Feedpresso — First month at StartupYard

As promised, I‘ll say more about what did at StartupYard.

The first month was a mentoring month. Every Monday to Thursday we would meet 4–7 mentors and we would tell what we do and what kind of help we need (or at least think we need) and they would try to help us.

This way we met fellow entrepreneurs and people that work at big corporations.

Many of them had lots of very good feedback. These few resonate with us even four months later.

Constantin Kinský — word of mouth marketing

Constantin helped us understand that word of mouth marketing (that’s probably one of the most powerful marketing types) doesn’t happen automagically. There is a process behind it and you have to understand it.

Identifying individual steps that lead to the recommendation is crucial and will help getting there immensely.

In other words, if you don’t know what are those steps, you will have a very hard time making people talk about and recommend you.

Darko Silajdžić — how to do PR

Darko gave us many great insights about communication and marketing.

One of the biggest takeaways from this meeting was the importance of knowing how to tell your story. It is always about the story you tell to your potential users and customers.

Also, it is very important to never be negative. Always come with a solution how you can help the customer but never make them feel bad. You want your potential clients to have positive emotions about you.

Liva Judic — How to prepare for public launch

Liva helped us understand how unprepared we are and how far away from doing a public launch of the product.

First of all, we need to find countries where the product is the most likely to pick up. For this, we were suggested to find friends and other people from ~20 most promising countries and interview them. Let them try our product and find out if it’s something that they think that people would use in their country.

Next, we covered things like how important it is to find relevant journalists for your product and coordinate launch through multiple channels.

Ondrej Krajicek — What are the steps of people starting to use the product?

Before meeting with Ondrej Krajicek, we had been only thinking in the terms of store visit, install, and activation when talking about the conversion rates before people start using the product.

But there is more. It is also important to identify the steps before that. How do people realise that there is a need for our product? How will they know that they need a solution for this particular problem? How they will realise that there is a problem at all? How will they look for it? How they will find yours?

Gustavo Vizcardo — what’s the problem you are solving

We have also had an extremely insightful session with Gustavo (now he is part of the team at StartupYard). With him, we’ve talked about the problem we are solving.

And apparently it isn’t so clear most of the times. For example, in Feedpresso’s case it was “finding relevant news in the sea of noise”.

But why do people need to find relevant news? Why do people read news at all? What do they achieve by doing that?

It really helped to think through this chain and see the bigger picture. This way you can realise that there are probably many more ways that you can solve the core of your problem. And maybe the way you are doing it now is not the best. Or it is irrelevant.

More things

There were a few more important things that we’ve managed to squeeze in the first month.

As the result of the talks with mentors we had a better market positioning statement and the understanding of the problem.

We’ve understood that it is very important to make people see the value they are getting from the product before they will pay for it. As the result, we made lots of improvements to the onboarding process and more are coming just to make people understand what value they will be receiving from our product and why is it worth paying for it.

In a very similar fashion, we’ve realised that we bring value to the people that’s worth paying for. We came to understand that the premium subscription works better even for the users themselves compared to the free product (in the end, somebody has to pay bills, and if it’s not you, it’s the ads with click-bait headlines).

Incorporation

Finally, in the first month we’ve incorporated in the UK (thanks Nikola and Jaromir). StartupYard here was again a great help, they go us in touch with lawyers and relevant companies that made the entire process super smooth. Also, they helped to prepare founders and shareholders agreements which we would have had trouble figuring out.

Most importantly, during the whole process you could feel that they care about the founders a lot.