Breaking the mold of soft drinks and startups
Back in the early 1970s, people associated the word “cola” with Coke, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper — basically any brown, sugary soft drink.
Between those top 3 players, worldwide cola sales had been exploding for more than a decade.
Then there was 7-Up… with its clear colour, lemon flavour and green bottle… and flat sales forecasts.
Rather than creating their own version of a cola (something they actually considered), the marketers at 7-Up decided to run a new ad campaign where they positioned themselves as the “Uncola”:
By adding the prefix Un, 7-Up said to the world:
“We’re not that kind of cola. We’re different and we’re proud to be different.”
The ads played well into the anti-establishment movement of the time, and they worked brilliantly for sales.
The award-winning campaign also demonstrated that you don’t have to go with the same formula as everyone else to become a successful brand and business. 😎
Fast forward 40 years…
The term “tech startup” evokes a similarly specific image… but instead of visualizing a dark bubbly soft drink, we typically picture employees in their twenties, late nights, a beer fridge, an over-representation of testosterone, a minimum viable product and a focus on technology over marketing.
As the product lead for Airstory, I’m here to say:
“We’re not that kind of startup. We’re different and we’re proud to be different.”
Airstory’s one of a growing number of UnStartups.
How so?
Our median age is 37
It’s pretty easy to see why so many startups have an employee median age closer to 27.
People in their twenties are far less likely to have family and financial obligations (with the exception of student loan debt, but on average, student loans pale in comparison to the size of an average mortgage).
Younger employees don’t have to cart their kids all over town on the weekends.
There’s a belief that younger employees have more energy and are less resistant to working long hours.
At Airstory, do we have trouble getting out of bed in the morning?
Of course we do!
AGE = A Greater Effort. Everybody knows that.
(No, not really.)
Cliché as it sounds, with a median age of 37, we’re able to draw on more life and work experiences as we build our product.
This is not to say that younger people don’t have life experiences; when I was 20, I’d already been kicked out of school, watched friends drive my mother’s car into a lake and nearly secured an early investment for a board game from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.
But 20+ years later, I’ve got those experiences plus twenty years’ more.
Rarely do we encounter something for the first time. Which makes solving problems much easier (providing we remember our mistakes from the past).
Additionally, working long hours over a sustained period actually delivers diminishing returns, and may result in depression and burnout (the enemy of any smart startup).
We’ve got an average of one child per employee
Maybe it’s the Canadian water or all the time we spend indoors during the frigid winters.
Whatever the case, we’ve got serious baggage. 😉
We all know how having kids can reduce the available working hours in a day, but might there be benefits to having kids while building a software startup or before you start building one?
We think so…
Children have given us perspective. They give us ideas. They add a new level of purpose to what we’re building and why we’re working. And, when properly managed, they’re cheap labour. 🎉
Kidding aside, my 15-year-old son Alec has been watching me and Joanna over the past few years. He saw his dad and stepmom building things and being excited to go to work, and he caught the bug, built a chatbot, marketed it and sold it. The work he’s seen is contributing to his own work ethic, which we didn’t know would happen going into this, but which has helped flesh out the startup experience for our whole family.
Sure there are times when children require our attention… and that attention pulls us away from the computer monitor, but when we return, we come with a renewed appreciation for what our technical cofounder calls the “peace and quiet of working”. 😌
He’s correct — it’s often bliss. And it’s better than any high tech office nap room.
We’re 50/50 split on gender
The technology industry has a gender diversity problem.
Despite a recent focus on the issue, numbers released by software giants like Google, Apple and Facebook show that men still have a substantial majority in leadership and technical positions.
It’s even worse at tech startups.
But Airstory’s CEO is a woman. And a feminist.
Joanna had the original vision for Airstory, she’s funded our product development through her other startup, Copy Hackers and she’s put together a skilled team of men and women.
We know that the tech world gender gap isn’t necessarily the result of companies looking only to hire men… but that the problem goes much deeper… starting with how parents speak to their boys and their girls differently… to how some young women are made to feel in computer science and math courses in college… to how male-focused bonding (which reaches into very office and boardroom that I’ve ever encountered) is given its own stupid name: “bromance”. 🙄
There’s not an Ivy Leaguer among us
Some of us went to college and some of us didn’t.
