves in the form of slowness and delays when using apps. You can find a checklist of NFRs taken from one of my software survival guides here. Let’s explore this further - if downloads of my app suddenly exploded, and the number of daily users I have on the app dramatically increases, say from 1,000, to 100,000, to 1,000,000 daily users just to give an extreme example (to put this into context, Twitter has more than 150 million daily users, and Instagram have more than 500 million daily users) or I had a sudden extreme spike in traffic, which can happen if content that drives visitors to your app were to go viral, for instance, how would BuildFire handle that? Are there any boundaries on scalability? That is why we recommend using a service like ours! Those big headaches about scaling up to many thousands of users are things you don’t have to worry about as a business owner. As usage increases, our architecture spins up multiple servers to handle an increase in demand. Can Buildfire apps be internationalised to support multiple languages? Yes. We have over 20 languages that an app administrator can choose from to set as the core language for standard fields. Additionally, an app administrator can build different sections with the same content in different languages. If I build an app using your platform, who owns the app, the code, and the Intellectual Property (IP) behind the app? The content, data, user information, revenue generating potential, and design is 100% your property. BuildFire has developed over 50 different features (e.g. YouTube integration for video streaming, chat forum, etc.) We own the IP for those. We also provide it as an open source feature, so if a developer wanted to make a copy of the code, enhance the feature, and maintain it, then that developer or app owner would own the IP. Additionally, when we develop custom features / integrations for our customers, the customer owns the IP. What happens to apps that are not in use, but still exist on your platform? Do those customers still pay you a fee, and can customers leave “dormant” apps on the platform for an extended period if they need to? We provide the ability for a customer to remove their app from the app stores and pay us a small monthly or annual fee to keep it "dormant" whilst still retaining access to their app. In the event they cancel the hosting subscription altogether, then the customer would no longer have access. In the event we develop a custom code (plugin) for a customer, they will always have access to that code because they own the IP. What skills, or knowledge are needed before people start using your tool? Are there any top tips that you can share for new BuildFire users? First, they need an idea for an app that solves a problem. They also need the time to add content into the app, and to make it an app that is worth downloading. If users are not doing any custom development, the app still needs to be made as attractive as possible using the features, or templates we provide. You can use an online design editor like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to create app icons, loading screens, banners, elements, and tools to crop and resize images. We recently launched a photo editor right inside our platform too, so that’s another option. What you don’t need is a development background. My mom is the least technical person I’ve ever encountered. I said to her: “I want you to build an app” and she said there’s no way she could ever do it, but I talked her through it. She selected a template, and we started dragging and dropping, and adding and removing features, and before she knew it, she had developed an app. We have a full development and design team to assist you. It’s not a 1 person development team, where if something happens to them, you’re out of luck. We have a team of 35 people to support you. Planning, and clarity are essential, in terms of at least having a clear starting point in terms of a target market and the key features you need in order to solve a problem, otherwise you’ll go round in circles without a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve! Can you give us a high-level breakdown of the types of people, and businesses that use your app? Typically, there are a few types of customers – there are customers with a design who have a few support questions, and we answer them, and they’re off to the races. The next type does not have a design background, and they want to set up an app, and do most of the heavy lifting but need help from a designer. Are there any use cases for which your platform would be unsuitable? If so, why? In the event a customer wanted to develop a mobile app game that needed a high-sensitivity touch screen, we would recommend developing the mobile app from the ground-up for iOS and Android. If someone wanted to mix and match – to do some DIY work, and get some design help from you – how much should they expect to spend? We have a professional services team, and a design team, and in 3 to 5 hours they can work alongside a customer to help them with the design related elements that the business owner might not know how to do themselves. 5-10 hours of work for our design team might cost $750 / £565 upwards. For that price, we’ll have a designer create some design assets for you, and help you set up a structure for your app, and show you how to put the content in it, so when you’re ready to publish the app it’s aesthetically pleasing to whoever is going to download it. From there, the sky’s the limit. It depends how much custom work you need. We have custom apps where users have spent a quarter of a million dollars on customisation, and built apps for Fortune 500 companies that have paid us $150,000 for a custom integration to their back-end employee management system. At the other end of the scale, we have a small, non-profit church with a budget of $500, who pay us $60 a month to have an app so they can better communicate with their audience. So it really varies! Can we talk more about the key features of your app? Which features and benefits do you think are most helpful for users? You mentioned photo editing, but also your templates… A lot of people need inspiration to start with. If you go to Buildfire.com, and choose the option to build an app on your own (see the previous screenshot above), and right there you’re prompted with a range of options as a starting point; whether it’s a university app, an internal communications app, a restaurant app, including online ordering features – there are different options that people can choose so they can get started right away. So, for example, if I’m a restaurant, I may have a bunch of people who buy from me repeatedly, and I might want a lot of features for my app:
All the features I’ve just listed are already developed, but if you don’t want all those features yet, you can choose which ones you want, and remove the others with just a click of a button to edit the app. The list above is a nice starting point for noting down the list of features you require. Just start by saying “I want customers to be able to do…. [insert activity] using the app” and create a list of items grouped into topics, or categories. Agile teams will say “As a customer, I want to be able to [Insert activity], so that I can [insert benefit].” This is done to make sure that build requirements are clear, but also because by stating the activity and benefit, you can really see what the customer will get from using each feature, and this will help you to prioritise one feature over another in terms of value. This is important, because there is ALWAYS more to do, than time and money available, so by picking the right activities and benefits, and not wasting time on low value, or “meh, so what?” features (even if YOU personally like them) this can really make a difference. In the interview with Christopher Gimmer from Snappa, we talked about teams being more excited over features than their customers, and this is a very good way to waste time and money! Two entrepreneurs could choose to build the same app, and one could end up with a much better product, because they made better decisions about which features to build (and which to drop!) This will also come down to how well the entrepreneur identifies, and interprets the needs of their target market, the problems they have, and the method they use to solve those problems. So don’t just build based on your own ideas and opinions – you need external feedback! What other advantages do app builder tools have over hiring a developer to create an app for you? A big one is this - when you hire a developer to build a mobile app, you might say: “I want people to be able to book rides, and on the other side: “I want drivers to be able to see those rides, and choose a ride, and despatch their vehicle to collect the user.” I’m talking about Uber, right? But then the developer finishes development for your Android, or iOS app, and you say: “I also want to be able to see all the rides coming through, the back-end analytics, what’s happening, and who’s being dispatched” and the developer says, “well, you didn’t tell me you needed that before”, and you say “well that’s obvious I need to be able to manage this!” and they say, “Well… that’s an extra $X,000.” What we’ve done at BuildFire, is built up a web control panel, where everything that has been built, can be managed, along with a robust analytics system, because whatever you’ve selected for the front-end of the app that the user can see, needs to be controlled and managed from a business standpoint at the back-end, and all that needs to be considered. A developer might literally develop exactly what you’ve asked for, but not necessarily think about all the use cases, (the scenarios and circumstances under which users will need specific functionality) or edge cases (less common scenarios) that you haven’t thought of because you’ve never developed software before. That’s one of the key challenge in building software for people who are new to it. Be careful what you ask (or don’t ask) for! This is where Purposeful Products steps in to help its clients. You do need to plan at a more detailed level than most entrepreneurs realise when they first start thinking about building an app, otherwise both you, and the developer(s) relying on details from you will be stumbling around in the dark, and this is often how people end up with a “bad” product that isn’t fit for purpose because it doesn’t hang together well, or have all the key elements it needs. Nothing is obvious, and everything has to be clearly stated because developers aren’t mind readers, and are expecting you to provide them with information because you're "the boss", and you're paying them to do a job for you! People often forget (or don’t know to ask about) account administration, app monitoring, analytics tools, and functionality (or integrations) to provide customer support. The onus is on the entrepreneur to think of these things and be clear about how the whole app needs to work. The problem is that entrepreneurs new to tech don’t yet know about all the elements that go into building an app, so there are often big gaps in their knowledge about what is possible, and what they should do, and ask for. Book a free 30 minute consultation session to ask us any questions about getting started via our Calendly appointment booking page: https://calendly.com/purposeful-products. When you develop mobile apps, you have to develop them in multiple languages – possibly for iOS, Android, or Windows (although it’s a little outdated) so you have multiple coding languages there, and you’ve got to hire a developer for each one of those, because finding someone who knows how to write code in all these languages, is not typical… (iOS programming languages include Swift, and Objective-C, and Android apps can be coded in Java, and possibly C, or C++.) Right, and even if they can develop in 2 or 3 of those languages most developers have a particular strength, so they will be more proficient in one than the others, so it might actually be best to hire a specialist who really understands each platform so you get the best results in each case… This is why hybrid apps can be hugely convenient - another topic I cover in Don't Hire a Software Developer Until..., Hybrid apps are written in HTML5, and display characteristics common to both native apps developed exclusively for a particular app store, and web apps. They are actually web apps, which can put into "wrappers" and submitted to the Apple, or Google Play stores. Sadly, we've worked with people who had already paid to have an iOS app built by the time they made contact with us, when they could have built a hybrid app suitable for the web, iOS, and Android. If you don’t require complex app gestures, a hybrid app maybe more than adequate to meet your needs, so if you want to build an app, consider how viable a hybrid app is before you shell out cash for separate apps. It’s also important to remember that an app is a living breathing thing, it’s not like a website that you can build once and it’ll work as long as you keep paying your hosting fees. iOS and Android come out with new operating system updates every 3-6 months, so you’ll probably need a developer on hand to maintain your mobile app(s) full-time. We’re always maintaining, so when the iPhone X comes out, we’ll be developing updates for that app - you’re also paying us for that. You’ve got to think about:
I explain how to plan what you need to build, step-by-step, and to create user journeys, and wireframes for your first software release in Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until you Read this Book. Understanding the components of an app, including what you can see, as well as what is needed behind the scenes, at least from a high level is important, and I explain all that in the book and audiobook, because how well you cover the bases can affect your success too. There are different types of developers - you don’t want a rookie developer, or a “yes man” who won’t question you, ideally you need assistance from one who understand tech, and business. You do need a business minded developer to guide you. Aside from charging upfront for an app, does your app handle in app purchases, and/or support monthly recurring subscription charges? Yes. We have an integration with Apple and Google Play to facilitate in-app purchases. This feature allows the app administrator to segment parts of the app based on in-app purchases. Once a purchase has been made, then the section is made available to the user. We provide in-app purchases on our Professional Hosting Plan for $149/month. Can you talk to us about last years’ Apple's announcement? This looked like a serious threat, or even “the end” for apps created using templates, and the app builder market as a whole: From Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines: “4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected.” What are my options following this change? In the US, a large number of people use iPhones. When Apple released its 4.2.6 guideline saying that people could no longer use services like BuildFire, that was a big issue for our company, and other services like ours. What Apple were saying was that they are trying to clean up the quality of apps in the App Store, meaning that they want unique apps. But the problem is, whether apps are templated, or custom many requirements are the same - people want geolocation, push notifications, list views, map views, to sell products… Apple has since released an update that said that people can still use app builder platforms, and as we move forward, app builder platforms aren’t having specific issues having apps approved in Apple’s App Store. Thanks for that, Robert. It's great to know that the app builder market is still open for business, because your industry really has increased the options, and opportunities available for entrepreneurs. Another important thing to mention whilst we're on this topic, is that apps which aren't very interactive, and are too much like basic websites will also be rejected by the app stores, so that's another thing to be aware of when you're building an app. I also mention that in my software survival guide. I’ve found the latest version of 4.2.6, which now reads: “4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app’s content. These services should not submit apps on behalf of their clients and should offer tools that let their clients create customized, innovative apps that provide unique customer experiences. Another acceptable option for template providers is to create a single binary to host all client content in an aggregated or “picker” model, for example as a restaurant finder app with separate customized entries or pages for each client restaurant, or as an event app with separate entries for each client event.” You can find the updated guidelines here: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality. The challenge of being in tech / software development is that there is constant change, and these changes can have major implications for you as a business owner. It’s important to keep an eye on app marketplace guidelines, as any rule changes issued by the app marketplaces can impact on your app sales, functionality, back end technology, and even your right to use the platforms themselves. TechCrunch have also written an article on the topic that you can find here. If that were to happen again, and Apple released another guideline like 4.2.6 then I think there would be a big push towards progressive web apps (PWAs). That is something that Buildfire is positioned for. I’m glad you have that as another option, and one lesson from all this is try not to keep all your eggs in one basket! This applies to all areas of business, for example:
Developing your own app, on your own platform gives you additional control, but this comes with risks too, so we aren't talking about making one single risk-free decision, or saying "this option is definitely good, and that option is definitely bad" (a nice idea, but impossible, because tech is too complex!) This is about assessing the risks, and advantages and disadvantages of everything you choose to do, and minimising your exposure to them through: i) the decisions you make, and ii) the actions that you are able to take to reduce and control your risks - a fundamental part of project management, and protecting your business interests. In the case of choosing an app builder tool, you need to do some due diligence research, for example:
Thank you, Robert. We've covered all these questions in the case of BuildFire! What's next for your company? BuildFire WorkForce for teams... we are working to help companies to "Streamline employee communications, Engage employees in a more meaningful way and Measure success! Where can people go to find out more about BuildFire? People can find us at: https://buildfire.com/. Welcome to interview 3 in the Software Buying Series on the Purposeful Products blog. In the last post, I interviewed a representative from Flippa about how to buy an existing software application as a way of starting a tech business. The next two interviews will answer the question: “What are my options if I want to build an app myself, without developer assistance?” As someone who has come from a tech background, I wanted to open up an honest debate about the pros and cons of using app builder software, and the suitability of app builder platforms to use as a long-term, sustainable, scalable foundation on which to build a business. I’m looking forward to finding out more, and asking a few challenging questions along the way! This week’s guest is Emmanuel Straschnov, Founder of Bubble, and we'll be hearing about how to build a web app from scratch, without coding skills. Welcome Emmanuel! Please tell us about your product. Bubble is a visual programming platform that allows users to build web apps without typing any code, then lets them run their app on Bubble’s cloud platform without having to maintain servers, etc. It’s designed for startups and business owners mostly, as it helps them build their customer facing, or internal solutions for a fraction of the cost of traditional development, and gives them more control over their software. When did Bubble “go live”? We started building Bubble in 2012, and launched in late 2015. We now have thousands of businesses that run on our platform, and more than 160,000 users. Do you class yourselves as a SaaS business? Yes, though sometime PaaS (platform-as-a-service) is more suitable as we’re a platform in the sense that contributors can sell, lease and distribute plugins on Bubble and we handle the payments. Overall, our business model very much follows the SaaS model, though our software is mostly free. You only start paying when you want to use your own domain, or need more capacity for your app. Can you give us a high-level breakdown of the types of people, and businesses that use your app? Well, we have three kinds of users. Firstly, our major category of users are startup founders that launch their businesses on us, and develop the entire product on Bubble. These account for about 60% of our users. Secondly, small businesses are an important category for us, as they use us to build the solutions they would usually hire a development shop to build. These are probably 30% of our users. The last 10% are individuals and groups - schools, and students that use Bubble for personal and class projects. The categories are not necessarily distinct, we’ve seen a lot of students become entrepreneurs on our platform! What level of skill, or experience is needed to get started with your app? Bubble is similar in complexity to productivity tools like Excel or PowerPoint. If you can use Excel, you can build an app on Bubble. It’s good to have good product sense, as that’s what you’re building, but as you build it, you can easily test, and iterate to improve the product further. What are your top tips for people building apps using your tool? Three things: 1. Keep in mind Bubble is a programming tool, so you should spend some time to learn it. While it’s great to start building and experimenting, we very much recommend doing the lessons we offer to make the best out of the product quickly. We estimate the time to learn the fundamentals to 3 to 54 hours, and after these hours, it’ll be much easier to build something. 2. When you start building, it’s always great to start with a pen and a paper! It’s good to think about what you want to build and the different screens you need, etc. 3. Rely on the community! After 6 years, when you have a question, it’s very likely that someone else has already raised that question and that it has been answered on our Forum. Then if you can’t find the answer, just ask! Our community is super vibrant and friendly. Point 2 is a key recommendation that I make in my books, and when working with tech entrepreneurs. Prototyping on paper is incredibly cheap - you can buy a notepad and create numerous versions of the app, and the user journeys needed to take your users from screen to screen within it. Take the time to work steps and processes through on paper first and get clarity. Even if I’m working on multi-million pound software projects I still do this! Mistakes are free at this stage, but once you hire a developer, or make the changes in a tool, there is a greater cost in terms of money, and / or time. What else should I know before getting started? Our commitment is that you’ll be able to build your app. As a user, your success on Bubble is our success, and we’ll make what is needed so that your app can scale on Bubble. How long does it take to build an app using your tool? That’s a tough one, as people usually keep iterating on their app as they build it. In general, people have a working version of the app in a few days. What are the major components of your app? Bubble has 3 elements:
