Business without revenue
Business development at a pre-revenue startup
“Isn’t Codecademy free, what do you do?” is probably the most common question my friends ask me. I joined Codecademy about a year ago as the first business development hire. Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code online, and any individual who comes to the site can learn the most popular web languages for free.
For the non-technical person interested in joining a startup, the business development role changes radically depending on whether the startup is pre-revenue or post-revenue. At a post-revenue startup the business development, sales, and marketing can be 3 different roles. In addition, each of the roles has an outbound piece, where the customer is contacted by the company, and an inbound piece, where the customer expresses interest in the company with a google search, tweet, or blog comment.
At a pre-revenue startup, the first few business development hires do three tasks that were previously done by the founders:
1. Develop partner relationships
Every week I respond to ~100 emails asking about partnership opportunities, and schedule 10 to 15 phone calls with those interested in partnering. During these calls I’m looking to see if there is a good fit between the company and Codecademy, and thinking of ways we can work together. Roughly 9 times out of 10 there is not a good fit, and that is okay because we both learned more about each other, competitors, customers, and the market. There is a decent amount of grunt work here just scheduling, having the phone call, and following up.
2. Sales & partnership strategy and execution
At a high level this involves identifying 2 or 3 ideas for what the company could hypothetically sell and to whom. Then you create some kind of experiment, trial, or pilot to validate those ideas. After you have had your fun on the whiteboard, you actually need to create slides to describe your company, and pitch something to either your inbound sales leads or generate some outbound sales leads.
Codecademy’s long term vision is to help people learn to code and then match them to jobs. One idea I had to test whether anyone was even interested in skilling up for an existing job or acquiring skills for a new job was to work with college alumni. I contacted alumni groups of 20 of the most popular schools on our site, and on 4 different nights alumni groups from Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, and University of Virginia packed our office for an evening of code.
3. User feedback
Everyone you pitch or who uses the product has feedback on what could make the product better. Some people want a feature added after they use it, and some want a feature built before they are willing to pay for or even use the product. You sort through all the feedback, and try to pick 1 idea to message back to the engineering team to work into the product plan, and 1 idea to develop yourself that might be monetizable or lead to a sale down the road.
Was there something an early BD person does at a startup that I missed? Tweet at me and let me know!
