Finding a Founder: An interview with Sugar

We’ve continued chasing founders around Inspire9 Richmond, and this week we perched ourselves next to Alex and Chris ; Cofounders of UX design Agency, Sugar.

The Sugar boys are long term best friends and as sweet as they sound. Alex and Chris gave us the scoop on client-centric business, UX design, and leveraging cofounder skill sets. From white collared bandits in high school and now two successful entrepreneurs, it is clear that Alex and Chris know who they are and how they like to work.

Tell us about your startup?

Chris: We are a user-centric UX design agency that solves user experience problems.

Alex: We immerse ourselves in the user problem by spending time with real people to identify how users react and adapt to technology. There’s a lot of UX designers that skip over the research phase, and this is our point of difference. Our aim is to avoid making these assumptions and stand behind evidence. Making assumptions increases risk.

We don’t think user research has to be high cost; some agencies charge up to $30,000. We just pick up the phone, spend 15 minutes chatting to users; it doesn’t need to be expensive.

What year did you launch?
2014.

When did you decide to develop your idea?

Chris: We developed Sugar after leaving a previous job when we worked together for a tech startup building mobile payments. Alex was the CTO; I was the Account Manager. I spoke to our users and Alex would build and manage our team of engineers. Our company had little UX process and focused on the immediate paying client rather the client’s customers who were using the product. The idea was excellent in theory; it convinced everyone, stakeholders, investors and us [laughs]. The mistake that we made was not spending enough time testing and speaking to end-users. The result was a product that just didn’t meet user’s expectations.

We identified a need for businesses to research and better understand the user of a product. For this reason, we created our UX design agency, Sugar. We want to help start-ups save time and money by avoiding the blind mistakes we made.

What are you working on right now?

Chris: We’re a small team (Alex and me) which means we can only work on one or two projects.

One of our current projects is very exciting. We are working on a product designed as hardware and software. Our focus is on the software element, but we’re highly involved in the entire process and build.

The product aims to reduce the tree death rate in young trees across councils. Australia has a vision called the “2020 vision” — to increase canopy cover by 20% by 2020. 20% of trees in Melbourne (one in five) die in their first two or three years of life. In Western Australia, it’s up to nine out of ten trees. We are working with our client, on a hardware product aiming to reduce tree death.

It’s taken a while to get these cool projects, but now that we do, we get to pick the job most aligned with our values.

We are also working on moving into development, something we said we’d never do. In the future, our clients want us to build their products for them. We will develop the product; deliver an end to end service and help realise the vision. That’s going to be an exciting change for us.

How do you engage new clients?

Chris: We often meet our client in coworking spaces. A previous client who worked for AngelCube introduced us to our current client. In 2014, we were working out of Inspire9 at the time that AngelCube was running and were working with around 30% of AngelCube.

Did coworking help your business?

Chris: For new founders, I would highly recommend becoming part of a coworking community. Embedding ourselves into the inspire9 community has provided long-term benefits. It’s a great way to stay relevant in people’s minds; reap the benefits of making connections and adding value to your business. Inspire9 has provided opportunities to tap into resources and community.

Alex: The community is alive and well outside of the physical space which allows us to connect to clients through relationships formed at Inspire9.

Have you made any mistakes?

Chris: A lot.

Alex: I read an article by a friend, Kunal, a resident of Inspire9, and it resonated with my experience. Kunal identified the struggle to balance vision and profitability. One of our biggest mistakes was sometimes putting profitability first, out of desperation to pay the bills.

As a result, we started hating the projects we were working on and were less engaged with our clients. As Kunal addressed, when you dislike the projects you are working on, your quality of work declines, you hate coming into work, and your revenue suffers — the snowball effect.

Learnings — maintain a steadfast vision.

Don’t let go of that vision just because you need to pay the bills. It is important to find the right business model that aligns with your vision. My mistake was not acknowledging the bigger picture.

I am now driven to work on larger projects that align with our values and afford the luxury of developing longer, richer relationships with our clients. Our goal is to be inspired by work from our clients, not their cash.

Chris: With respect, these smaller projects were highly valuable when first starting out and helped us get to where we are now.

My mistake was not investing sufficient interest in the business model. Your model — input, output, people you hire; what you pay — this all establishes the sustainability of your business.

We made a few concession in the beginning due to our lack of strategic planning. You need to be careful who you give concession to as making a concession is making a loss; unless it is strategic and has the potential to make you more money. Over the last twelve months, I focused on the value of our model instead of being guided by the need to get money in the bank.

Do you have a mentor? What role have they played in your career?

Chris: I view mentorship as a relationships building opportunity. I try to actively engage with influential people well above me in level of experience, monetary value, leaders, and directors of companies.

I view mentorship as developing trust and accountability as a founder of the business. Yes, I am there to get advice but more importantly, I am there to show up; to keep turning up; to let them know I’m there and that I am valuable. In the process of gaining advice, you become valuable to your “mentor”. My advice is to contact someone and keep showing up so they can relate to your reliability as a person.

Alex: There is a book called Mastery by ROBERT GREEN who talks about mentorship through failure. The failure approach refers to taking the long route, where you learn by making your own mistakes. I take this approach for better or worse.

I haven’t found anyone who I would listen to unequivocally about everything. I don’t find formal mentoring necessary. I like having great conversations with incredible people and taking what you can from those conversations.

What is the best advice you have received?

Alex: Best advice was from my mother — “If you see someone behaving in a particular way towards someone else, don’t be surprised when you receive the same treatment”. That has served me well. It certainly saved me from a lot of bad situations in my business and personal life.

Vice versa, if you see someone being generous to others, the chances are that in the future they will show you generosity.