What do you consider to be the best features and benefits of your app? There are so many features that it’s hard to list them, but in a nutshell: The ability to define your own data structure, so that your database does what you need. The ability to connect to any API. As long as it’s REST (a RESTful API), Bubble can talk to it. The fact that once it’s built, there is nothing to worry about in terms of servers, etc. Bubble scales automatically as your app does! What language is your tool written in? It’s built in JavaScript and relies on Postgres for the database. Which use cases is your product best for? Bubble is web based, whether it’s desktop, mobile, or database driven apps. If my app took off and I went from 1000, to 10,000 to 1000,000 daily users, how would that increase in resources be handled? Are there any boundaries on scalability? The way it works is that you add capacity when your app needs more. It comes at $20 USD per month per unit, and you can add more units if you need them. Some users have got to 500,000 page views a day on their system. When your app gets bigger, you can migrate to a dedicated plan, when we set up a cluster of servers just for your app, which buys you a lot of room to grow! How are things like sudden spikes in traffic, or large, sustained increases in users be managed? Would there be any actions that I would need to take, or would you handle all of this? We handle the technical aspects, and have some automated systems to make sure capacity gets adjusted when you need it. What you need to do within a few hours is add some units of capacity to have the best performance. How many users does your largest customer have? It’s hard to say - some apps have few users, but a ton of data traffic. In total, apps hosted on Bubble reach more than 10 million page views a month. Does your app handle in app purchases? Bubble apps are best for the web, so in-app purchase are handled that way. You can use the Stripe or the Braintree plugins to charge the cards. What security measures exist to prevent app cloning, and to keep customer data, including credit cards safe? We take security extremely seriously. All apps are served over SSL, we encrypt data at rest, etc. For credit cards, specifically, you would use Stripe or Braintree so the credit card data can be stored on their end. Yes, handling credit card information, especially with data privacy and standards like PCI DSS, which require merchants to follow very strict rules when managing customers’ personal and financial details can be tough to comply with for small businesses. The simplest thing to do is to work with a 3rd party payment processor (also known as a payment gateway), so you don’t need to worry about compliance because the processor handles all the complexity related to compliance and storing and managing credit and credit card information. Emmanuel, who owns my app, and the Intellectual Property behind my business and idea if I build my app using your platform? Our terms are very clear. You own your app, the design and the data, we own the engine that runs your app (and that engine is not specific to your app). The comparison we use to make it easy to understand is Microsoft Word. If you write a book, you own the book, but Microsoft retains the IP of the Word software. But would the actual code related to my specific app belong to you? We don’t generate code, so this question isn’t relevant to us. You own the app design and data, we own the engine! Thanks for the clarification. What does the monthly subscription cost cover and are all services completely withdrawn if customers halt their monthly payments? The monthly fee covers the hosting for your app and access to some specific features that are related to using the app in production. The access to the software to build is free. If you cancel your plan (or you card fails a few times), you’ll lose the connection to your domain, but the app will be there and kept safe. As soon as you subscribe again you’ll be back up on your own domain. Is there any level of portability (the ability to move and reuse software in a new environment, or on a new platform, or operating system) available? While we don’t export code, apps are very open. Any app on Bubble exposes an API automatically so that you can easily read and write data from the server. So, while apps are not portable per se, they are not completely closed to the outside world! What other advantages do app builder tools have over hiring a developer to create an app for you? The main advantages are: Speed of development, and control over your app. If you want to tweak your app, you don’t need to ask a developer to do it, you can do that on your own. Are there any groups, or use cases for which your app would be unsuitable? Why? Maybe building a platform game. That wouldn’t be the best use of Bubble... If I were to get stuck whilst working on the app, what options would I have, and how long would I need to wait to get support to help me resolve the problem? We offer email support to paying customers, but to be honest, the forum is the fastest way to get an answer! As we have users around the globe, if you ask with enough details, you’ll get an answer in a few minutes, while our email support is done during business hours. Are there people out there that could build the app for me? What skills would I need to look out for when hiring? Yes, we have quite a few agencies using us, and overall the feedback we have from users is great! People often ask for freelancers on the forum as well. In terms of skills, I’d say it’s the same as other freelancers: professionalism, reliability, etc. I'm interested to know whether a person creating an app can introduce new bugs into the app, or whether any bugs found will always be directly related to the app builder platform. We have a debugger in run mode that lets you test your app without custom plugin and custom code. If after testing you still think there is a bug, you file a bug report and our team will follow up with you. Can you tell me about your timescales for fixing bugs? If there is a bug with our platform, we’ll fix it from our end. We can’t commit to a timeline, but we do our best to fix a bug within a week or two. If it’s a critical production bug we fix it in a day. Is it possible to hire a coder to do major coding on top of the existing platform, or to add custom code here, or there? How would this work? Yes, they can add custom plugins written in JavaScript. Bubble can be extended with code using JavaScript plugins, so if you can code you can take Bubble even further, but it’s not necessary! Can multiple people work on creating new features for your app at the same time, in the same way that a development team could coordinate and create new features for an app? Yes, the editor can be used by multiple app editors at once. Can your app be internationalised to handle multiple languages? Yes, apps can have multiple languages. Are there any geographic restrictions on use? Not, not really. As long as AWS can be accessed, Bubble can used. (Bubble is hosted on AWS). See our previous blog post about the AWS 2018 Conference and the range of services that AWS (Amazon Web Services) has available for use by tech businesses. The post contains links to a number of free services and resources for tech startups. What is the standard uptime / availability of your service? It’s 99.9%, and you can monitor it at https://status.bubble.is/. The downtime (or its reverse, the uptime) of any system you use tells you how much downtime that system will experience on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. This time is unplanned, which means that the downtime can happen at any time, and can't be predicted, so if you are running software on any platform, or infrastructure and have customers that are using and relying on your software, then the uptime is very important. 99.9% uptime equates to approximately 10 minutes a week, or 43 minutes a month, which is a decent standard of service. For some tech businesses, even 99% uptime may not be good enough, and could result in a loss of customers. Even if you're building an app that doesn't require coding experience, it's still important that you have the knowledge to ask these kinds of questions before you decide to work with any service provider! If you'd like to expand your knowledge on these types of topics so you can run your tech business more efficiently and effectively, register for our forthcoming Techpreneur Toolkits and courses here. Here's an example of the information you'll find on Bubble's status page including latency (the delay experienced when waiting for data to reach its destination), API error rate which tracks the unexpected failures of Bubble's APIs due to Bubble failures, and page load speed. That’s a nice feature! How do you monitor app health and maintenance, for each customer? We have a lot of automated systems to make sure all apps work well. What's next for your app? We’re in this for the long term. Our goal is to redefine programming, and we’re well positioned for this, but we need to keep pushing the limits. Look out for the ability to build iOS apps, which is currently in Beta. Where can people go to find out more about your app? https://bubble.is/ Thanks Emmanuel, I wish you all the best of luck! 24/5/2018 0 Comments How to buy a software business like a BOSS! Step by Step advice from the experts at Flippa.com
Welcome to interview 3 in the software buying series on the Purposeful Products Blog.
We began the series with an overview of the common mistakes that business owners make when buying software to use in their own businesses, and what techpreneurs can do to make this process easier for customers. In this post, we’ll be looking at buying software as a ready-made business opportunity. You may have heard about people buying businesses and getting ripped off, or otherwise short-changed. There can be a lot of anxiety around making a wise decision and not having the “wool pulled over one’s eyes” when handing over hundreds, or even thousands when buying an existing business. Chris Holle - a marketing specialist at Flippa.com agreed to speak to me about this topic, so in this article, we'll take a deep-dive into how to buy a software business. We’ll bust some myths, and give you a blueprint to follow to help you tackle a process that for many, is just as nerve-wracking as hiring a developer to create software from scratch. Thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed Chris. I’ve been looking forward to shedding some light on this topic, and helping people interested in this option to educate themselves about how to buy a software business the smart way. Please tell us about your platform. Flippa is a marketplace for entrepreneurs looking to buy or sell online businesses. We started in 2009 after being spun from our sister company, SitePoint. We noticed that people were posting on message boards and forums to sell their online businesses (mainly websites), which wasn’t very efficient or safe, and realized that we could create a marketplace that helped entrepreneurs buy and sell these businesses, and we established an MVP in under 24 hours! Fast forward to today, and we’ve had over $200 million in online businesses bought and sold through Flippa. That’s impressive! What do you see as your USPs over alternative ways to buy a business? Our biggest selling point is having more businesses for sale at any one time than other marketplaces, or brokerages may have in an entire year. Whether you’re looking for a website generating $20/month via Google AdSense, or an Amazon FBA business generating $500,000 annual profit, there’s a high probability that we’ll have several businesses for sale at any given time that meet your criteria. We’ve also greatly increased the amount of high-value businesses on our platform in the last 3 months by partnering with over a dozen different brokerages. The number 1 fear people have about buying a company is getting burned by a bad purchase. This could include overestimating the companies value and assets and buying a worthless, or very low value company at a high price, missing the signs, or being completely unaware of important points about the business that should have influenced the buying decision, (or given the buyer scope to negotiate a lower price) or maybe even handing over money and not receiving a business at all! What can people do to avoid these nightmare scenarios? This is definitely a fear when purchasing a business, especially through an online marketplace. While virtually all transactions on our site go smoothly, there are cases every now and then where people feel that they’ve been ripped off. If someone plans to buy their first business, there are three things that it is absolutely crucial to understand before placing a bid: 1. Understand how to value an online business Business valuations typically range on a 2-3x annual net profit basis. So, if a business generates $15,000/year in revenue and $10,000/year in profit, the business (on average) will most likely be worth anywhere from $20,000-$30,000. Factors that also influence the value are:
2. Understand due diligence If there’s one point that I could leave each reader with, it’s understanding how to conduct due diligence on an online business. Due diligence is the most important activity by far when buying an online business. We’ve put together a Due Diligence Checklist that new buyers should review before purchasing anything on Flippa. It covers the basics on conducting due diligence One of our top buyers on Flippa has stated that he spends roughly 5-6 hours reviewing a site, the financials, traffic, monetization, backlinks, etc. He mainly buys websites on Flippa, but the due diligence can (largely) be translated to other business types. We have a video which outlines his success story, and I highly recommend watching the full interview. 3. Make sure you know how to operate the business. This ties into the due diligence stage, but is a big factor in itself. Most of the time, people that feel scammed simply didn’t take the time to understand how the business operates. For example, if someone sees an eCommerce site making $1,000/month in profit and ends up winning the auction without performing due diligence, they may not realize that the owner spends 3 hours per day packaging and shipping the items, with another 2 hours per day running social media ads that drive traffic to the store. If the new owner doesn’t have the time to package and ship the items, or knows nothing about running social media campaigns, they may not be able to run the business as effectively as the previous owner. To sum this up, when buying a business, make sure you understand the value of the business, perform proper due diligence, and have the experience, or knowledge to run the business. Thank you! That information is gold. Unless you’re going to hire a competent person to manage the business for you, you must know what needs to be done, how often, and how to perform the essential activities needed to run the business to a high enough standard - otherwise things could unravel pretty quickly. Whether you have someone build your software from the ground up, or buy it, we’ll be launching mini-courses on different aspects of running a tech business soon, which in addition to reading Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until you Read this Book, will offer additional information and guidance for tech entrepreneurs. Bear in mind also that even if you buy your software business, unless you never intend to improve it, upgrade it, fix bugs, or perform other maintenance on the software, or the platform it runs on, you’ll still need to hire tech staff to help you! How do you help purchasers make informed decisions? What useful information and indicators around the Flippa site can you point out as examples? From the get-go, each listing has a quick screenshot of the revenue, profits, and traffic (where applicable). The first thing you’ll see on any business listing is this: Here we see a summary of the business, including:
We also require all sellers to add revenue proof to all listings that claim revenue. This is typically screenshots of their accounts (in this case a screenshot of Amazon Affiliates dashboard). This helps verify that the revenue is legitimate. Below this, we have detailed breakdowns of the traffic and financials. If a person has Google Analytics on their site, we have a plug-in that allows us to pull in all the site’s information, so a user can quickly see the verified traffic broken down by page views, visitors, traffic sources (organic, direct, social, etc.), as well as what countries are the top visitors. We really aim to provide as much up-front information as possible, so each seller can really show their business in the best light possible. This also helps the buyers, as it’s less work for them during the due diligence process. That’s great. I didn’t know proof of revenue was now required, and I like the fact that you’re pulling in this “real data” from websites. That would inspire confidence. I can also see how due diligence (in terms of the buyer’s capability) fits in here. You might ask: “Do I know how to manage the part of the business that relies on Amazon Affiliates to generate income?”, and “Do I know how to run a WordPress site?” and if not, there is a need to skill-up, and/or to start looking to hire WordPress specialists. (We’ll be interviewing a business owner whose company fixes WP sites soon!) You’ll also need to ask yourself if you even want to learn about these things. Be honest with yourself, and if not, you’ll need to think about hiring, or outsourcing, and whether the business can support the monthly amount you’ll need to spend to hire capable staff to take care of the things you don’t want to get involved with. Trying to run a business that you don't have a passion for is never a good idea. They need care, and attention to grow! What are the best ways to assess the “true value” of businesses? What are some key signs that a business is overvalued? Due to our auction format, businesses on Flippa tend not to be under or over-valued. Our process is much like eBay’s, where users place bids on businesses. This is perhaps the best method of assessing the true value of a business, as the market will dictate the price of the business. If the business doesn’t meet the seller’s reserve price, then that means it’s worth more to the seller to keep the business than to sell it. But surely some businesses must be undervalued? What about them? What are the more savvy and experienced buyers looking out for that others might miss? Businesses that might be considered under-valued, are typically ones where the seller either doesn’t have the time or knowledge to grow the business, resulting in stagnation (or possibly even a decline). The buyer then sees this as an opportunity for them, as they may have the time, or expertise to take the business and run with it. One of the best examples I can give is where a Flippa user bought a website for $1,250, and in two years was able to grow the site to generate $5,000 per month in revenue! We have the full case study here. The buyer quickly identified that this site had excellent Google search rankings... Simple but effective due diligence - Google the business, and see where it ranks! The previous owner was unable to capitalize on long-tail keywords, primarily to do with local search rankings. After using the buy-it-now option, he quickly transformed the site by targeting these keywords that were relatively uncompetitive, and due to the site’s original authority, it was quickly able to take over these markets. He also knew how to implement an additional monetization method, by adding lead generation forms and selling those leads. To sum this up, the best businesses to buy are the ones where you can use your knowledge and expertise to grow the business. [Here’s a link to a post about long tail keywords from Neil Patel, an authority on marketing and SEO.] Brilliant! Can you give us some “due diligence” tips to use when buying software in particular? I would say the biggest due diligence for software specifically is to test out the product, and see what you can do to make it better (if that’s your goal). Ideally, you’ll have the technical expertise to navigate around the code of the software to the point where you can make any changes or updates where necessary. Some SaaS businesses that have sold on Flippa require a hands-on person developing it. Others have been completely passive and haven’t required any changes to it and instead needed marketing expertise to come in to grow the business. Definitely. From my perspective, I'd advise that the buyer test the product, and look for issues (and opportunities).
