Lessons from a year of running a startup
I “launched” Startuplister exactly one year ago today (August 13, 2014).
There’s a special place for a startup’s very first customer (thanks Amir!). It can indicate something bigger, or it can be a meaningless fluke.
In the case of Startuplister, it is seeming like the latter. Since launch, we’ve worked with over 2,500 startup founders and have successfully completed over 80,000 form submissions to websites, review sites, directories, and blogs.
Below are just a few things I’ve learned since launching Startuplister.
Building a Product is Ridiculously Fun
There is nothing quite like the feeling of building a new feature in a day, pushing it, and having users visit the site and go through the new signup flow within a few minutes of deploying.
When I launched a year ago, Startuplister was just a basic web form.
Now, we have a backend management system that allows us to
- Queue up submissions and assign to staff
- Automagically build a list of sites to submit to based on startup industry, stage, and platform
- Perform quality review for each submission, catch & fix errors
- Send detailed reports to customers
- View average time per submission, and improve inefficiencies
Our frontend now allows customers to create multiple startups, publish their startups to the Featured Startups page, begin multiple campaigns for each startup and monitor the progress of the campaign as it happens.
With all of the features above, they came out of the need to improve and optimize a process that was slowing down our business. They evolved from seeing what users needed via support conversations and how they interacted with the site (using LuckyOrange).
It’s easy in product development to over-engineer and build a mess of features without knowing what features are needed.
Instead, start by solving the problem with as simple a solution as possible (read: spreadsheet). If I started with all the features above when I launched a year ago, I would have never launched!
Competitors in the Rear-View
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of studying competitors in your industry. When I launched in 2014, there was only one similar service that was mostly inactive. Now, they keep popping up every month. Some have even directly linked to images on my site (grr!).
I use Google Alerts, Mention, Monitor Backlinks, RivalFox, and Page Monitor for competitor monitoring. These tools help me stay informed and current. I think it’s important to have an eye on the market to make sure I’m staying competitive. But, at the same time, I think it’s important limit the amount of time devoted to competitor monitoring and analysis.
My rule of thumb has been to keep one eye on competitors in the rear view mirror and one eye on the future of my company. Hopefully, this doesn’t make me cross-eyed.
Experiment with Pricing Constantly
We launched at $49. Every week we would add new directories and it would consequently take us a lot longer to submit. That, paired with some nice exposure on a few blogs, caused us to get backlogged by a few months (not good).
To handle the backlog, I began hiring more help. But, I still had new signups coming in, so I had to do something quick. Out of desperation, I raised the price to $75 as a necessary stopgap thinking that it would slow signups. Not the case. New paid signups maintained. It had little to no impact on our conversion rate.
It’s important to experiment constantly with your price point. If you think you are not charging enough, you are probably correct. Try this — raise your prices for a week and see what happens. If the conversion rate is the same, keep doing it until it until you’ve reached the ceiling.
Twitter is Great for Startup Marketing
I’ve never been a big Twitter user until working on Startuplister. Now, managing and engaging on Twitter is part of my daily routine. More than half of our social traffic is from Twitter.
Best of all, the traffic we get from Twitter is typically high-converting. Our strategy for growing a following and producing relevant content is still a work in progress. However, so far what we have done has worked great. We use a few tools to help find relevant people to follow. Here’s our twitter growth of the past few months.
Say “Maybe”often to Partnerships
One of the best things about working on Startuplister is that it has inserted me into the conversations with thousands of founders, startups, and amazing ideas.
A lot of opportunities have arisen for partnerships and collaborations. Most of them are really great opportunities. But, equally, most of them would end up taking away from my time working on building the product and supporting my customers.
It’s important to say no more than yes when it comes to opening up the doors to partnerships. Better yet, say Maybe. The ones that are supposed to work will develop over time. If someone really wants to work with you, and it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen!
Customer Support is #1
If you have product market fit, but your product sucks (ours did initially), your customer support better be on point. As Startuplister has evolved, we’ve had bugs and mistakes that have directly affected our customers. But, throughout all of the issues, I’ve found that being 100% responsive on customer support, admitting mistakes, acting like a normal human (vs. a awkwardly professional customer service representative), and going way out of my way to take care of a situation has nine times out ten lead to a relatively happy customer.
You’re not in the business of building a product, you’re in the business of supporting your customers.
Side Note: Using Intercom has been a great help in keeping our support threads going. It allows us to have live chat for new and existing customers. After chatting with a customer, the handoff from live chat to email is seamless. It’s expensive, but has replaced at least 3 tools we were using previously.
Onward & Upward
It’s been a great year one! We’re excited for year two. You may have already noticed that we recently launched a new pricing plan. We have a ton of new features that we’re getting to roll out that will dramatically improve the amount of exposure we can deliver for our customers. Stay tuned for the coming weeks!
Thanks to everyone for making our first year an amazing one. The tech startup community truly is incredible. Cheers to all!
Special shouts for your help & guidance: @ShiirLee24, @dylanbrendan, @joshuamuccio, @GoLocalApps, @bentossell, @robbnotes, @jlejuwaan, @colinvincent, @bradlishman, @bramk, @_jeremiahs, many many more.