Chris: “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you”.

This advice relates back to mentorship. In business, pick and choose people who you want to know and who you want to know you. You don’t need to have one thousand connections, just a few leaders who have a lot of influence. That is my approach to my relationships.

People don’t remember what you do; they remember how you made them feel. That feeling is crucial as an external freelancer or a service provider. If you’re not in their business, they’re going to take your silence as a lack of work, which is not the truth. A five-minute call every day or every other day is enough for them to know you are doing something.

What is the worst advice you have received?

Alex: “Get out of the building”.
This saying is a tenant in the startup gospel; get out of the building and show someone your product; get feedback. The idea behind it is honest and can be valuable. It’s often generalised to almost anything to do with your startup. “Have a business model?… Get out of the building, put it in front of people”; “New products, brand or designs?… Get out of the building, put it in front of people”.

We made a mistake taking this advice. We “got out of the building” and put our idea in front of the wrong people, particularly in the early days. As a human being, with your new startup idea — if you’re not a veteran, you are quite fragile. Yeah, you might get out of the building and talk to people, but you might pick the wrong person and receive the bad advice which can take you on a different path.

When we first started Canary, an adviser referred us to a man to pitch our idea. This man looked at us and said: “Look, guys, I’m sorry, but I think it’s crap. It’s absolute shit. I hate service businesses; I hate your idea”. Those were the exact words he used. He suggested we build an app or a product.

The shock from that conversation made my hands go cold; I was sweating and devastated. I remember saying to Chris, “Man, is he right? Our idea is terrible; we fucked it, what are we going to do?”.

After some time passed and we gained more experience we realised that the person who we received that advice from was completely unqualified to make that claim. We were also asking the wrong kind of questions, which is a big problem with getting out too early. If you do want to “get out of the building”, make sure you find the right people to talk to and learn how to ask the right questions.

When did your friendship begin?

Chris: We met at school when we were 14; went to high school together; lived together; worked in the same company together and then created a startup. It’s been a decade.

Alex: We are glued together.

Why did you decide to become co-founders?

Alex: We knew each other incredibly well, and we were both quite enterprising at school.

Chris: We started out printing fake high ID’s and selling them to students at school [laughs]. If we didn’t like operating in a particular system, we tried to push the boundaries. We were misfits because we didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing.

Alex: I got in trouble for hacking into the school portal software. That’s how I got my first job out of school. We were like white collar bandits if you were to explain it [laughs]. We weren’t getting in trouble for getting into fights, but we were trying to break federal offence laws, hacking stuff and printing fake IDs. Working together just made logical sense. [laughs]
Also, a deciding factor was that we have separate skill sets.

Chris: I love talking to people.

Alex: I hate talking to people.

Chris: As an extrovert, I thrive off people’s energy and conversation. I enjoy building relationships. Alex likes working on projects more so than I do.

We learnt that when we were in the process of running the business. I am predominantly responsible for the growth of the company through relationships, and Alex is in charge of the company growth, through the product.

Alex: I just sit back and do what I like to do, and he is out there doing what he likes to do. It works well because when I’m not in the headspace to talk to people, he’s like, “I got this”.

It would be a lot harder if we were two product guys trying to start a service based business or two developers trying to launch a service based business.

Chris: At some point in time you’re going to have to talk to someone and sell yourself to them, to win the big ticket items. To get the deal with Clemenger, I had to go in there and be very firm, confident and tell them exactly how we can help them. They’re not going to come through a form on your website or Google Adwords.

People with serious money and projects are not going to click on Google and choose you until they trust you. If you want to grow a business you’ve got to start thinking in the tens of hundreds of thousands.

What is the most memorable experience you have had together?

Chris: We did a seven-month leadership program together. This program is designed to remodel the way that you see the world and challenge your childhood beliefs to the point where you can create new ways of seeing the world. During the course, we saw each other in deeply vulnerable states. The course was incredibly challenging.

Alex: We came out of that very different people.

Chris: I don’t want to say “it was personality changing” but yes, it was. Before this program in 2013, I had never been able to speak to girls — never asked a girl out. I was very shy.

After the program, I asked someone out in front of 350 people. That may not sound like a big deal for people, but this experience was a breakthrough for me. The program forces you to address your self-perception and childhood experiences. This hurdle is one example.

Alex: Going through that experience together was pretty extraordinary.

Chris: Although we are not endorsing the idea that cofounders should participate in a seven-month personal development leadership project.

Alex: It took a lot of time, and there are easier ways to achieve that healthy cofounder relationship. But that’s what we did, we tested the boundaries, and it worked well for us.

Do you have any strategies for managing cofounder conflict?

Alex: The leadership program that we went through, taught us to develop a very open communication relationship with each other. Chris and I make it a priority to have a discussion and resolve any issue before we focus on our work by having a quick discussion if we are feeling stressed or preoccupied.

Chris: Our strategy now is to catch up at 8.30 am every morning for 1hr and meet at a cafe to talk about anything we want.

Alex: Then for the rest of the day, all you’ve got left to do is work. It works for us.

What advice would you give to founders looking for a co-founder?

Alex: Find someone who you have a track record of working with, efficiently and sustainably. Chris and I were lucky because of our history. If you don’t have that rapport, do a couple of test days; whiteboard some ideas and get a taste for whether you work well together.

That’s what accelerators like Y Combinator will look for in a start-up team. Take someone with you from a company that you have worked productively with to start your business. It’s also important to like each other and find someone with a complementary skill set.

Chris: Do your due diligence on your potential cofounder. If they said that they made $100000 revenue in sales, go in and talk to the people who your coworker used to work with, so you can confidently move forward knowing they can walk the walk.