Try and find out if there’s an up-to-date list of tasks to be taken care of, bugs to be fixed, and customer requests (or complaints) that has been maintained by the owner, or their team. This will give you an idea of the more tech-related jobs you’ll need to do in the first 3 to 6 months of running the business, in addition to sales and marketing, customer care, and other general management tasks. Are there any other important considerations when buying software, as opposed to other types of businesses? Just make sure you’re comfortable with operating that type of business model. If you’re buying a software business, you should either be experienced enough to make changes or updates to it, or have an employee or contractor you trust to make the changes on your behalf. Another suggestion would be to have the seller be available for questions for longer than the typical 3-month hand-off period. Many sellers (typically businesses selling for more than $10,000) are willing to hop on Skype calls to help the new owner adjust to operations. It might be in your best interest to talk with the seller and see if this can be extended, or if s/he can offer some time in the future to work with a developer and explain the product. This is not the norm, but is not uncommon either. Finally, I think it’s important to look at the reviews. Are people giving the product good feedback? Find out how this plays out and see if this is something you will need to invest your time in to improve, should you end up buying the business. Reviews can be a great source of data. If there are enough of them, it should be easy to do a SWOT analysis of the product based on:
If I'm buying a tech business, I'll need to be given the source code for the product(s) too. How would that work? My understanding is that they send all necessary files over (typically through Dropbox or Gmail) that the new owner would need. When buying a tech business, make sure to outline everything you need from the seller before placing a bid. Ok, well I would suggest the following:
You can download a PDF of the due diligence advice and the key points, and checklists, including the checklist I’ve provided above here. These are all excellent things to ask about, and to make sure you understand before making your first bid. Is there a formal process for handing over passwords, access codes and other important information? This process varies for each buyer and seller. Typically, it’s sent in a notepad file or word doc, but there really is no set way. For obvious reasons, it’s always important to change your passwords and financial information on each account prior to sending, or upon receiving access to these accounts. Thanks for mentioning that. So, Chris, how does one avoid coming across as a complete “noob” on the Flippa website?!!! A problem for many people new to Flippa is that they’re worried about asking the seller too many questions, and decide to not ask them. If you’ve never had control of a website or other business assets transferred to you before, it’s perfectly okay to talk to the seller about the process so you understand it more. By not asking questions, buyers risk missing very basic information that would have easily turned up in conversation had they asked. The most common mistake is buying a business and expecting it to run exactly as it was under the previous owner, but this is determined by how well the buyer understands the business and how to operate it. When buying a business, you should always feel comfortable with the state of the business before placing your first bid. Thanks Chris. No-one wants to come across as a pain in the behind, but get the information you need because you’re the one spending your hard-earned coin! What are some useful do’s and don’ts when interacting with sellers? I think just common sense stuff like being polite. And again, never be worried about asking too many questions. We’ve talked about testing the goods, in other words assets such as SaaS, or web apps, mobile apps, Chrome extensions, to see just how useable they are, how buggy they are etc. You could even sign up as a user, in some cases to see what the experience is like! If possible I’d also recommend asking for customer demographics etc., and confirmation of compliance with state and national regulations and now GDPR has come in, that too, if you want to serve, and manage the data of EU customers, or have clients who do. Not only will these give you a lot more information about the state of the business, but will also help with the smooth handover of the business. How much detailed information about a business can buyers get usually access to before the sale? As a buyer, you can expect to get nearly all the information upfront, excluding some confidential information that would be shared post-sale. This confidential information may include suppliers, or employee names, etc. Buyers might not give these details out for fear that a competitor is simply fishing for information. It shouldn’t be much of an issue for a seller to provide this information if it isn’t confidential. Never be afraid to ask! It’s the seller’s job to make you feel comfortable, and it’s your job to do the due diligence. If the seller refuses to provide the information you’re hoping for, it may be best to walk away. Is it common to acquire social media assets too, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts or channels, any banners designed for these sites, and all the existing followers as part of a sale? This is a very standard practice. Unless stated otherwise, it is pretty much implied that when you buy a business or website on Flippa, that you are getting all of the assets. Again, this is something to double check for during the due diligence stage, but only under very rare circumstances are social media accounts and other assets not included. What are some other things that buyers could reasonably expect to acquire as part of the sale? Some common items included in the sale are:
Thanks for those. If you’d like a checklist with ALL the things you should ask that have been covered in this post, you can find one here. What kind of contract, or agreement should I expect to have with the buyer? Sometimes a buyer will need to sign an NDA prior to buying the business. Many businesses for sale have an active audience, and if word got out the business was for sale, it could jeopardize their user base. Another common agreement is a support period provided by the seller. The length, and amount of time depends on what is negotiated between both parties, but having 1-3 months of post-sale support from the seller is fairly common, should the buyer have any questions on operating the business. One other agreement may be a non-compete. This is typically for sales $25,000 and up, and prevents the seller from using their knowledge of the business and industry to set up a competing business in the same space. For example, if you bought a software business that scraped emails from website, you may want to have the seller sign a non-compete that prevented the scraping of sites for emails, as they could develop another tool and market that same business using the information they already knew about growing the business in the first place. Who supplies these documents, and do I need to hire a lawyer? For most sales, a lawyer isn’t necessary. If you’re buying a business for over $100,000, it may be worth it to have a lawyer look everything over, and make any necessary amends, or additions. We do provide a template for NDA’s for sellers, but we highly recommend reading through it, and making changes to it as needed to ensure it is relevant to the business. What should a fair contract include, or exclude? What may be considered fair to one party, may be unfair to another. At the end of the day, both parties want the best deal for them, and that’s something the buyer and seller will need to work out together. At what point should I hand over my money? Only send the money once the auction closes. Most transactions will be through Flippa Escrow, which is by far the safest way to send money and gain control of the assets. The reason for escrow is the money isn’t released until the seller sends over the account information, and the buyer is able to take full control of everything. Once that happens, the funds will then be released to the seller. If you’re using PayPal, (which I really wouldn’t recommend for sales over $1,000) then talk with the seller, and make sure they are ready to send everything over before you send the money. While this goes without any hiccups for the majority of the transactions, there are transactions every now and then where things can go awry. The only way to guarantee a transaction going smoothly is to use Flippa Escrow. ESCROW is often used to protect the interests of the buyer and seller. I discuss it in my 3rd book, Don’t Buy Software for your Small Business Until You Read this Book in the scenario where a business has hired a software company to build a product for them, but it can also be applied to the successful fulfilment of software services, and for selling items, as it is in this case. How about red flags? What are some common warning, or danger signs when assessing a business, or the behaviour of a seller? If a seller doesn’t want to provide certain information, or doesn’t want to sign a non-compete, that should be a warning sign. None of this should immediately cause you to run, but it’s something worth looking into. If the seller doesn’t want to give you certain information about the business, it’s important to know why they’re doing it. Are they worried about revealing information to a competitor phishing for info on the site, or about someone finding out the site isn’t what it’s cracked up to be? As for non-competes, some sellers may operate similar businesses. This is something they should be disclosing upfront anyways, but if a non-compete might hurt other opportunities, then it’s not in their best interest to sign one. When cases like this arise, then as a buyer, I would go back to the seller and create a very specific non-compete form that directly pertains to the business I am considering buying. If that doesn’t work, it comes down to whether you trust the seller to not compete directly, and if that’s a risk you would be willing to take. Can you complete the sentence, “Run like hell if ………………”?
… the seller wants to do a deal off-platform!
Obviously, it’s in our best interest if a deal remains on our platform so we can collect the success fee from the seller, but as a buyer, the risk of being scammed skyrockets when you go off platform and there is no real upside. By remaining on platform (and subsequently using Flippa Escrow), the chances of being scammed are virtually zero, provided you perform the proper due diligence. Ah. I've discovered that the seller is in a different country to me. How does this affect the process? People buying and selling websites may be located all over the world. Since the majority of these businesses are location independent, it’s common for people to be in different countries. The biggest barrier is usually language. But with translation services, etc. this is greatly diminished as a problem. Is there anything I should have asked you, but haven’t? ;-) I can’t think of anything... you’ve been very thorough! Thank you! What advice can you give to readers if they buy a business and things go wrong? The first step is to identify why it went wrong. Once you understand what the problem is, reach out to the seller and ask for their advice. This may, or may not be included as part of the deal when buying a site, but whether it is or not, most sellers are willing to spend a bit of time to help you out. Many of these businesses only had one prior owner and despite the fact they sold the business, they do want to see it succeed. If you can’t seem to “right the ship,” so to speak, it may be best to chalk this up as a learning experience and list it back for sale on Flippa. If you do this, it’s best to be very open that you bought the business and it hasn’t worked out for you for reasons x, y, and z. As a seller, it is always in your best interest to provide as much information as possible, and just because it isn’t working for you, that doesn’t mean it won’t work for someone else. Can you tell us about any software purchases on the Flippa site that have become success stories? In 2017, one user sold his SaaS business for $70,000. The business was a global wedding planner and invite list, and was quickly taking off. The original creator and seller, Ben, sold the business because he had no time in his life to run the business, and as a result had stable, but not growing, revenue, despite the excellent functionality and feedback the product was receiving. A nice payday indeed! What else can readers learn about the process that smart buyers follow? Due diligence, due diligence, due diligence! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me Chris, I think people are going to find this post incredibly useful! My pleasure! Thank you so much for reaching out. Where can people go to find out more about Flippa, and how to get started with buying a business? To get started, simply go to Flippa.com to create your account. Once you’ve done that, I would recommend browsing our Editor’s Choice section to get an idea of some of the businesses for sale. Once you know what you’re interested in buying, you can search for your ideal business by refining your search criteria. Good luck! ☺ 10/5/2018 0 Comments THE AWS SUMMIT 2018, LONDONI was fortunate to be able to attend the sold-out AWS Summit in London this month. Here’s a write-up of the day, including talks from tech-driven startups experiencing phenomenal growth, including Starling Bank, Onfido, and Deliveroo. Towards the end of the post, you'll find information on services, training, and freebies for tech startups. What: The AWS Summit London, focused on cloud computing, innovation, developer workshops, and the support of startups. When: May 9th & 10th 2018. (I attended on May 9th.) Where: ExCeL London, one of the largest conference and exhibition spaces in Europe with over 1,000,000 square feet of available space. The Agenda: I focused my attention on the AWS Startup Day, and Innovation Hub Lightning Talks. About AWS Many of us know Amazon as a retailer, but for those in tech, AWS (a.k.a. Amazon Web Services) is a major player in the IaaS arena with a customer base in the region of 1 million. Household name clients include Netflix, 3M, Airbnb, Lyft, AOL, Hitachi, General Electric, and Amazon.com! AWS aren’t SaaS providers, but are in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) markets. Where SaaS products usually provide the software and “front end” interface that users view and interact with, AWS is concerned with what goes on "behind the scenes." Of course SaaS providers require IaaS and PaaS services too, however these are not matters that concern SaaS customers who interact only with screens, or web browsers to operate the software. Because there are so many tools (and combinations of tools) that can be used to support software, these may require specialist knowledge, or a significant research effort from tech teams to understand what they need, and to assemble all the necessary components in the correct way(s). PaaS provides the foundation for running, and managing software. This means that companies can escape the headache of delving into unfamiliar territory, and remain focused on taking care of their software, whilst the PaaS provider takes care of the tools and services that the software relies upon. IaaS, supports data storage, cloud computing, networks, and hardware (both virtual, and physical.) The services available are extremely flexible in order to meet the varying needs and computing demands of customers. If you’re a non-technical entrepreneur, you may be surprised to find out how much goes on at the "back end” of your app. It can appear that the front end is the whole app: The “front end” is easier to quantify, simply because it's what we can see. At the front end, tech businesses are focused on user journeys, making it a pleasurable experience to use the app, and creating intuitive, easy to use interfaces and navigation. There's also the matter of "stickiness" - making the app engaging enough to encourage repeat use, thereby increasing user retention rates. IaaS and PaaS services are harder to visualise, but can play a huge role in making sure that your app runs quickly, can handle web traffic, and never (o.k, rarely) “goes down” when you’re not expecting it. These services can also help you monitor, and manage your app, and ensure that it is ready to meet the demands that you, and your customers will place on it. The sessions AWS Startup Day Startup Day was designed for tech founders, startups, and intrapreneurs looking to drive innovation within their companies. The talks were mainly delivered by AWS Customers who explained the different ways that AWS supports their startups. Session 1: Taking Your Startup From Zero to Hero Deliveroo, was established in the UK in 2013 by an American named Will Shu, who was surprised to find that few local restaurants in the UK delivered food, and decided to do something about it. (Ahem, yes, the 65 million residents of the UK just accepted the status quo.) Deliveroo offer a fast delivery service which is trackable via smartphone and have seen revenue growth of over 650% year-on-year. (Ok, so we really did want the service!) The company reports that restaurants that partner with them have seen their revenues increase by up to 30%, which has created jobs in the sector. Deliveroo’s talk was about "Scaling Up" and meeting the challenges associated with outgrowing their platform. Have you come across the phrase: “What got you here, won't get you there?” In short, there needs to be a shift in mindset, and behaviour to move to the “next level” of success. It’s said in business, but it's also true for tech. Deliveroo’s experience is very common in tech, so common it’s almost predictable, and a tech rite of passage! Because AWS work with such a large and diverse client base, working with them gave Deliveroo access to expertise and knowledge about scaling that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access as a startup. This saved them time, and helped them to make wise decisions, more rapidly. I mentioned earlier that experiencing issues whilst scaling is almost predictable. In the same way that a child can't fall asleep as a boy, and wake up as a man, (unless it's Tom Hanks character in Big!) a new product can't reach maturity, in terms of product-market fit, or the way its been architected, overnight. It has to go through multiple stages of evolution, and just like puberty it can be confusing, awkward, and frustrating! So... here's the warts and all truth - if you're a new tech founder, don’t be surprised to discover that the technology platform (the tech that your software “sits” on) or the “technology stack” used for the initial version of your app, or parts of it may need to be changed, or upgraded within a few years. Software and hardware technology, user experience design, hot new trends, and business demands move too fast for you to build once and use your platform for aeons, and as we've discussed, your app will need to evolve, and mature. What tends to happen, is that you will start to see signs that the initial app is no longer suitable, or is too basic and needs to be upgraded. All, or parts of it may simply become too flimsy to use as a foundation for the next phase of growth. There could come a time when back end processes are pushed to their limits, or your user interface has become unappealing, and outdated. At that point, you’ll need to rewrite, rebuild, or even rearchitect the whole system – sometimes from the ground up before it gives up the ghost, or customers start to get fed up. This can mean that extra manpower and time is needed to complete the job – possibly using a different programming language, or a different combinations of tools, software and hardware, whilst you maintain the existing software that customers are still using. I know this sounds pretty horrifying - and it’s definitely frustrating, however sometimes it's unavoidable. Every sector has its downside and the need to revisit, and rebuild (or periodically "replatform") in order to move forwards is a big one with tech. So what can you do about it?
