Building For Anyone, Not Everyone: How To Future-Proof Your Company

Customers are seeking modulated, integrated, and customizable solutions. Learn how three companies have become more than just a product.

One of the most common questions I get is “What’s your favorite startup?” For better or worse in this industry, we tend to collectively anoint heroes or unicorns or cockroaches (or whatever we want to call them this week) and give them too much credit, overvaluing what worked for them as a gold standard in how to run a company. I love Buffer’s transparency initiatives, but I also recognize that if every company tried 100% transparency, we might be plunged into a Purge-like anarchy overnight.

The question about favorites really means, “Where can I look for guidance on how to build a startup that will make it?” I thought I would take a minute to go there and give some examples of the types of startups I think are designed to make money (shocking expectation, I know) and last for a long time, which is how I personally measure startup success.

I’m going to walk through three examples; two I know extremely well, Transpose and Zapier, and a third that everyone has likely heard of — Slack.

My huge assumption is that if more startups thought on the level that these three do, they would be more successful and more prepared to weather inevitable storms that come their way.

There are a few key places these companies share common philosophies and approaches that I can only conclude has led to a large part of their success.

Making Yourself Feature and Future Proof

These three companies have managed to build a core product that people will pay for, prepare themselves for almost any change in the market, serve trends without chasing them, and even drive growth by making it easy to make them a part of your existing workflow. These traits make them great examples of startups that I’ll just call ‘future-proof.’ In short, instead of building a solution meant to serve everyone, these companies have figured out how to build a solution for anyone.

Now, there are a number of companies crushing things on the integration front. Even the behemoth Salesforce has managed to provide an incredible set of integration options via the AppExchange. The platform and integration model isn’t new, nor are these three companies even necessarily the best at it. But, what they’ve done better than many others is combine a solid platform with the right integration options, all in a wrapper that I can easily engage with.

The following companies are interesting to model after because they scored high on these major purchase criteria:

Flexibility: Can I tweak it to perfectly serve my core use case? Can I fine-tune this tool for edge cases? What options are available in the back-end?

Integrability: Does this work with my current stack? Does it provide a nice set of API endpoints? Is this something I can add-on or something I have to build around?

Simplicity: Does it seem like it was built for a human to interact with? Am I going to be able to train someone to use it without a lengthy on-boarding process? How many clicks does it take to do the thing it was designed to do? How long until this is up and running and doing its job?

By nailing some key aspects of their product, these companies are insulated (somewhat) from market changes, integrated in a way to create a competitive advantage, and designed for humans to easily interact with their products.

Transpose

Think of Transpose like a customizable database for all of your information. In other words, what if any content you wanted to save also had a level of structure to it, making it searchable, providing you with different views on that information and even offering insights on your content?

Odds are, you’ve been collecting data for years now through different apps or platforms, but the downside to this is that your growing mass of information doesn’t have structure — Transpose wants to solve that problem for their users, who are proving to be business-focused users or “prosumers.”

Transpose is young, but it’s software is so flexible that it’s being used for everything from Real Estate CRM to Genealogy projects to Small Business operations across their more than 100,000 users.

The company formed in May 2015, boom. They’ve taken users away from bloated, expensive databases and splintered task management products and provided a flexible platform that adapts to the user as they work, not the other way around. Too many startups try to make the user change, not change the product to meet the user.

Slack

The fastest tech company of all time to reach a 1 billion dollar valuation. Who cares? Here’s what is powerful:

Slack is more than just a chat tool. The magic of Slack, at least for us and many other companies that love it, are the integrations. Slack became a hub for other tools we use, a true communication central, and significantly cut down on email volume. Do a quick search on Product Hunt for Slack apps or tools built with Slack in mind. It is fascinating that such a young company has embedded itself so deeply and so quickly in workflows everywhere and boasts integrations with all the right tools and services.

Because they are a platform for business productivity and not just a chat app, no one minds paying — and I think they can reasonably expect customers to stick around for a long time. Slack managed this, by the way, while keeping their core competency front and center and leaving the interface simple and intuitive. It passes the grandma test!

Zapier

This one is a little meta: Zapier’s entire goal is to make once complicated integrations possible and not just for developers, but anyone. It is the platform for integrations and quickly becoming a connective tissue between apps, tools, and platforms that we can rely on both for personal use cases as well as professional ones.

Before Zapier, it wasn’t easy or even possible to automate certain tedious parts of my workflow without custom code work. Now with a few clicks I can use human language to ‘build’ whatever integration I need to. I’ve made two apps that were previously on islands talk to each other and because of that, they are both more useful to me.

What they have in common:

• They play nice with others. Apart from just integration though, they have found a way to encourage development on their platform. They’ve offered a way for other companies to extend their capabilities through them and that makes them powerful.
• Each possess a strong dose of ‘do-it-yourself’ in the software. Modularity or customization options that let you ‘build’ the right solution for you instead of trying to guess it.
• They easily embed themselves in your existing workflow — or significantly enhance it by adding value to (or in some cases, enabling) processes.
• They let robots do the robot stuff so you don’t have to mess with it. A normal human being can sit down and nearly instinctively know what to do. I can behave normally and still get the max value out of the tool, the same cannot be said for many apps, products, tools, etc.

Summary:

1. Understand how you fit your customers’ stack to have any chance of selling to them.
2. Find ways to become more than just a product — become a platform.
3. Balance flexibility and features with simplicity.
4. Know the one thing you want to do really well and build items 1–3 around it. Better yet, make it the vehicle through which you accomplish them.
5. Remember that the customer is a human. The more you force them to change their behavior to adapt to your tool, the less naturally you are going to fit into their life or workflow. Your days are probably numbered if there is significant effort involved to make it work for them.