Tips From a Trailblazer: How To Build A Successful Product
From playing in a high school jazz band to designing websites and discovering a passion for product design, Matt Fairhurst’s entrepreneurial journey has been an unconventional one. Since launching his startup eight years ago, there have been many turning points and challenges along the way, requiring the resilience and ability to adapt to succeed.
Now the co-founder and CEO of Skedulo, a deskless productivity cloud solution, is leading the company through a time of rapid growth and investment, in a world where remote working is becoming increasingly prevalent.
Matt joined us on the Trailblazing Entrepreneurs podcast to share where his journey all began, how he pivoted to create a product that customers really needed, and the importance of surrounding yourself with a valuable support network.
When you first launched Skedulo, did you always plan to create such a broad range of products and solutions?
I think the recognition that this was going to be much bigger than we initially thought came pretty quickly. When we first started out designing the product, our approach was, “What if we could just build a better version of existing tools and platforms that have tried to tackle similar problems before?” But that quickly evolved when we realized that when we think about scheduling and organizing deskless workers, the use cases, industries, and workflows that they go through are all quite different. There’s an incredible amount of diversity to take into consideration, but it’s all anchored around these fundamentals and commonalities that we could build from.
Due to this, we realized early on that this was going to become more of a platform vision, where you have the sum of these connected parts contributing to an overall story. This allowed us to be much more creative and diverse ourselves, in a market which was still quite new and fragmented around one use case or one industry. We’ve been able to look past that and think a little bigger.
Can you tell us about your funding journey? What do you wish you’d known then that you know now when started out looking for investment?
When we started the company, I actually had very little idea about venture capital and raising money. That was an incredible learning journey that myself and the co-founders went on together.
One thing I learned about fundraising, as you go through these cycles, is to be really deliberate about who you want around the company and to be part of your support network from an investment perspective. These people and firms become such an incredible part of your journey, but also so tightly coupled to it that you have to be really clear about the values you are looking for in an investor. Ask yourself who you want around the table; these relationships are very much like marriages and they definitely last the duration of a start-up’s lifetime, so that’s important to keep in mind.
I think it ultimately comes down to making sure you have relationships that can support these hard, challenging conversations. Things don’t always go well; lots of things go wrong when you’re building a company and to have people that are going to be there to help you through those really tough moments is super important.
How did you build a support network along your entrepreneurial journey?
I’d say the best network that I was able to grow in the really early days came from finding people that were just slightly ahead of me in their own leadership journey or their journey as a CEO. This is something that’s been really valuable to me and that I’ve tried to maintain — finding people that I can continue to build relationships with that are a few steps beyond me in this same journey. I think as a founder and a CEO, you also have to remember your responsibility to do that for others as you grow too, and become a mentor and advisor to people that are slightly behind you on their journey.
The other thing I tried to do, in terms of a support network, was to start reinvesting in friendships. There was a period of time where I was working so much and I’d moved countries and lots of things happened in my life which meant I was rebuilding my friendship network again and again. It was really important for me to remember to keep anchoring myself to those that have always shared common values and will always be there through successes and failures. Establishing that outside of work and my professional network was critical for me.
Hear more about Matt’s journey in this episode of the Trailblazing Entrepreneurs podcast.
Get the full transcript of the conversation here.
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