Some of these challenges were discussed in my interview with Christopher Gimmer from Snappa, in the Techpreneur Interviews series. (You can get a free ebook containing a number of interviews with successful techpreneurs, including the interview with Christopher here.) In Snappa’s case, they had used Open Source software to give them a head start in creating their app, but building on top of that software wasn’t sustainable in the long term. Takeaways:
Transferwise, is 6 years old. It was started by two friends receiving their pay and managing their expenses in different currencies (British pounds, and Euros). Their pain points revolved around the hassle of converting money every month, having to pay bank fees, and the delays in receiving their funds. This led to the formation of the company. The Transferwise mission is: “Money without borders - instant, convenient, transparent and eventually free.” The founders’ MVP was a basic Excel spreadsheet, which I thought was brilliant - you can’t get “leaner and meaner” than that! The founders used a spreadsheet to validate their business idea simply, cheaply, and without any risk. There was a real element of drama to the talk, as this startup faced a nightmare scenario - their first DoS (Denial of Service) attack; a cyber-attack whereby hackers flood a site with so much traffic that the site is brought down. The Transferwise site went down, and they received an email demanding payment in Bitcoin! They were given 24 hours to pay, or face an increase in traffic the next day. The Transferwise team called a War Room meeting. AWS were consulted, and there was an analysis of the attack, a plan was put together, and work was done to prepare for the next day. When the attack happened the next day, Transferwise’s site stayed online. Like Deliveroo, Transferwise had also experienced replatforming pains, and used AWS to assist them with scaling up. Transferwise believe that to achieve their mission, they need to experience exponential growth, and to do that, they need to remain focused on business goals, not infrastructure related concerns. As a result, their philosophy is to focus on what they do best, and to use AWS to support them. Another reason that Transferwise found it advantageous to use AWS is to avoid a natural bias towards the familiar. When a technical problem arises, a knowledgeable developer may well have seen, and solved the problem before. In this case, they have a familiar go-to solution, based on their previous experiences. How can having a knowledgeable developer able to solve your problems be a bad thing? It’s not, however, consulting with AWS brings another perspective so that familiarity does not override the selection of the best solution. Before we move on, let’s explore this a little, so you can consider a typical scenario that tech founders may face.
If you had the time and money to absorb the learning curve needed to deliver solution B, wouldn't you choose that option? But what if you don’t have the resources? You can see the dilemma. Just remember that short-termism can look attractive, but if you save pennies now, you may waste pounds, dollars, Euro etc. later! These are more tips, than takeaways, but here are some things to note:
Session 2: Data-driven Product Management at Scale Session 2 was all about innovation, and the talk started with a brief introduction to some of the approaches that Amazon take with respect to innovation. Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles were covered and an excerpt from Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders published in, April 2018 was shown on screen: “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It's human nature. We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's 'ordinary'. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before... You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won't have it.” When making changes, Amazon collect data > review the results > and iterate, and they have what they call 1-way door, and 2-way door decisions: 1 way door decisions have a significant impact on the business and can’t easily be reversed. Therefore, they need very careful thought. In contrast, it is possible to back out of 2 way decisions, which allow space for experimentation. Takeaways:
A quick pros and cons brainstorm could be useful to identify whether the door is 1-way, or not. Gousto were the first company to present in this session. Speakers: Shaun Pearce, the CTO of Gousto, and Nicholas Hemidy, a Gousto Product Manager. Gousto deliver pre-proportioned boxes of fresh ingredients to customers at home, along with “fool proof” recipes to make cooking at home both quick, and nutritious. The company was established in 2012 and have seen 240% year-on-year growth. They are currently on track to deliver 15 million meals across the UK by the end of 2018. The company are looking at ways to reduce waste by making sure that the portions delivered are precise, and are working on personalisation that will help them recommend recipes based on algorithms. Question: How many times does a customer have to make a purchase before Gousto has enough data to reliably recommend recipes to them? The current thinking is 5… As with all tech businesses, there are an almost endless number of features that could be built. Gousto are focused on making sure that the features that they do decide to work on make a “material difference.” They achieve this through customer interviews, data analysis, and testing. Team structure Gousto has 6 squads named after foods, and each squad has an Agile Coach, Product Owner, engineers, and a data analyst. Gousto were focused on “moving the needle” by working backwards, looking at what they want to achieve, and using this to drive their activities. Each squad is focused on delivering on key business objectives. The model described was: Team > Mission > Metrics > Features > Components. The metrics are used to inform decision making in terms of the features that are built, and the smaller components within those features, and show the squad how they are doing in relation to their mission. Giving each squad a mission, and a level of autonomy, has given the squad members focus, a clear purpose, and the scope to innovate, whilst keeping the squad’s mission at the forefront of everything they do. This has fostered innovation, and has motivated and engaged Gousto’s staff. This wasn’t explicitly stated, but because recruitment and retention are major challenges for high-growth startups, my take is that in keeping the tech teams motivated and empowering them, this not only helps the team excel, and has a postive effect on the whole business, it will also help the business to keep staff for longer, so it’s also a smart employee retention strategy. Individuals interested in stretching themselves, and in having a degree of scope and autonomy in their roles are going to stick around. Capturing data and driving traffic Gousto gather data through the use of 3rd party testing tools which they use for A/B testing. They have code in their website headers which allows them to change various elements on their web pages, and to track the data they receive based on customers’ actions. The company use both email marketing, and Facebook ads to drive traffic to their site. Experimenting with Calls to Action (CTAs) CTAs can be powerful. Gousto found that changing just one word in the CTA on the Gousto refer a friend page; from “Give and Get Gousto” to “Give and Get £15” resulted in a 12% increase in click-throughs. Takeaways:
Onfido. Speaker: Dan Leitao, Product Consultant, Onfido was also an extremely data driven business. Onfido are in the identity verification business, and use artificial intelligence to answer the question: “Is this document real, or fake?” They perform checks on applicants for employers and do KYC (Know Your Customer) checks for institutions, including banks that help prevent fraud, money landering, and other financial crimes. Their investors include Zopa, Google, and Salesforce, and they have raised over £60 million in funding. The company has over 1,500 clients worldwide, and Onfido perform identify checks in over 195 countries. Dan spoke about the pitfall of making product decisions based on gut instinct, without any data, or data analysis to support the decision, which he described as being the common mode of operation for the “Immature product manager.” Mature product managers strike a balance between their gut, and the data available, using data to inform, confirm or refute their initial instincts. It can be a chicken and egg situation as it is harder to gather significant amounts of data and feedback in the early days, before you have lots of users, or web or mobile traffic to analyse, but it’s still important to seek feedback and to consider the implications of what you learn, and any changes that need to be made. It is common to hear stories about founders who refuse to take feedback onboard because they are holding on so tightly to their own vision and don’t want to see this threatened. The product is for your customers, therefore founders should try not to perceive external input that suggests that changes are required as defeat – feedback should increase the chances of success! Companies exist to serve others and become successful through doing that well. “In business, you get what you want by giving other people what they want.” Alice Foote MacDougall Startup metrics When asked about key startup metrics, you might name customer lifetime value (CLTV), or Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), or you may look at new downloads, retention, or abandonment rates (in one of the sessions on mobile engagement, a drop off of 70% in use 1 week after the app was downloaded was given as the current abandonment rate.) For Onfido, the metrics that show them how well they are doing as a business include the time taken to complete checks, and the accuracy of their assessments (including increasing the knowledge of the number of ways to identify fraudulent documents.) Dan warned against the overuse of “vanity” metrics. These can sound impressive, but can be of low value because the team doesn’t know how they can control that metric, or influence it! His advice was that metrics which can be influenced should be focused on, as they are far more powerful than vanity metrics. Q & A session with Onfido and Gousto The teams were asked: “How do you know that you're focusing on the right things?” The answer was that you don't! It’s a case of having a hypothesis, and looking at the data, taking action, and gathering data and that allows you to learn what impact this has had, and whether you're on the right track or not. If changing the input affects the output, than the metric is valuable. Gousto takes a qualitative and quantitative approach. They invite customers to their offices, and give them prototypes to interact with. They use the customer feedback to better understand what the data they have gathered is indicating, and why, and therefore both types of data inform Gousto’s decisions. Takeaways:
Session 4 From Web and Mobile to Chatbots and Voice: The New Customer Engagement Models Starling Bank Speaker: Sam Everington, Lead Engineer. I was really impressed with this presentation. Starling Bank offers a mobile-only bank account. Despite it taking approximately two years for Starling to obtain the necessary permissions and licences to set up their bank, they have grown incredibly rapidly. After less than 12 months in the app stores, they have hundreds of thousands of customers, from 17 years old, to over 90 years of age! Their mobile usage stats blow other banks out of the water - more than 50% of customers use Starling’s app every day, and more than 95% use it weekly. The app has nice features, including statistics on the proportion of money spent with different organisations, and if customers lose a card, they can easily put a temporary lock on their account. Starling avoids taking a punitive approach with their customers. Users are warned if there are insufficient funds in their account to make a payment that is due. If the customer tops up the account before 4 p.m. that day, then the transaction will still go through, and even if they don't, the bank won’t charge them for being overdrawn. What does the future look like? Sam spoke of using chatbots to provide customers with useful information based on their financial circumstances, and would like to see further advances with bill payments using Alexa. Session 5 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Implementation: Tangible Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Use Cases for your Startup This session was focused on different types of AI, including machine learning, and intent recognition (which is where we’ll see chatbots and other forms of AI become really useful) and how startups are using these to revolutionise traditional practices. Babylon Health Speaker: Nils Hammerla, Director of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. The ability to book an appointment and see a doctor rapidly in the UK is a major problem, and there have been few advances in this area. Babylon Health are a subscription service that gives customers access to virtual consultations with health care professionals via video and text messaging. For a low fee you can access a doctor 7 days a week, and have unlimited medical consultations. Their mission is to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. Using machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) in conjunction with data collected from medical professionals Babylon can also help customers to diagnose problems and book an appointment with their doctor. We were shown a (successful!) live demo using Alexa to diagnose a medical problem, and to subsequently book a doctor’s appointment. Stories from the event PagerDuty knew how to draw in the crowds with their ice-cream machine, and cool t-shirts (thank you!), but they were also able to engage visitors at their stand with simple, but powerful real-world examples of how their product helps its customers. PagerDuty’s clients are able to bring all their monitoring tools together under one roof, making it easier to control and manage a range of different tools, and to set parameters for alerts. I’m a huge fan of monitoring tools, which I talk about as a key non-functional requirement for your app in the software survival guide for tech entrepreneurs, Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book. Your tech business is never too small to at least have some basic monitoring tools in place. The other benefit with monitoring systems is early warning detection. Prevention is better than cure, and with the right tools in place to continually check on the health of your app, tech teams will be able to spot problems brewing when any metrics enter the “danger zones” set by you, or your team, and can take action before the situation even reaches a stage where your app crashes, or goes offline. The example I was given by PagerDuty was the clothing chain, Gap. Their site was brought down for an eye-watering 6 hours during Black Friday a few years back. That’s more than long enough to bring the C-level execs at any company to tears, and I dread to think of the revenue they must have lost during that period. PagerDuty automates on-call management, and will email, call, send SMS messages, or even send push notifications to the people your business designates as contacts to receive an alert when any metrics reach the warning limits set. With the right alerts in place, and their tools consolidated on PagerDuty’s platform, Gap experienced zero down-time during the Black Friday sales the following year. The cautionary tale There are always at least a few horror stories at these events, and I spoke to a consultant working for one of the exhibitors at the Summit, who had worked for a startup that had acquired funding from VC’s, overspent, grown rapidly to close to 100 staff, and then had to fire over 90% of them. They didn’t have a CFO, or any financial counsel in-house. There is such a stark contrast between bootstrapped businesses who rely on content marketing, social media strategies, and in some cases, don’t even spend a penny on Google ads, vs. VC funded startups! Snappa’s Chris Gimmer talked to me about how they keep a tight hold on the purse-strings there, and justify evey penny spent (they’re at $40,000+ MRR, monthly recurring revenue), and Nathan Kontny talks about burning money on office space, which doesn’t offer any return on the money invested. There is definitely a culture of raising a lot, and spending it just as fast in some startup businesses! Next, let's take a more in-depth look at some of the services offered by AWS... AWS Services for Small Businesses What technical support and guidance is there if there’s just you, a co-founder, and one or two developers? Or even just you and a developer? I went to the AWS stand to find out. AWS offers a huge array of cloud based services, including networking, database storage/ server space, web hosting, analytics, security, database services and more. Services are startup friendly, because they are so flexible. Customers pay only for what they use, and have the freedom to scale these “on demand” services up, or down according to demand, and the needs of their app. At the Summit, I was told that services can also be turned off completely in some cases if they aren’t being used. In this post, I’ll name just a few services that I think will be of general use to most tech startups: AWS CodeStar is for building, developing, and deploying applications on AWS. Each CodeStar project has its own project management dashboard, with issue tracking capabilities, so customers can track progress across their entire development cycle. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), allows you to store data / content, including videos, audio files, documents and images for your website, web app or mobile app, which can be retrieved by you or your customers as needed. AWS Mobile Services offers a selection of tools that you can use if you wish to build a mobile app, including analytics, Amazon SDKs (Software Development Kits) for mobile app development, sign-in services that let users sign into your app via Google+ or Facebook, data storage, chatbots, and management of push notifications. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service akin to a cloud-based supercomputer that will allow your developer to install and run software applications on it. EC2 can also be used to control different physical machines virtually, without having to manually control them from each computer, or laptop. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), offers what it describes as a “managed relational database in the cloud that you can launch in minutes. Amazon RDS can be used to store, manage and retrieve customer data. AWS Security will help you to enhance the security of your application. Maintaining security is rarely as simple as buying one product, because often it is humans who increase businesses vulnerability to data security breaches! Therefore, you’ll also need at least some basic common-sense policies for accessing and handling data. