What would you do differently if you could launch your startup all over again?
I've been a serial job hopper most of my life, and from working at more than 20 companies, I noticed that almost every business had an issue with digitally storing files/data and easy retrieval. This was most noticeable within Law and Education.
So, a couple of years ago, I launched FileStore, a digital storage solution. I sold it as a quick and easy way to store and retrieve files, but I missed out on one important thing.
Every company I pitched to was concerned with GDPR issues. Speed and easy access didn't seem to be something they cared about or at least was something that was way down the priority list. It seemed that my experience at the lower end of a company and the time I wasted with data storage/retrieval, was something the CEOs didn't care about. They cared about GDPR. Yes, I had already done a lot of research on this and ensured my software was conforming, but it was an afterthought, tbh.
Key takeaway: Understand what your BUYER'S PAIN POINT is. That can be different from your USER'S PAIN POINT.
Essentially, the first few months were wasted marketing a solution for the user, not the buyer, and we didn’t onboard a lot of clients due to this.
If I could start from the beginning again, I would have better validated my idea with the buyers not users. The people we spoke to and the questions we asked, on the whole, gave us answers that we wanted to hear. So, be careful of your own biases when seeking feedback.
Things turned out okay, thankfully, and I'm turning a decent profit now, but it could have easily caused failure if I didn’t have savings to keep going after the initial mistakes.
What would you do differently if you could start all over again?
I have launched quite a few start-ups that didn't get traction. My focus was always on building a detailed product instead of building something that works and then focusing on sales to prove out the idea. It's typical advice but this time around I am focused on selling and marketing before getting nerdy with features that I think users want. I am only 7 months in but have already seen that what I thought would happen is not happening the way I thought it would. Users (even if they never come back) are so helpful in figuring out how to make your product work.
Great question! What I’d change would be pricing. We offer a bespoke mentoring service where we’ll find a mentor for you who has been in the exact position you have been regardless of industry. We initially gave a 7-day free trial but found that people didn’t buy at the end despite excellent feedback. Essentially, they wanted advice for free. Changing the payment structure so you paid straight away but could get your money back if you weren’t happy meant a lot more people signed up and churn was really low because the mentors were good and people wanted to stick around.
Hey that's super interesting. Are you still working on this product? It kind of overlaps with what we're doing at https://geeksandexperts.com/
This is simple but start sooner with getting organized. Made the mistake of underestimating how many tasks, bookmarks, docs, code snippets, etc that needed organization. Fixed it now with project management tools but it took a while to clean up the mess.
I quite agree with everyone else. Validating the idea at the beginning saves a lot of time and effort. And I think it's important to talk to real potential users via using tools and knowledge from books like the Mom Test. We thought we were building https://geeksandexperts.com/ for students and the realised there is a space in the indie creators hub for something like this.
I've been a digital nomad for a few years now and noticed that a lot of digital nomads returned home and quit the nomad life within 6 months. I wanted to provide an in-depth practical guide to ensure success, focusing on things like loneliness, budgeting etc. Advice that went above what was already available online for free. Unfortunately, I found that digital nomads didn’t actually want to pay even though it was a very cheap guide at just a few dollars. The other issue was that they thought they would be the exception to the rule and wouldn't need the advice. I carried out surveys with the same people who had returned home and asked if in hindsight they would have bought the guide and many of them said yes. So, it showed that there was a need for the product, but the user didn't realize at the time they needed it, only afterward. I couldn’t find a way around this problem so stopped marketing the product.
If I could go back to the start I wouldn’t have created the product at all and spent my time elsewhere. Sad but true.