He Just Wanted to Get Feedback From Students. It Inspired a Product Used by 500,000 Conferences and Events
It all started as an innocent little idea at a Startup Weekend hackathon. Peter Komornik wanted to get feedback on his lecture from students. He thought other teachers might like to use it, too. Early users didn’t think so. They were interested in a different feature: audience interaction. It was not an instant hit. Here’s how Slido became a globally recognised technology company.
It came as a surprise when the idea of getting feedback from students won at a local Startup Weekend hackathon in Bratislava, Slovakia. Peter was working at Google in Slovakia and teaching on the side. He was curious about feedback on his lectures from students and wanted to potentially help other teachers to get feedback as well. Winning at Startup Weekend got them 3 months free office at a co-working space. Peter quit his Google job, rolled up his sleeves and went all in.
From students to business professionals
The original idea of Slido was to get ‘instant feedback after the lecture,’ hence it’s initial name, Instando. One early adopter — a conference organiser — liked the feedback idea, but also suggested enabling the possibility for people to ask questions during the talk. Shortly after came the idea to have a ‘live Twitter wall.’ Peter’s answer was simple: “Sure, if you use our feedback feature we’ll build whatever you want”.
Slido had more features when we launched than it has today. It took us a while to figure out what we need to focus on.
One day, still early on, Slido was used at an event with a fairly bad public speaker (from a bank), but a great expert. Yet, when she saw questions from the audience, she was giving really interesting answers. This was an aha moment for the company. Slido realised that they can help presentations become more interesting by crowdsourcing the best questions from the audience and adding a lot of value to real time Q&A sessions.
What internet domain and how much to pay for it?
Peter knew that he needed a short and powerful domain. Today he laughs that after buying 76 domains, he landed on sli.do. It is actually a domain from the Dominican republic and they had to apply to get it.
Later he managed to secure the domain slido.com. He offers valuable domain strategy advice: “you can start with any domain, but if you don’t have a .com version of your domain, it’s a huge liability. He eventually got the domain Slido.com from someone in Germany. Apparently that person wouldn’t sell it for less than 5,000 €. It took two and a half years to negotiate it.
Great founders execute fast
When I first saw Slido, I was not impressed. Their early struggle was that speakers didn’t want to use Slido. Shortly after they won that hackathon and decided to create a company, Peter approached me. It was after my talk about the London startup scene I was giving in Bratislava one lazy Sunday afternoon. He asked if I can help them expand in London. We connected, I reviewed the product and told Peter why I didn’t like some aspects of it. To my surprise only a few days later he told me that my feedback has been implemented. I knew right then that with such strong focus and working moral they have a chance to build something big out of this little idea!
We decided to test Slido at our next Startup Grind talk. To my surprise over half of our audience either asked or liked a question. I offered Peter to make a very good deal for SG and I would recommend it to other SG directors around the world. Two months later Slido was used by Startup Grind events on three new continents: Australia, Africa and South America.
A strong sign: the founders of Eventbrite loved it instantly
Coincidently shortly after we started using Slido we hosted a talk with all three founders of Eventbrite in London. It didn’t take long for them to notice Slido, but what surprised me was that they instantly loved its value proposition.
“Slido, this is incredible. Go, Slido!” — Julia Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite
During the interview Julia, Eventbrite’s CEO clearly stated how much she likes Slido. ”Kevin, Co-Founder of Slido added: “I love this. I have been look at these questions, they are wonderful.” After the interview Peter met the Evenbrite founders and it did not take long before they started discussing a potential partnership.
Product Features
When we talked about product features of Slido, Peter highlighted the importance to analyse features that are adding value and understand which ones are creating a ‘visual smog’.
“We have removed everything that is not connected to real time interaction. ”
As an example, Peter mentions their partnership with Eventbrite and why it turned out not working so well. Slido wanted to build an integration with Eventbrite without having a clear problem to be solved with it. It was cool, it worked, but didn’t bring anything. It was not a growth channel, which is what Slido needed at the time.
It was important to understand the context: when organisers create an event page, they don’t yet think about live interaction. There was no clear user journey taken into account. Slido has several important integrations today, with Slack, Google Slides, etc and today they think about the user journey carefully before they start building any new integration. The most successful integration is definitely Google Slides. It allows to add Slido directly from google slides.
Key product learning is this: in order to keep the product sleek and uncluttered, every time they want to add a new feature, they think about removing a feature that is not used a lot.
No product is fit until it solves a real need for customers
Slido has been using the Superhuman methodology of testing new product features, especially watching when over 40% of users would be disappointed. It is important to understand that product-market-fit works for different segments. Slido wanted to work with clients like The World Economic Forum or SxSW (South by South West), but they had each different expectations and wanted so much more around the product.
Very early on Peter made it his mission to be where their customers were. When Slido wanted to serve US customers, it was clear that they had to come to the US. When Slido wanted to be present in the UK, their business development person came to London with only a sleeping bag, Ryanair ticket and crashing at friend’s sofa. There was no budget they could afford to spend.
Slido spent 10% of its available cash on a SxSW sponsorship. It was a big gamble, but it worked out. A lady that Peter met when pitching at a local event in San Diego, California was going to host a session at SxSW and offered to use Slido there. They ended up having eight sessions using Slido there due to positive feedback. Slido as a product keeps evolving. After serving conferences the most popular use case was ‘all-hands-meeting’, but it is now being used for all kinds of meetings, since the need for engagement during the pandemic is greater than ever.
Funding is a double edged sword
The fund-raising journey of Slido was nothing but a roller-coaster ride. The founders put together money for the first year. They paid themselves 500€ per month. Then they raised 30,000 € from angel investors and a little later they raised another 300,000 €. That’s it!
After raising their seed round, Peter remembers how much pressure he felt for the company to grow at least twice as fast. In his opinion they wasted 20% of their entire funding round in the next two months just because of that pressure. They hired the wrong person, secured a few unnecessary sponsorships and so on. Peter quickly realised he needs to get his act together and aim for a sustainable business model: revenues from customers. This strategy paid off: they have revenues of over $ 10 million today.
“Slido mantra’: focus on the success of customers and the rest will follow. We want to make the experience of customers great.
CEOs needs to worry about making the company future-proof
The CEO of Slido highlighted one thing he worries about most: how to make sure Slido will still be a successful company in 3 years from now!
The way he looks at it is that when a company starts, it is like a plane trying to take off. The main worry is that the plane is running out of runway. Once the startup takes off before running out of money, it worries about getting to an altitude above those big dangerous clouds. Then, when the startup is finally cruising at the high altitude, the captain sees the horizon and has time to prepare for what’s coming.
It is important to be cautious and be ready for what’s coming to stay on the edge, especially in tech-heavy industries. It is easy to get overwhelmed by operations, operational excellence and forgetting about customers and their needs which are always evolving. A good CEO needs to leave enough space for creativity and innovation.
One of the best companies when it comes to great execution of long term thinking, is Amazon. Jeff Bezos worries years ahead and doesn’t worry about day-to-day operations:
“When Amazon’s quarterly results are published, people often congratulate me. I say thank you. But what I’m thinking to myself is that those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about 3 years ago. Today I’m working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2023. Not next quarter. Next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it has probably been done for a couple of years.”
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