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a free service for web apps. It includes release management tools, statistics and alerting tools to help developers monitor and manage various aspects of a product’s “health.” If you are interested in building a web app, such as a SaaS, then a combination of EC2, S3 and RDS and other AWS products can be used together to cover the major services that may be needed to support your app. This falls under Application Hosting. The AWS Free Tier for developers and startups, currently offers access to EC2, S3, RDS, and a number of other products. It includes 12 months of free computing capacity, database storage, data analytics and more, within specified usage limits, plus learning opportunities in the form of tutorials for developers. There are many, many more services, including those for load balancing, IoT (Internet of Things), Machine Learning, and game development. Follow any of the links provided and you’ll be able to reach a full list. AWS also offer a “Device Farm” for device testing, which I’ll discuss separately a few paragraphs down from here. What support is available? AWS Support Services offer 4 service tiers – Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All customers receive Basic Support with their AWS account, which includes 24/7 access to customer services. The developer level plan is where more help becomes available. Customers can raise support tickets and “cases” and seek advice. There is a 24-hour maximum turnaround on queries, and 12-hour maximum turnaround for “system impaired” issues, where a customer believes an issue has been caused by an AWS service. Developer plans starts from $29 per month, and personalised guidance and troubleshooting starts with the Business Plan, which costs from $100 a month, billed based on usage of services. What other support resources are there? You’ll get AWS documentation, whitepapers, and access to support forums with all 4 plans. All AWS customers have access to their own Personal Health Dashboard, which displays the status of the AWS services that you use. This makes it easy to see if there are any issues with the service that could affect your business. All plans receive 7 basic checks through the AWS Trusted Advisor service, which scans your infrastructure, and makes recommendations. AWS architect zone I also got some time with an AWS Architect whilst at the venue. I wanted to speak to one, because I believe that cross-device, and cross-browser testing are tough tasks for micro-businesses. The array of device, and browser combinations that customers could be using to access your software is staggering, and because testing and identifying issues is so important, I wanted to get an update on the services offered by the AWS Device Farm, a service that I discuss in Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, which gives businesses a way to remotely test their apps on real physical devices. In my interview with Alexis Theriault, he talked about spending a small fortune investing in different mobile devices so he can check that his Brain Focus app works correctly on each one. As a new customer, you will still get 1000 minutes of testing free, but I discovered that when you pay, the price is $0.17 per minute, per device. Having a clear test plan, will ensure that you aren’t wasting time during testing so you can keep costs down if using the paid service. You can use the Device Farm to test the experience of your web app on different mobile devices browsing the Internet on different web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc.) However, you would need to pay extra to test your native mobile app on an AWS remote device, as it would need to be installed on the relevant AWS remote devices. Costs for that service start from $200 a month, so you’d need to weigh up the cost of buying a number of smartphone and tablet devices, vs “renting” them. When assessing the best option, also consider that new devices come out all the time, so keeping up with “the latest” devices in house is an ongoing task! The Device Farm can also be used to replicate issues when suspected bugs are reported. If a customer contacts you and says they’re having a problem with your app, once you confirm the device type and version, and web browser and browser version being used, if you don’t have the same device as the customer, you could locate it in the farm and investigate the problem there. Here’s a list of physical devices available for testing via the Device Farm: http://awsdevicefarm.info/. Other sessions attended Startup day Engage your Audience through Mobile Speaker: Daniel Geske, Solutions Architect, AWS. This was a technical session that took attendees through the AWS Mobile Hub and demonstrated how to integrate chatbots into mobile apps, and set up other services such as SMS messaging, and push notifications. Innovation Hub Lightning Talks I attended two Innovation Hub talks. These were short sessions of approximately 20-25 minutes each: Innovation in Startups Speaker: Arunkumar Krishnakumar, Venture Capital (Blockchain, Crypto, Fintech and AI) discussed the ways in which cloud infrastructure has created opportunities for startups. He quoted the founder of Starling Bank, who stated that she had achieved the same things at Starling Bank for £30,000 that had cost £30 million when she worked at a traditional bank. By the time large companies set themselves up to take advantage of new tech and innovations, then build and release them, they are already too late. Times will have moved on, and their "new" offerings will have become "old." This is why startups have a competitive advantage - the ability to innovate, and release to market quickly is key. Inspiring the Next Generation of Builders Speaker: Lorraine Underwood, from Lancaster University gave us an insight into new methods being used to teach young children to code. Free stuff! Everyone loves a freebie, so I found out what free services, and offers were available so I could share them here!
If you’re part of an accelerator program, you can apply for:
Well that’s it from me, I hope this post was useful! If you have any comments, or questions, please contact me at: hello@purposefulgroup.com. Writer Bio K.N. Kukoyi has worked as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, Agile Project Manager, and Software Delivery Consultant since 2004. She has authored 5 business books, including the software survival guide Don't Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, and is the founder of Purposeful Products, a consultancy that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses to transform ideas into commercial software products. Kukoyi has worked on multi-million pound projects to deliver mobile apps, websites, and other digital products used by businesses and consumers worldwide. She has founded several small businesses, and has first-hand knowledge of the challenges faced by small enterprises with limited resources. With a background covering business, project management, and product management, she aims to demystify key topics and help readers and customers to gain clarity, so they can achieve their goals. If you’re interested in building a software application to sell, or would like a professional opinion before investing in new software, you can book a free 30-minute consultation session here: https://calendly.com/purposeful-products. You can access her new book, Techpreneur Interviews: What's it really like to run a tech startup business?, a compendium of interviews with techpreneurs and entrepreneurs from around the world free of charge here. Welcome to the Software Buying Series on the Purposeful Products blog, where we’ll be talking about some of the software you might buy to help you start, grow, and run your tech startup business. The series will look at "buying" software from three different perspectives:
Most Purposeful Products clients are planning to hire developers to build their software, but reviewing these other avenues provides a balanced view of the options available! We'll kick off the series by exploring perspective 1. The first time I sat on a software selection panel was back in 2006, and in this post I’ll be sharing some best practice tips based on my experiences from more than a decade of working with clients to build, buy, and integrate software. I hope this will help you avoid pitfalls (and regrets) when deciding on the right business software to use. But here’s the twist - we’ll look at each tip from both the build and buy perspectives, so whether you’re an aspiring techpreneur, or already run a tech business, you’ll gain knowledge that will help you make better decisions - both when you’re looking to buy software, and when you’re busy building, and selling it. As a tech-centric business, you’re likely to spend a large proportion of your time on product development. However, other tools and activities will also be needed to keep your business afloat, including those related to sales and marketing, customer care and customer success, accounting and finance, and tools for organisation and planning. You may also be surprised to find that you, and your tech team rely quite heavily on software to help you to monitor, maintain, and manage your core product on a daily basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if a tech startup with a full range of “kit” uses at least twice as many software products as non-tech focused business owners! The great news is that there are a great range of free and low cost tools that you can use to run your business. :-) But then comes the task of comparing different products in the space, and coming to a decision about which ones to invest your time, money, and trust in. :-/ “Eighteen months ago, we invested in a CRM that turned out to be complete rubbish.” “The only thing that keeps us sane is knowing it’s not just us going through these [technology related] issues.” "Software is a continual challenge…” These are some of the comments I heard during the 60 minute interviews that took place with the CEOs, and directors of small businesses when Purposeful Products sponsored a research project called In Their Own Words, focused on the challenges faced by small businesses. The majority of the companies had recently bought, or were planning to buy some form of software, and several had had horror stories and negative experiences to share. The findings from this research led me to write my second book: Don't Buy Software For Your Small Business Until You Read This Book. Let's's start with a few general points to consider before we drill down to some more specific tips. Show empathy and take a walk in your customers' shoes Buying software can be a confusing, and stressful experience for businesses. Bear in mind that buyers:
If you’re developing B2B (Business to Business) software, be aware that research from major players such as the Gartner Group, the world's leading information technology research firm, has highlighted a growing trend; businesses without formal or mature IT departments are increasingly making software purchasing decisions without technical advice. According to a recent Forbes article: “The face of tech purchases, both buying and selling, is changing in the digital age.” As a techpreneur you will have a competitive advantage if you become great at putting yourself in your customers’ shoes as you build, and market your software. Consider how you feel, and what your needs, hopes and fears are when you’re operating in “buyer” mode for your own business. What annoys, or frustrates you, and what makes the process more confusing? In contrast, what makes it easier? Get to know your customers, and their concerns and preferences so you can remove issues and common bugbears from your sales processes. This will also help you tailor your marketing copy to your audience - using customers’ language and expressing their sentiments in your marketing copy is a great way to grab people’s attention, and is another cue which can indicate that your product is right for them – you can see how Highrise CRM do this in my interview with its CEO, Nathan Kontny. Let's move on to some specifics. Common issues experienced by customers when buying software. Some of the most commonplace issues and complaints that I hear about software, and software vendors are that: 1. It’s difficult to gather the required information. Sometimes getting a straight answer to “Does the software do X?” is a challenge, and customers are often bombarded with calls to action to “Sign Up!” before it’s quite clear what the product does, or what its benefits are. Some product websites are wonderfully mysterious - sometimes because of fear of the competition discovering their latest innovation or how they price their product – but this does nothing to help customers, and increases the time it takes for them to compare and contrast products, and ultimately to gather enough information to make a well-informed decision about the best product to buy. As a software builder… Provide information that will help customers to make quicker decisions At the end of the day, indecision is painful for everyone. If you can help prospective customers to do their research and gather information about you, to address their concerns, and to put a tick, (or cross) against the relevant items on their “must have” list, you could be several steps closer to making a sale. Help people decide whether they want to give you their business (or not) as quickly as possible: Make sure your marketing copy clearly lays out who your software is for, and what your product is able to do. It’s refreshing when product information is easily accessible. People will appreciate you for this - and for not wasting their time. Have a script prepared for “meaty” questions about things like data protection, contractual queries, and refund policies, so those supporting your product can answer questions fully, and comprehensively when asked. Have an FAQs page and address these questions there too – and keep it updated! Good, easy to use FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) will also reduce calls and emails from customers who can’t find, (or are too impatient) to trawl through the information you provide if the answers they’re looking for aren’t easy to find when they visit your app or help pages. Increase confidence with social proof and other evidence that the customer is making a wise decision if they choose your product. Quotes, reviews, case studies, and testimonials can really help your cause. Even if these are Beta users, or former user testers, displaying some evidence of customer satisfaction on your website is better than none! If you’re going to be operating in the B2B higher-end of the market, with expensive, or enterprise level software, customers may be even more discerning and may take longer to make product decisions. Can you offer the details of any customers who would be willing to vouch for you as a referee? Ask for permission to use them as referees now, so you already have a list of referees who have agreed to be contacted. (This will cut out delays whilst you frantically call and email your network to ask if anyone would be prepared to vouch for you.) Be everywhere on Google. Most of us start with Google when we’re looking for products and services, so do your best to appear in organic search results (which you don't pay to appear in) for relevant keywords relating to your business, and have a good general online presence. That might include: Having your company set up on LinkedIn and on other social media sites with user names as close to your business name as possible (sadly I missed out on mine, but try and get an identical username / handle across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, as an example.) Getting your product listed online in the major software directories. These are listed towards the end of this post. Increasing the volume of content available about your business / product. Why not take the opportunity to rank for blog posts that you’ve written for your own site, or appeared in as a guest blogger, or podcast guest? Tagging your product, logo, and any relevant company images so these become visible under Google image searches. This is an example of how you might add alt text to an image from the Yoast website, a great place to learn more about SEO. Having demo / “how to” or “explainer” videos on your website possibly hosted by Vimeo, or YouTube, which will appear in video search results in Google. This means that you have a chance to rank for text based content, images, and video. Let’s take a look at a few examples for Calendly, a company that create calendar management software. If we were researching this product, we’d see a large number of product demo videos online: There are also lots of images available under the keyword “Calendly” – including their logo and numerous examples of the Calendly appointment booking page. You can also rank in search engine results under “News” by submitting a press release to Google News, or via a PR (press release) company. Some are fiendishly expensive, but you’ll find some services that come in at under $100 via the link provided. If you have a business address, register for Google My Business too. This will also increase your chances of ranking for your company name and bring up your business in search results relating to maps. 2. That it “ticks the right boxes" on paper, but in practice is difficult, or time-consuming to understand, and operate. In this scenario, once businesses start to use their new software, they quickly notice problems with it. The menu options are in weird places, the processes are illogical, it takes 8 steps to do what could be possible in 3… Companies often get caught out because they don’t dig into the detail of how a product does what it does. The savvy software purchaser asks not just what the product can do, they find out how it does it. To avoid this pitfall, get hands-on with the product, and give it a thorough road test using some realistic scenarios that you regularly encounter in your business, and always take advantage of product demonstrations, free trials, and the opportunity to “try before you buy” to get a feel of how easy a product is to use. As a software vendor… There is no point investing time and effort into a product if it isn’t easy to use. People just don’t have the time, or interest in “learning” complex systems. Think carefully about your user journeys, and user experience across all device types - desktop, mobile devices browsing the web, and native mobile apps. Use familiar menus and placements that people already understand how to use (coming up with unusual styles of user navigation is a risk that could impact on user experience / usability. If you do, you absolutely must carry out user tests to be sure that your innovations really work before you launch.) Keep workflows tight, and look for ways to make the each process as simple, and quick as possible. Test thoroughly, and objectively – if this wasn’t your app, how would you feel about the way it works? Take a look at the reviews in the Android and Google Play stores and you’ll see negative reviews where you’ll see people I like to describe as being mad or sad - they are either driven to anger by user experience flaws which they just can’t understand, or saddened because they desperately want the product to be better in specific areas, but find that it isn’t. They can see what the product could be, and what it needs… but it just isn’t there yet. These people don’t want to switch products, they just want the product to mature a.s.a.p., so it can fulfil its potential! I truly believe that sad customers can become massive advocates of your business that stick with you like glue and tell everyone how great the product is - once their needs are better met. Learn to spot them, and if they start to appear in your own business, pay attention! Allow them early access to new features, and develop relationships with them, because they will get behind you, and be your cheerleaders, and they will tell you the truth about their views because they care, and want you to succeed. 