Startup Journey: Day-3.
Hi. My name is #liveslack
Yesterday I decided to take this idea a step further. I spent all night thinking about this and listed the next steps to come up with up with an answer on the question:
Could this idea be a business ?
The only real answer to that question is to try it. And by “just do it” I don’t mean be stupid.
We now know the “build it and they will come” philosophy is not a good way to live by. It’s a good way to die by. So let’s focus on coming up with something that allows me to do real market validation.
Landing page
The next step in discovering if this idea is worth it is setting up a landing page to announce the idea. Here is what I want to learn from this landing page:
- get an idea about the demand by discovering how many people are organically searching for “livechat for slack” or similar keywords
- find out how many of the visitors leave their email address (conversion rate)
#liveslack
Before publishing anything I wanted to find a good name for this venture. As a partner in a hosting company I have access to cheap domainnames, so why not use that ?
I opened ProductHunt and searched for “startup names”. This pointed me to panabee.com and impossibility.org where I searched for a combination of related keywords (“slack”, “chat”, “livechat”, “engage”, “connect”). I quickly came up with a short list of domain names.
The one name the jumped out was “liveslack.com” I was surprised to find out that the name is still available so I registered it.
Need (tech) help
Although I consider myself as one of the greatest hackers mankind has ever known I gotta admit the technical side of LiveSlack looked a bit too challenging. As in, I don’t have a clue to do something like this.
I’ve learned that people are the most important part of a company. More than the idea. I figured it will be very hard for me as a solo founder to make something good out of this. Don’t just take my word for it:
What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him.
- Paul Graham on Startup Mistakes
I decided it’s time for help so I reached out to a friend to check if he wants to dive in (translated from Dutch):
Subject: It’s all in the execution. Need your help!
Hi Sam,
I am thinking about a startup that has great potential (world domination!). The idea is: “Livechat for your visitors, Slack to reply”. Yeah yeah, live chat has been done a billion times, but no one has thought about doing it on top of Slack.
I can’t do this on my own (read: I need someone smarter to do the actual work) and I was hoping you want to join me in this adventure. What do you think ?
The next days I kept checking my inbox. A few days in I was starting to worry and subconsciously going over alternatives when this email came in:
Subject: Re: It’s all in the execution. Need your help!
Aha Mister Pong-Ping Nelissen!
So you have time to work on new idea’s with a baby coming up ? I love the idea and I have time to whip something up. Let me sit on this for a few days.
That’s it. No conversation about equity, ownership or anything like that.
Hack away
Just to impress Sam I opened Sketch and started designing a site. After staring on to the blank page for 15 minutes I decided to borrow some ideas from succesful webpages. I opened Awwwards website and started browsing for good-looking product/landing sites.
Trying out some designs and combinations of elements this is what i came up with:
After that I did what I am good at. Hack away! Within a few hours I had a working html prototype of the website. Fired up an AWS Micro instance and published the first version of the liveslack website. What do you think ?
This is a post in a series of “Startup Journey” posts. It all started with “Is this idea worth exploring?”. All posts are listed in “Startup Journey” publication.
