Snapshot: the first four weeks of an Edmonton Startup.
This is a story about how anyone can launch a company by asking the right questions, right from the very start. Let’s get into it.
My co-founder and I did something very cool last month. In the space of 4 weeks — September 1 to October 6th — we:
- Decided to launch and build a logistics company, part of a $2.1 trillion market.
- Received our first 40 shipments (from a wonderful group of early adopters, who we are super grateful for).
- Started talking to several smart and disruptive online shops wanting to close the gap between their online and in-person delivery experience.
All of which has been incredibly exciting, but last Friday we hit one of our first product milestones: BounceBox is live in the iOS and Android app store!
I’ll be writing a lot about starting a company in Canada over the coming weeks, but I want to first give you some insight as to what had to happen to launch an app in such a tight timeframe.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Kyle and I have spent most of the last half decade working with several dozen startups in Edmonton, and many have experienced stagnant growth at some point for a multitude or reasons. Chief amongst them is that startups wait for their product to be perfect before launching. I find this holds especially true for startups seeking their first 5 or 10 customers, but it’s not exclusive — this mentality can be a blocker even for companies that are dozens (or hundreds!) of employees deep. How do you avoid this early-stage pitfall?
Value speed + quick customer feedback above all else.
This has almost certainly become a cliche in the tech world (“Move fast and break things”, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product launch, you launched too slow” etc) but it’s extremely challenging to take this ambiguous concept and put it into practice on a day-by-day basis. This problem’s exacerbated when you don’t have a baseline to compare your company’s growth to, so how do you make the right decisions day-in and day-out? Well, I find it best to work backwards from your customers, the only constant in an extremely dynamic environment. Right from the start, Kyle and I both pushed each other to ask ourselves some important questions:
- “Will we get a 10x return on time invested for our customers?”
- “Is this a feature or move that will dramatically improve the user experience?”
- “Is this a feature built specifically for our ideal customer?”
Once we started asking those questions on a daily basis, things became a little bit easier to determine what the first version of our app should look like. The vision for V1 revealed itself shortly thereafter.
Only make what the customer needs.
As some of you may know, BounceBox makes it easy for online shoppers to receive the stuff they buy online. They receive a shipping address that’s unique to them, and send everything they buy online to BounceBox, where we’ll hold their packages and arrange a delivery when they’re actually home.
I started experimenting with this idea a few weeks before working with my co-founder, and set up a simple landing page and text-messages to notify the user of their shipping address. I found that most of our users ended up understanding the value proposition quickly, but an interesting problem arose: users who didn’t ship us something within a few days of receiving their shipping address didn’t end up using the service at all. I spoke with a few of them and found something that made me feel like an idiot for not seeing before: they couldn’t find their shipping address easily when it counted the most: on check-out.
You see, our customers receive a lot of SMS messages. The moment they received 5–10 new messages from friends, our SMS containing the address was lost. So, we made the ultimate decision that V1 should do something extremely simple: show them their shipping address. This way, they can retrieve their shipping address with one tap on the Amazon check-out screen, Indochino shipping page, or anywhere else they buy online.
I’ll let Kyle speak to the technical build of the application soon (and how React Native was one of the best behind-the-scenes tools to getting us live quickly) but let’s put it to the litmus test of the 3 questions above:
- “Will we get a 10x return on time invested for our customers?”: Yes. The shipping address notifier was fairly easy for us to build, but bridged a big gap for those wanting to use our service.
- “Is this a feature or move that will dramatically improve the user experience?” Yes. The one or two taps required to find our app is infinitely better than the multitude of taps and swipes required to find the original SMS notification of address.
- “Is this a feature built specifically for our ideal customer?” Yes. The majority of our customers browse and shop on both mobile and desktop devices, and most will have their phone nearby even when they’re working or browsing on a laptop.
So there you have it, a lean decision making tree of how we got our app into both stores so quickly, and a snapshot of the first four weeks. The coming weeks will be focusing on getting feedback from our customers to determine what we absolutely need to build into V2 to continue making this the best way to get the stuff people buy online.
Download BounceBox
Head over to the iOS App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/bouncebox/id1290918663?mt=8 or Google Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bounceboxnative to download the app for service in Edmonton & St Albert.
Lastly, share this post with those interested in starting their own company. Kyle and I will always be stoked to talk about our experience.
Happy bouncing!