3. Is missing important features. Usually in this case, important features are forgotten, and there is a failure to anticipate how requirements for software may change in the future. Taking on new staff, expansion in customer numbers, and changes in legislation, and internal, or external policies can all mean that software that was once adequate is no longer a good fit for a business. To avoid this issue, be sure to cover all the bases by keeping a checklist of “must have” requirements you can use as a benchmark. Consider what success looks like from your perspective. What would cause you to feel delighted with your decision - or to feel disappointed? What ultimately makes the software worth the time, and money you’ll be investing? Note down the top 5-10 key business activities that you’ll need to carry out, or problems that you want to solve, and write them down. Once you have your list of deal-breakers, don’t wing it, or go off script, but stick to your key requirements. If you’re a larger business, also speak with, or survey everyone who will be using, supporting, or benefitting from the new software, to get feedback and input from everyone about what the software should do, so important features aren’t overlooked. As a software vendor… It’s not your fault if customers forget their own requirements! However, being very clear on what features you offer will help organised customers to tick off key criteria on their lists with minimal effort, and will inform the less well prepared about items that they should be thinking about. If there are features that customers want, that you don’t yet provide, make sure you highlight any “workarounds” (alternative ways to deal with gaps in functionality) that are available, so customers can decide whether your solution is right for them. 4. Is unreliable, or of poor quality. After committing to a product, you may come to find that the software runs at a snail’s pace, or is unstable; “timing out,” and leaving you checking your watch, or distracting yourself with other tasks whilst it loads, crashing at the worst moments and losing work, and generally inspiring computer rage! To avoid these pitfalls, make use of free trials, and pay close attention to how long it takes to perform commonplace activities. As a software vendor… Remember the 3 golden rules: · Make it fast! · Make it fast!! · Make it fast!!! Human attentions spans are at an all-time low. There’s a debate about whether the “goldfish memory” attention span is a myth, but many sources report that goldfish now have the jump on us at 9 seconds vs 8 seconds (ouch!), so software should run quickly, and performance testing (checking how fast your app runs when performing different actions) and performance tuning (taking a range of measures to improve the speed of your app where necessary) are musts. When testing, make sure you’re fully present and not just thinking: “Yes, ho hum, I’m doing some testing today, that was a little slow, but nevermind. It’s probably just my computer!” Instead, always test like an advocate of the customer: “Sheesh, I’d be mad if I was a paying customer having to wait this long for a page to load! What’s going on? I need to speak to the dev team about this urgently!” Regularly monitor performance, including page load speeds, and the time taken to complete user journeys using your software. This isn’t a one-time job when your software is first built - keep reviewing this as new features are added to your product, and the number and complexity of the journeys that your customers make through the system starts to increase. These changes will all contribute to your app slowing down. There are many different tech tools for performance management (ongoing control, and improvement of performance), and performance monitoring (for basic, and more complex stats and figures on performance), which can be used to help you to remain vigilant, such as Yslow, for performance monitoring. I discuss performance testing, and many other types of testing, as well as the clever solutions that companies use when slowness in their systems can’t be avoided, in my software survival guide for tech startups Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book. 5. Does not support businesses in meeting legal, or regulatory requirements. Even worse than suffering an inconvenience, this complaint can leave businesses open to fines, or even legal action. No matter where you’re based, there is likely to be local business legislation in place, including Data Protection Acts, Disability Acts, and Privacy laws to comply with, as well as the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which becomes law in May 2018 and will affect you if you (or your clients) have customers in the European Economic Area. Standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) may also be relevant to your business. If you have access to legal, finance, security, and compliance teams then consult with them to make sure you haven’t forgotten any important legal, security, or financial factors that should have an impact on the type of software that you buy. Online privacy, security, and data management are going to be hot topics for many years to come, so make sure the software you use helps you to operate within the law, and not outside of it. Check the specifics of key regulations relevant to your business and industry, and get full responses from software companies which confirm whether they are compliant, and what measures they have taken. This may include gathering information about how they have interpreted legislation, and built, or configured their systems to comply with it. As a software vendor… If you are going to be collecting, storing, or processing EU members data, then GDPR may affect the way you build and run your tech business, and even where you choose to locate the servers that hold your customers’ data. (Servers located in the US, are not considered compliant with EU data protection regulations.) If you don’t already know about it, and will store, manage, process, transform, or manipulate consumer data on behalf of your B2B customers,’ start reading up about GDPR now: https://martechtoday.com/gdpr-mean-third-party-data-processors-208098. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/resources-and-support/data-protection-self-assessment/ Make compliance information easy to find. Don’t make customers hunt for these details. Be aware that for some customers, this may be a key deciding factor when choosing a new software supplier. 6. Is incompatible with other software systems. Your email marketing system comes from here, your CRM system comes from there… You use a different system for your business email, which also contains a separate list of your contacts. Small businesses tend to use lots of niche tools to run their operations, but even if the individual tools are satisfactory, often these do not “play nicely” with each other. To bridge this gap, check if any integrations are offered by the companies that sell the products that you’re interested in. Fortunately, software automation tools such as Zapier, IFTTT, Automate.io, Piesync and Microsoft Flow can be used to create connections between an increasingly wide range of products. Try visiting pages like Zapier’s where you can type in the name of a product and get a list of all the integrations on offer. As a software vendor… Consider partnering with companies that offer complementary services to the same target market as your business. Which software vendors you could form joint ventures with? For example, a business that develops CRM software could team up with a company that provides accounting / invoicing software, so that when new clients are added to the CRM, it is easy to select the client in the CRM and then to send them a bill via the accounting software, and to update the CRM to confirm that a sale has been made, and the amount the client spent. These collaborations benefit clients as their software processes become more seamless, and vendors also win because their products become more attractive when they work in harmony with other popular tools and enhance the customer experience. These ventures also raise the profile of both businesses, and widen their audience / customer base. You can also approach Zapier and other automation software companies directly. These businesses offer HUGE platforms for you to get more eyeballs on your product, and to showcase a variety of uses for it alongside other products. 7. Is more expensive to run than first anticipated. “Ah. We didn’t factor those costs in when we chose the product…” Unanticipated costs related to software purchases can be a real set back financially. Keep a note of the monthly, quarterly and annual expenses, add-ons, upgrades, fees for services rendered, or other products or services you’ll need to get started, or to extract value from each product that you’re considering. Use this data to make like-for-like cost comparisons for at least the first 12 months, and to help you to assess the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO.) Look at the costs and usage caps at the price tiers above the one that you need right now. Often companies don’t spend enough time thinking about what will happen when they hit the next, more expensive (and sometimes unaffordable) price tier. Will you take the financial hit and accept rising product costs, or start hunting for a replacement tool (and repeat the selection and set up processes all over again? Choosing a product with a price-friendly model that your business can grow with will spare you from the upheaval of migrating to new products due to rising costs. As a software vendor… Avoid pricing models that mask additional costs, and necessary add-ons and extras required in order to use your service. Don’t bury this information. Of course you can make it look attractive, and justify your costs, or pricing structure, but make sure the information isn’t hidden away. Few things aside from poor quality software leave customers feeling more annoyed, and manipulated than hidden costs. 8. Poor customer care Consider customer support before you actually need it! I like to ping an email to any businesses that I’m thinking of working with. It’s surprising how many never respond, aren’t particularly helpful, or where it’s actually a challenge to contact them in the first place, because emails bounce back with a “this mailbox is not monitored” message! Would this level of service be acceptable in an emergency? The answer to this question should depend on what you use the product for, so consider that the quality and speed of customer care you receive should be better (and snappier) with products that you rely on heavily. If a tool is free, and non-critical to my business, I might give it a try even it looks like the lights are on, but no-one’s home, but if I’m paying – no way! As a software vendor… Don't set up a business and then go AWOL… It leaves a poor impression, and it isn’t fair to customers - especially if you’re charging a fee for the use of your app. Even if there are only one or two of you, there are ways you can manage customer support that are professional, and ensure that communications aren’t lost:
Let’s cover a few other tips to assist you with your due diligence: Use comparison and review sites to gather information about the best products available.
As a software vendor… Get yourself on these directories! They are seen by huge audiences and will help you raise your profile, and win more customers. Be sure to check the “small print” When buying software, read the terms of business, Service Level Agreement (SLA), End User License Agreement (EULA), or other forms of software licensing agreement before you commit. Often these can be accessed from a link in the website footer of software vendors, or from the settings, or about menus in mobile apps. Look out for clauses related to privacy. Is data shared? If so, who with? Where is data stored? Who owns the content created using the app – does it belong to you, or the vendor? Be aware that by using software, you may already be bound by the software vendor’s terms whether you signed an agreement, or not. As a software builder… Uh-huh. Most customers won’t bother to read your terms, but they should! To be totally ethical, put your terms in places where customers would expect to find them. Because these documents will also state what customers must not do when using your software, it is in your interest to make sure that people pay attention to them, and that you don't have users unwittingly breaking the terms of your agreement, because they just "thought it would be o.k." to share the same login and account information within their company, (or with a friend) or try and reverse engineer your code for a college project, for example! As a final takeaway, remember the general rule - the bigger the role a piece of software plays in the smooth running of your business activities, the more time you should invest in the product selection process to avoid unpleasant surprises. After reading this post, I hope that you feel more well-informed, both as a consumer and producer of software! 29/3/2018 0 Comments INTERVIEW 6 - Nathan Kontny, CEO of Highrise: Deconstructing Highrise (and why “eating your own dogfood” is good for business)During the Techpreneur Interview Series, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to entrepreneurs from the US, Canada, and Europe, bootstrapped businesses, full-time techpreneurs, a side-hustler, and entrepreneurs that have gone through accelerator programmes. In this final interview in the series, the Purposeful Products Blog features Nathan Kontny, an entrepreneur that has founded several businesses, including City Posh and Inkling Inc. Several years back he was brought in to run Highrise, a startup SaaS company whose core offering is a “simple CRM” system for entrepreneurs. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including the intricacies of running customer interview sessions, strategic marketing, hiring, and hustling in general! In this post, we will "deconstruct" Highrise, and look at how an established SaaS company literally “takes care of business,” as explained through the eyes of its CEO.* This is a long post, covering a range of topics, including:
You can download the entire interview here. Welcome Nathan! First, could you tell us about Highrise and how it came to be? My understanding is that it’s a spin-off from another company… Highrise was originally launched in 2007 by the makers of BaseCamp. They were known as 37 Signals back then. They were having trouble keeping up with talking with reporters, and lawyers, and dealing with landlords… There were all sorts of collaborations that needed to happen. Because it was people based, rather than project and task based, it didn’t make sense to use the Basecamp project management software, so they created a simple CRM to do the job. It ran for years, but it was never the focus – that was on BaseCamp. The product hadn’t had any updates for a while, but was growing as a business, and it deserved more attention. It became a spin-off in 2014, which is when I came in to run it. Highrise is now its own company, and there are 7 of us in the team. We help people who need a simple CRM, and need to track who said what to whom, and when - whether it’s sales leads, speaking to journalists, or other tasks; it’s about making sure those things don’t fall through the cracks. In previous interviews, we’ve talked about how people got started, but I’d love to talk to you about the middle part of the story - about establishing the product, marketing, sales, optimisation, and fine-tuning… Just from looking at your website, it seems that you know your user base really well. There are a lot of references to how your customers work in your sales copy, with some really specific language - for example, when you talk about customers’ “lead spreadsheets.” How did you gather such intimate knowledge of how your customers think and feel? There are a couple of things – talking to them, and using the product so much ourselves. None of the Highrise employees came from BaseCamp. We didn’t have that knowledge of who the core customers were, and who was using it. So right away, we made sure that we used the product every day. We started using it for our internal helpdesk, and used it to manage all our incoming emails, and for managing support requests, feature requests, and customer requests for pricing and demos. We converted that all over to Highrise. Just the act of using the product every day to support ourselves gave us a lot of knowledge of the product, how people use it, its quirks, and its problems. I come from an Agile background, and when you consume the service that you are offering to customers, we call that “eating your own dogfood” – because if it’s good enough to give, or sell to others, it’s good enough for you to use as well, wherever possible! This removes those blinds spots you can have in relation to your product. When you use it yourself, you can empathise better with your customers, and get eyeball-to-eyeball with the things that don’t work so well on a practical level, because you're a customer too. How did you approach speaking to customers? It’s quite hyped-up parlance now, but we ran a number of Jobs to be Done (JTBD) interviews. JTBD looks at how people identify that they need to solve a problem, or transform in some way – in other words they recognise that there's a “Job to be Done.” A person then “hires” a product, that has a "Job to Do", to get them from where they are, to where they want to be. Jobs to be Done was made famous by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor and leading thinker on disruptive innovation. He's the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma, and the Innovator’s Solution books. Clayton did some research for McDonald’s because they wanted to increase milkshake sales. When they started asking people why they were buying them, people were saying: “I have this long commute to work, and if I "hire" a banana, I eat it too fast, and if I "hire" a muffin, the crumbs are all over me, and if I "hire" a bagel I have to mess around with the cream cheese, and if I "hire" a donut, one is never enough... but when I buy a milkshake, it lasts a long time. It supports me on my drive to work, and I’m still full at 10.00 a.m. (You can find an in-depth Medium article on the topic here, and some scripts and JTBD questions, written by a product manager from Google. You'll also find an article about understanding your customers on the Kissmetrics Blog (a blog well worth following for its quality content on a range of business topics.) If you'd like to learn more about the research done for