How to start a 4 Billion Dollar Company : Part 2
Its finally March 2018.
What a year it has been! We have shut down the Grate App and have developed a brand spanking new business model and dare i say its the most beautiful thing under the sun since a fresh pair of Air Force Ones.
In my previous article “What is your biggest achievement” I documented the Journey that led to me shutting down the App and Starting again. Building a global team that spans across South Africa, USA, Kenya and India. I have even reverted to using Google Calendar to setup our weekly Google hangouts meeting just so we are all on the same page with regards to the time-zones
So the stage is set. We have a super iOS native developer, Badass Backend developer, Ninja UX and UI developer, an amazing Sales and Marketing Head and a new Addition which i shall tell you about in the next article.
Now we needed a new name for the new App we were building.
We wanted something memorable, beautiful and elegant. Something that slips off the tongue. Something that aligns to our vision to take over the world and doesn’t exist anywhere yet. Plus there was an App with the same name as ours, on iOS, that we only found out about later as we initially focused on Android
Note to Startups
1-Due diligence is vital, do a domain name search and social media site search
2-You can always add a prefix or suffix to your App name for domain registration and social media purposes
3-Amazon Hosting is amazing, dont even bother with Microsoft Azure
Problem — Now we knew what we wanted but didn’t know what it must be
Solution — Crowd-source
So we created a Google form and added a couple of App name suggestions and allowed peeps to add and suggest new names. This was the first part of building a community and getting our first set of early adopters. We sent out the form across all the channels we had at our disposal and below is a summary of the Suggestions
Yes someone suggested “cat” for a food app…. Herein lies the danger of crowd-sourcing like the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ fiasco.
It was a neck and neck race between Restuhunt and Fudos. In the end we went with Fudos, below is a preview of the website
So what is Fudos? Its an App where foodies can Buy coupons, Rate Dishes and Connect with other foodies. Foodies can save money through buying coupons for dishes at well known restaurants and they can rate the dishes that they then order. They can share this with other foodies and they can even connect with the restaurant owners
There is a conclusive study that went out (okay we just went to a restaurant and asked 10 random people the same question) that showed that 8/10 people will not tell the restaurant manager or server/waiter/food runner if they truly had a bad dish, they will simply not come back and trash the restaurant on social media.
Bad.
This is obviously not good for all parties involved, there are reputation and revenue implications so on Fudos restaurant owners can connect with the foodies and catch all of this before it goes viral.
We are like viral-blockers.
We are letting you into the engine room as we build this amazing 4 billion dollar App and if you like what you are reading and click here and Subscribe and get notifications and exclusive previews
Medium also has this cool clap feature, apparently when you clap for an article more then 50 times something amazing happens…..