McDonald's, you can find an article published in the Harvard Business Review about it, and the theory of innovation here.) How did Highrise manage the JTBD process? We borrowed Ryan Singer (Head of Strategy) from BaseCamp, as he’s well versed in carrying out Jobs to be Done interviews. Then we got customers on the phone, and basically interrogated them! JTBD interviews aren’t always a comfortable experience… We asked them about their businesses, and their emotions, and what they were going through when they bought Highrise, so the information you see on our website came from those interviews – lead spreadsheets, follow-ups, things not falling through the cracks – in fact we modified the language on the website after we ran those interviews. Customer interviews can be tricky. It’s easy to infer the wrong things from interviews, and customers can say one thing, but actually their motivations can run a lot deeper. How did you make sure you pulled out the right information from the interviews? Ryan knows Bob Moesa, who worked with Clayton Christensen, and educated himself in this area, but it’s definitely a skill you need to practice and get good at. I’ve been running my own businesses since 2005, so I’m accustomed to talking to customers about products, but maybe not getting the feedback I need right away. Customers love to talk about features. If you ask most customers what they want, most times they’ll tell you about a feature they dreamed up. This happened to me on Twitter the other day, when I was talking to a customer about a problem they were having. I had to say: “Just put Highrise out of your mind and tell me about the problem you’re trying to solve.” You must help the customer to distance themselves from the product temporarily, and to focus on the job they have, and the emotions they go through. You’re not paying customers to be innovators for you. It’s not the customer’s job to provide you with all the information you need to make good judgements about what you’re going to do. You have to get really good at teasing that information from them. You have to ask “Why?” many, many, many times until you think you’ve got all the layers – starting from the feature request, down to what’s really going on within their business that’s troubling them, and driving the need to ask for the feature. Here are some YouTube videos about our Jobs to be Done interviews. Thanks, that’s a great piece of advice. It’s important to be able to separate the product from the problem! Don’t just take a feature request at face value, follow up with the customer, because there could be more to the request than you realise. The process shouldn’t always be: “He, she, or they said they want feature A, so we’ll build feature A” without further discourse, or analysis… It could be a great idea, but you might be missing an opportunity for learning and gaining deeper insights about your customers, product(s), and pricing, so probe a bit more before going ahead. Toyota do this really well, they say: “Ask why 5 times…” I started thinking about Toyota as soon as you mentioned asking “Why?” many times! (If you haven’t come across it before, The 5 Whys exercise was invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. I refer to an article about the 5 Why’s in my book Don’t Buy Software for your Small Business Until You Read this Book. Here’s the link to the article: Toyota Traditions. Ask 'why' five times about every matter.) It's important to set your customers up for the JTBD interviews. You need to let them know that you’re going to be drilling down, otherwise it feels impolite; “No, but why are you…? But why…? Please tell me why…!” It can get uncomfortable when you’re trying to investigate the psychology of people. When you ask customers a lot of questions, you turn the spotlight on them, and people often want to focus on what they want to focus on, and may not go into real depth with you. From the perspective of someone that's worked on a lot of product teams, I'd say that people often request features based on the first idea that comes to them that seems like the answer. That’s why psychologists are trained to get deep into people’s psyches, and to understand their motivations. As people who make products, we need to channel some of that. A product team could take many days (or longer) to consider a feature and its pros and cons, and then to plan it out, and work through all the kinks in the customer journey / steps in the process. They will also consider the right technical approach, and the best way(s) to deliver the functionality and present it on screen etc. I think it can be useful to educate customers about how much work and thought goes into creating quality features, and why we need such detailed information... I also noticed on your site that you tick all the best practice boxes with regards to marketing - you’ve clearly defined your customers’ problems, your product’s benefits, and you provide lots of social proof - quotes, tweets etc. Could you talk us through the work involved in getting your Homepage to that stage, and what went into bringing all those elements together? The JTBD interviews provided a lot of it. People talked about searching for “something simple”. Even the top phrase on the page: “Simple CRM.” Everybody was looking for simple. People also kept talking about “zero learning curve.” We talked to all these entrepreneurs that were super busy, and were hiring their first sales person, or business development person, or support person that they needed to collaborate with. They didn’t have time to read anything, they just wanted something they could turn on, that would work really fast. Salesforce, I don’t think you would expect to just turn on. If you work at Accenture, or one of those big consulting companies, they have “Salesforce Champions” - people with a dedicated responsibility to assist users. We know from our interviews that our customers don’t have champions. They just need to get out of their spreadsheets, today – right now! So all that helped with the language. Our marketing covers versions of that message. The wording for: “We have a manual, you won’t need it” came from thinking about other products that we all really appreciate for just turning on and working, like an iPhone. People say they love iPhones because they’re so simple, and because they didn’t have to read a manual. It’s just intuitive. As you say, there’s a ton of social proof, I’ve been making products for a long time, and I’ve seen over, and over again how important it is to have social proof, whether it’s logos, or case studies. It varies – for smaller businesses you need a lot of quotes, maybe tweets. If you’re a small SaaS business, and you’re dealing with enterprise businesses, they’ll want to see case studies, or how other businesses used your product and saved money, or how other businesses have implemented your product. It’s all different versions of the same thing; they want to know; do other people like using you? We also looked at other ways to provide social proof, from magazines like Inc magazine, and Entrepreneur magazine - publications that I know my customers read. I’m very attuned to that. The JTBD interviews really helped guide us to highlight the right benefits, and to answer the question: “Of all the emails we receive, and the things people are saying about us, which ones are we going to spend time highlighting on our homepage?” Thank you. How long has it taken you to “optimise” your homepage? Would you say your homepage is optimised? We’ve been optimising it forever! BaseCamp optimised it a long time ago, then we came in… I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve blogged that we just got another 31% improvement on our Homepage, so it’s never done! I just finished an experiment 2 weeks ago, where I added a link: “What is CRM?” in the footer on the site, it’s a popular search term, so it was an attempt to do some more SEO work. That's a great example of how tweaks and changes can improve a website, make it more targeted, capture more leads, and convert more sales. If you're doing this, have your website analytics in place first so you can compare before vs. after! Are there any other marketing tactics that techpreneurs can use when putting together a high converting website? You’ve got to get the layout right, the social proof… I’ve been doing web design reviews every week on YouTube, where I look at someone else’s site and I feel that people are getting testimonials wrong. Either they don’t have any at all, or they’re buried somewhere at the bottom of the page. I think you need them high up to convince people to stick around and not bounce right away. Some of the arguments I get for people not having testimonials are:
But there are ways to hack around that. Get the product in the hands of friends and people you know, and you’re likely to hear something great. At first it was my sister, or my mom commenting on early sites that I worked on. There’s nothing wrong with putting testimonials from your sister, or your mom on your website. If they said it, and it’s true, who cares?! You don’t have to say: “This is my mom”, although if you do it could be interesting! You can say: “Here’s what she said, [and use your mom’s name] she loved this product!” I didn’t pay her to say those words, she wasn’t lying. Another thing - go to the biggest customer that you can find, and ask for an introduction. Offer your product, and give yourself away for free. We used to do this at the first company I started with Y Combinator, and we gave our product and ourselves away for free to O’Reilly Media. We made ourselves available, and went to their offices and showed them how to use the product. It was free consulting, but at the end of the day I got to use their logo on our site, and mention them in interviews, and use cases, and they were talking about it too and about how well the product worked… We didn’t make a dime from that deal, but the next one we could charge for, and it generated a good buzz. They are good tips! Going back to testimonials... User testing is a great way to get quotes and testimonials too - usually someone says something which is quotable! We’ve used sites like Usertesting.com before. You pay a price, $20 - $30, and the tester uses your product, and they record a video. Whether it’s the first, or second iteration of your product, someone will make a positive comment about what you’re doing. Keep listening to the feedback, and make the product more useful, and prettier. I would say: “Hey, can we put this comment on the website?!” and the testers said “Sure, no problem, I love the product, put me on there!” You need to ask for permission, but as you say, it's a wonderful way to get testimonials. They're a great, low-cost resource for startups. I’ve used Whatusersdo for clients, but they're more expensive. Nathan, what’s your preferred social media channel, and why? Right now it’s YouTube. It used to be Twitter. I do love the simplicity of Twitter; the short blocks of text, and not needing to become friends before you can reach out to people. It’s also easier to sift through feeds than it is on Facebook. Although I have more followers on Twitter, if I look at where the world is going, it’s going more towards video. Facebook is moving more towards video, and YouTube keeps on growing. Kids want to be YouTube stars, rather than athletes when they grow up! If I want a place in the future, I need to become good with video. How’s it been going? Has it had an impact on your business? I do this daily vlog, and there’s a lot of experimentation. It’s not growing really fast, but it’s growing. It’s not easy to say that traffic from YouTube is going to the Highrise website, but it’s a long game that I’m playing. People email and say they’ve been watching the videos and finally got their business started, and they’ve signed up with Highrise. That’s an interesting point. There was an interview I did for Entrepreneur Interviews Series 1 with Rob Cubbon, where he talked about the importance of thinking about the future and the “big picture," and setting time aside to work on long-term goals vs. just existing in reactive mode. Thanks for highlighting how you do this! It’s not like people are watching my videos, getting their credit card out, and signing up, but more about people following me for six months, and consuming my content, and now they’re signing up. People say they love how I’m helping them on YouTube. I use it as a place for constantly testing content. I post a new video every day, whether it’s web design advice, business news, or going about my day with my 3-year-old and trying to draw lessons from it. When I see what hits, in terms of more likes on this video, or that video, then I’ll write up a nice version of that in Medium, and that Medium post will end up driving traffic back to Highrise. I try not to take a myopic approach, because you can take one piece of content and spin it off into 5 other things and one of those might generate the impact that you want. I’d say my Medium writing generates more traffic than my YouTube channel does, but it’s all inter-related. Medium seems to be helping a lot of entrepreneurs gain traction... I think seeing your thought process laid out will be interesting for readers. A CEO thinks about tomorrow, and if you’re always thinking about tomorrow, in many ways, that approach starts to take care of “today”. It’s like that quote by Sean Patrick Flanery: “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” So, we’re talking about these different activities having different length sales cycles? The YouTube cycle is just longer… Right. One way to do it is to dump a bunch of money into Google ads, but once the money runs out, the traffic stops! You really need to invest in things that are going to be long term traffic generators. A lot of entrepreneurs have their heads down, working on a product, and they’re not doing any audience building activities. They’re focused on features, and I think they’re hurting themselves, because it’s likely that the product you’re working on today is not the product you’re going to be working on 5 years from now, and if it’s not, you’re going to be starting over with something and you still won’t have an audience to use that product. I feel you could reverse the priorities and build an audience whilst you’re coming up with that genius product. Whilst you’re building a product, don’t forget about building an audience. I’m a big fan of the long game, and investing in meeting people online, and providing value, so that one day they’ll actually use the products you’re selling. I really like what you said there. When you think about the concept of constantly starting from scratch with new products or services, it could be quite soul destroying! You're playing a bigger game than just what’s happening today, or this month, or this year, and not just building, or making “stuff”... I was with Y Combinator with a startup in 2011, and I made that mistake. I didn’t build an audience, we were paying for Google ads, but we ended up walking away from that product, and ended up starting from scratch again with the next product. I refuse to make that mistake again! Now I try to encourage customers, and say: "This is the product, but you should really follow what we’re doing on Medium, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook." One day, if we move on to a new product, hopefully they’ll still be around to try the next thing. How much time, do you or your team dedicate to marketing on a weekly basis? I spend almost 100% of my time on marketing these days. When BaseCamp spun off Highrise, they hadn’t worked on it since 2011 and it was slow, broken and not quite right. At that time, I put a lot of focus into the product. Back then it was 10% marketing, 90% product. I was working on features every day. Now we’re a larger team, there are people that can focus on the product and I need to crack the marketing challenges that we have. We have a great product, but not enough people know about us. I should have started even sooner on marketing. People want good products, obviously, but it doesn’t do you any good if nobody knows about them. I don’t know what the magic formula would have been - 50-50% probably. Marketing is different for different people, but for me it’s everything from Google ads, SEO, optimising the website and making sure it continues to convert better, and pricing plans, and making sure they can sustain the business. It’s writing blog posts, it’s posting YouTube videos. It’s not just advertising. Everything that you’re doing aside from working on your product, and building a team is probably attributable to marketing. Where would you focus your energies if you were starting again? I would have started with YouTube even earlier. Now there’s video on Instagram, and videos on Facebook... But video is harder than writing. You’ve got to get good with video, and editing, and telling a good story, so the sooner you start, the better. It’s going to take a while… When I look at the videos I posted 18 months ago, I cringe. The lighting is terrible, the editing is bad... if you’re going to be terrible for a while, just start practicing now! I’ve been on Medium for a while, but I probably would have done more to pursue writing on other publications. I’m on the Signal vs. Noise publication from BaseCamp, which has a nice following, but I feel that I’m probably talking to the same group. If I want to diversify, and reach more people, I’ve got to be on other channels such as The Mission, and Startup Grind. I’ve only published a few things with them, and I should have considered other publications too. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently – publishing on your own site vs. other sites, and looking at how you can reuse, and adapt content to save time without affecting your SEO. The current wisdom seems to be that it’s best to check that Google has indexed your article on your blog first (if it comes up in Google searches, you'll know it's been indexed) before you upload it to Medium. If you do that, Google recognises your site as the "master" source for the content. Then you can publish on Medium. The risk is that if you publish to other sites first, and then publish to your own site, it could appear to Google that you’re duplicating / copying content, and your site may be penalised. Others recommend publishing part of your post on other sites, and linking to your site so people can read the rest. I'm experimenting - we shall see! That's a tough one, the whole SEO thing, ‘cos you're right, you're putting a lot of content on Medium as opposed to your own site. I think we made that mistake a little bit - putting our content on Medium, when we don't have enough content on Highrisehq.com. We're trying to crack that. It's totally ok to rewrite an article. You can write something once for Medium, then write a different version of it for your blog, or website. It's not that hard to do. Don't just change words for synonyms, but take another crack at it, alter it and add another two hundred words, or make it 200 words more concise, or pick different anecdotes… We're doing that now to get more content on our website where all that SEO traffic is more valuable than it is on Medium. Medium has been great for us. It’s such a great social channel for spreading a message. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have your own blog, and your own content, but it probably means that you can't forget about Medium. (You can use the Medium content upload tool to import your existing posts onto Medium.) There's a constant learning curve with business, isn't there? Can we talk PPC (Pay Per Click advertising)? Some entrepreneurs have said it doesn't work well for their businesses, because based on what they charge customers, they can't justify the cost. However, others have said it does. What are your thoughts? PPC is expensive and in many categories for CRM, it's insane! It teeters on not being affordable for us either. There are very few wins there. Often, I don't think paid ads is the right way to go. However, it can help you test products, even if you're not making enough money from it. It can get the word out about a product early on when you're struggling. I don't think it's sustainable for most people - you and your competitors are just giving money to Google, and the cost of your ad placements is going up… So, no, I don’t love it as a long-term channel. I'm much more of a fan of focusing on longer-term investments in audience building; finding people who want to follow you for years, who will help you to get your product out there. Yes, you've got companies like Salesforce to compete with! We even compete for keywords that Salesforce probably doesn't care too much about like “easiest CRM" - come on Salesforce, you're never going to be the easiest to use! They make so much money from their Enterprise customers that it makes it hard to compete, even for keywords that probably don't mean that much to them but mean a lot to us, because the prices have been jacked up so high. As a new business, you should be careful with your budget, and spend your time on YouTube videos, writing, and talking to people on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for that Nathan. Are there any tools that have been useful for analysing traffic and customer activity on your website? I've got three analytics tools running all the time. My favourites are Clicky, it’s a little old school, but I like it for real-time stats and web analytics, and we use Google Analytics a lot. It’s a pretty good tool which is accessible for startups, because it's free. There’s also one called Heap Analytics. You can basically turn it on and they measure everything. They’re capturing every click and you can come across things that you may not have thought you'd be interested in before – “Oh, do people click on this link or not?” If you suddenly think of a question like that, they have the data, but it can get pricey pretty quickly. Often with analytics tools, they have a free plan and then an enterprise plan, so be careful with them - they are going to be useful early on, but then they get so expensive! We also use Optimizely a lot, but it's the same thing there. I think Optimizely has got a really cheap starter plan, but then it goes to Enterprise really fast. I noticed that trend with analytics tools when I was researching products to include in Entrepreneurial Espresso, which features over 450 software applications for entrepreneurs. [You can download the first 3 chapters of Entrepreneurial Espresso for free here.] The issue is that customers get used to them, invest time in them, and then may have to abandon them because they can't afford to use them anymore. Yeah. I'm getting annoyed because it keeps happening. I'm not going to call them all out by name, but I was using a tool that was 75 bucks a month and then it became 175 bucks a month, and then it was: “This feature is 175 bucks a month, but if you want this feature it's another 175 bucks a month!” You think: “I’ve invested all this time into you, and now your prices have become astronomical...” I understand it’s how they need to charge to run their business successfully, I guess, but I don't have a good feeling about it when it happens. There's another tool I won't name, but we got in with them when they were still using SaaS pricing, and we were spending a hundred bucks a month with them. We kept putting in more data, and then it became a thousand bucks a month. It was fine, as our usage was changing and I could see that, and we could afford it, but all of a sudden we found ourselves in this category where they said: “Well, we've got rid of the thousand bucks a month plan, and now you're going to need to get on the phone with one of our sales people to talk through your usage.” and I thought: “I don't want to get on the phone with a salesperson! I don't want to haggle over price. Just tell me what it costs, and keep it consistent!” These are important points to consider if you’re considering pricing, and your sales process. The beauty of SaaS is that you see how much it costs, get your credit card out, and get started. No booking appointments, or fearing that someone is going to waste your time, or sell you something you don’t want. Adding in the sales piece adds friction to the process. That’s such an “Enterprise” mentality, thinking that people want to speak to your sales department! Unless they have questions, they usually don’t. They just want to get on with buying and using the product. Data storage / data centre costs rise as more data is stored, and companies are passing that cost on to customers, but it’s still extreme. In my software survival guide for small businesses, I advise readers not to focus exclusively on the entry-level price when buying software, but to look at the second price tier, and the third before committing, and to think: “It’s fine now, but can I afford this product at the higher tiers?”, and “How soon will it be before my usage reaches those more expensive tiers?” If the answer is "no", or "soon" to those questions, keep looking, because it’s so disruptive to disengage with a product you’ve become accustomed to using, and to start hunting for a replacement. I know! At a certain level when you’re trying to do new things with products, it involves sales people, and now I'm just stuck and I'm probably just going to toss the product away, because I really don't have the time to deal with them. I think there could be a gap in the market if somebody can make this work, and offer a reasonably priced tool for small businesses starting to consume more data, where there’s not this huge price jump, and crunch point where businesses are looking at the pricing and saying: “Hmmm, what now?” You would think so. That's why I like Clicky so much. They’ve been around for years. There are only a few employees, and I don't think they’re VC funded, so they were able to create a sustainable business, and they charge reasonable prices. I think a lot of the analytics companies are VC funded, because they need to store gobs and gobs of data, but we all know that VCs want a huge return on their investment, and if you don't make money fast enough… Now the VCs are looking for results and you're going to be under pressure, and if you want to raise more VC funding this is where businesses start to say: “Look! We've moved into the Enterprise market!” At that point, it's almost like there's nowhere else to go... Can you tell us about your journey as an Entrepreneur, and now as a CEO? You've founded several businesses, and been through the Y Combinator program twice! I always wanted to run my own business my dad was very entrepreneurial, so I always had a taste for it. When I was in school I had an internship with a uranium processing plant. I worked as a chemical engineer (Nathan has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering.) I worked with this entrepreneur; he was the plant manager, on the side he was going around measuring air quality for people. He also had plans drawn for a pizza restaurant he wanted to start... He was just inspiring, and I had every confidence that he would succeed. When I got out of school I wanted to accomplish that too. I got a traditional job at Accenture, but I was always doing these little side hustles here and there. I was doing some consulting for a friend of mine, building apps and stuff. Then Y Combinator came about in 2005. I found out about it and we applied, and got in. Since then I’ve been starting and building new businesses. I did Y Combinator for 5 years, and did it again in 2011. That didn't quite work out, but I was able to turn that into Draft, the writing software, and the Highrise job just landed in my lap because of the work I had done with Draft. I couldn't have predicted how this path was going to go, I was just open to different opportunities. There have been struggles, especially with the first business where you wonder: "Can we do this? Is it working?” There's a lot of self-doubt, and a lot of experiments, and stuff that doesn't work... You lose your confidence over, and over again. That's it. That's the journey. That's what you go through. I read an Elon Musk biography, and it was a good one. They were on the 8th or 9th rocket test, and on their last rocket. They had nothing left, and they probably weren't going to be able to raise any more money. Then it finally works. You've got to be open to failure, after failure, and then other times things work, and get you onto the next challenge. Uranium?!!! I want to ask you so many questions about that, but I don't want to go off track! When you're starting a new venture, do you have a way of deciding when "enough is enough"? I think one of the big things with knowing when to quit is when you feel that you're not learning anything anymore. The way folks like Elon Musk achieve success is through experiments. He's always got another idea for an experiment. If you're experimenting and not learning anything new from it, then it's time to quit, because you won’t have an idea of how to fix things and make them better, so you can test that new hypothesis, and move to the next stage. But, if you do learn something, then keep going! In terms of work - I'm not a fan of pushing myself past any physical limits any more. When you're young you think: “Oh, I can stay up all night," but you quickly get sick! Back in the day at Y-Combinator, you’d get these kids who weren’t taking care of themselves. People got scurvy, they weren't getting enough vitamin C… It's not worth it! My dad was in the hospital recently, my mom has been sick, and it sucks. Life is so fragile, life is so fleeting it's not worth pushing ourselves to become more successful by hurting ourselves, by not eating right, by not working out, by not getting enough sleep. I give up when it’s 10.00 p.m. and I've got to go to bed to get 8 hours’ sleep. I don't try to physically overpower any problems I have with running a startup. I love your comment about not trying to “physically overpower” the problems that you have within a business. That can only be done for a limited time. We know that long term it's working smart, being disciplined, and having good systems in place that gets things done, but it's so hard not to use brute force! We're all guilty of it. Recently I had a situation where I had some work to deliver, and I was up late, then couldn’t sleep, and before you know it you’re sick and it ruins a week, or two weeks. You might get a small win now, but what did you get yourself? Probably a net negative overall. True! Sometimes the boundaries you set yourself are the most important ones. I’d also love to talk about customer support and customer success. I've been watching the development of the SaaS market as a customer, but also out of interest with my business analysis “hat” on, in terms of the different strategies that companies are using. I've noticed the whole concept of "customer success" has really grown over the last few years. How do you approach those concepts at Highrise? There was a guy who approached me who wanted to work at Draft. What was interesting about him was that he proactively helped a bunch of people in our customer support forum. I was busy and was having a hard time keeping up with customer support, but without me even asking, he was assisting people. I thought that if I hired him he would just get stuff done - I wouldn't have to tell him how to make a customer happy, he just knew how to do it and figure it out for himself. Not everyone is like that and can manage themselves. Others want guidelines about what they should do, and how to do their job. So, to answer your question you need to have lots of people like Chris, and support them in making your customers happy without you having to be there all the time! Look at Zappos (a shoe company renowned for excellent customer service.) The people at Zappos have been empowered to just make customers happy. Their process is great. The big lesson is to hire people who feel very responsible, and to empower them. Yes, that's hard to train or teach. I find that there’s a lot of customer service work done on autopilot, where agents aren't really listening (or reading) carefully, or paying close attention to what is being said… There's no 2-month Highrise class. That’s not going to cut it. In a startup, you need to be able to hit the ground running, and do whatever it takes, and to learn whatever you need to learn to do your job, which is to satisfy that customer on the other end of that email, and you need to be able to understand, and help them with whatever they're struggling with. There's definitely a personality trait there that you want to look for… Have you been able to narrow down a way to find those traits? There’s the Newcastle Personality Assessor (NPA) based on the “Big Five” personality traits that everyone has to a greater, or lesser extent - Agreeableness, Neuroticism / Emotional Stability, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. I’ve investigated trying to select for high conscientiousness, to identify people who are achievement focused, but also disciplined, and thorough, but it's hard to do! I think one of the things that helped me with hiring Chris was that he was just out there in the world writing blog posts and talking to people online. Today, with social media you have a really good window into how people communicate with other humans without waiting until you get them in an interview. If someone’s applying for a job, go and see how they talk to people on Twitter. Follow them on social media. Are they helpful? Are they being constructive? If they're not on social media, and if they're not answering questions, and they're not writing blog posts, then that's a problem too. In an interview people might say: “Oh, I just haven't had time to do that,” but we all have the opportunity to do it. There's nothing stopping you from signing up for a Twitter account and being a productive member of some sort of community. One of the things I look for is people who are out there publishing things, whether it's open source products, or just writing a lot and being friendly and useful. There may be ways of testing for that in an interview, but there are ways of monitoring how people interact with the world just using social media. What you've said is far better... That’s concrete proof. It’s physical evidence, so it’s probably better than a test. Thanks for that comment! (If you'd like to see what your strongest traits are, you can take an NPA test here!) What's your top cash flow, or money management tip for technical entrepreneurs? It's just the way I run businesses, but I don't like to raise money, and I don't like to have a lot of debt. Even with my first businesses, we only raised $17,000 with Y Combinator, it was peanuts. After that, we didn't raise any more - we focused on getting customers to pay us. Even if they weren't the perfect customer, they were customers that could pay! People can be too obsessed with finding the "perfect customer", and have a narrow view of who their customer is, with good reason - they read The Lean Startup, which says that you need to find the perfect customer and do all these perfect experiments, but when you're struggling to pay the bills, it's not always easy to find perfect customers to pay those bills early on. With Ink (one of Nathan’s businesses), we had customers that wanted to use our products in ways that we hadn't even imagined, and hadn’t wanted to use the product, but they were going to pay us $30,000, and that was going to fund product development for the next five months. We did it again for a pharmaceutical company that wanted the software, and wanted us to give them a licence. We were a SaaS company with a monthly payment model, and there was this business that wanted to get our code, and they wanted to pay us money for it. I think it's ok to do that once or twice to pay the bills. Those customers can give you the runway to find your perfect customers. Sometimes you need to get a bit creative and find other ways of getting money, and you may need to deal with some not-so-perfect customers. So, be pragmatic... Exactly. Also, be sensible with money. I don't understand the number of people whose first action as soon as they raise money is to use it to buy office space. It doesn’t make any sense. You can get a co-worker pass these days for 50 bucks, and you can rent a desk somewhere, or work from your home. There is no return on that money - you’ve just burnt it so that you have an office to sit in. (On the topic of licenses, take care with your legal agreements when licensing your product to customers. A common type of end user license is a EULA - End User License Agreement, but if the client wants additional rights, you may need to call in a lawyer to help you cover all the bases and include the necessary clauses to protect your Intellectual Property. You can find a cheat sheet of free online contracts and legal resources for business use here, but remember that tailormade contracts are likely to be a better fit for your needs.) You can reflect, and let it sit in a bank account for at least a short period, because sometimes priorities change, but when it's gone, it's gone! What's next for you, and for Highrise? We need to get much better at marketing. We’ve gotten pretty good at optimising and improving our conversion rates through testing, but we need to get better about spreading the word, and getting people to check out our product. We've also been considering PR campaigns, and stunts to create a buzz this year. In terms of YouTube, I’m getting better with experimenting and looking at what works - I'm not just doing the same thing on repeat. I'm looking at what’s going to draw more people to the channel. I'm also spending more time on SEO on YouTube, looking at what kind of tags and titles will draw people in. We’re also building cool features, of course! Features are awesome, and customers love them, but that isn't part of the marketing flywheel. You can't just keep shoving stuff on to your product to make people come and pay attention to you - you've got to find something a bit more sustainable, probably along the lines of more teaching, and more helping people. Thanks Nathan. I wish you, and Highrise all the best! Where can people go to find out more about Highrise? The best place is Highrisehq.com: http://highrisehq.com. You can find Nathan’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/nathankontny. *Please note that Nathan left Highrise during 2018, but you can still connect with him via YouTube, or Twitter: https://twitter.com/natekontny. |
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