(Now don’t go assuming that because I used 2 conjunctions to start sentences in the last section that you know me. ’Cause you don’t. 😘)
Does a lack of “pedigree” put us at a disadvantage? It hasn’t for any of us so far…
Perhaps more interesting than where we went to school is the fact that none of us have degrees specifically related to our roles at Airstory.
Our CEO has an English (Honours!) degree.
Our technical co-founder has a degree in business.
Our front-end developer has a degree in music.
Our user success lead has a master’s in nursing.
And I have no degree.
We’re like the Island of Misfits when it comes to our “credentials”.
Cool thing is, everyone here has pursued expertise in areas outside their formal education… where there’s passion. 💥
Being self taught requires discipline and curiosity. There are no standardized tests to validate what we’ve learnt outside the lecture halls.
The test we face is the same test every other startup faces: can we deliver kick-ass results day after day? And when we fail at that, can we get back up, hypothesize about what might’ve gone wrong, fix it and charge on, all without missing a beat?
The Ivy League can teach you that. And so can the University of Alberta. And so can startup life.
We have no ping pong table
Not because we don’t love ping pong, but because none of us work out of the same location.
For starters, we’re not in Silicon Valley. We’re in Canada. Specifically, we’re in Victoria, British Columbia and three cities in Alberta: Calgary, Lethbridge and Edmonton.
Actually, if you’ve ever heard of Alberta, it’s likely because of the oil and gas scene there; and if you’ve heard of it recently, it’s because oil and gas is… well, not what it used to be. Gone are the days of Ralph Klein handing out $400 “prosperity cheques” to all residents of the province. The resulting hunger-slash-drive in Alberta is creating great breeding ground for innovation and startups.
Are we risking productivity and our culture by having no central office?
As far as productivity goes, being 100% remote is not without its challenges, but communication tools like Slack and Zoom bring us closer together without hurting productivity.
Most of us have done the office thing. Intuit. (Three of us met there.) Adobe. MetaLab. And one day we may find ourselves with a physical Airstory hub of some sort to go to.
Because, yeah, offices are good for helping team members connect — but they can also foster gossip and exclusion. So we’d like to get our culture as sorted as possible before we get an office. And, naturally, offices cost money, and we’re self-funded, so every extra dollar goes toward hires, not 10,000 square feet of glass and exposed ducting.
In reality, culture comes from a shared vision for what we’re building and who we’re building it for. It doesn’t come from a box of Lego or a beer fridge (as Canadians, we have nothing against beer 🍺).
We took 2 years to get a beta out the door
Was the extended early build the result of our advancing age?
Only partially. Hip surgery is no joke. ← but that is. well, it’s a dad joke.
Getting our beta live took a while because of our belief that Viable is the most important component of Minimum Viable Product.
We’re creating a product that at first glance seems like a Google Docs and Dropbox Paper competitor.
But Airstory is different than Docs and Paper… it’s a product built expressly for deadline-driven teams who create content and supporting marketing materials and who want a future of smarter content creation and promotion.
The catch is that, due to the similarities in appearance, we find ourselves competing in a space where the bar has already been set pretty high. And launching a too-lean product in this space that doesn’t offer the core features of the established players would’ve been a mistake.
LinkedIn might’ve been “embarrassing” when Reid Hoffman launched it, but it had no true competitors, did it? We do. It wasn’t asking people to switch from an existing software solution. We are.
See, there’s a huge market for writing platforms. We’re entering a space that’s filled with big-wigs for a reason: documents are where work actually happens. So yeah, there’s a huge market for writing platforms. We just don’t believe there’s a huge, revenue-generating market for lean writing platforms.
Our target market wants purpose-built features for their specific needs, but they also want many of the same features found in Google Docs… like collaborative editing and user permissions.
Building that stuff with 1 or 2 developers takes time. Luckily for us, entering an established market doesn’t require any sort of first mover advantage.
We had time to get it right.
So by leveraging the audience, brand and revenue-generating opportunities at Copy Hackers, we were able to take the time to build the baseline features of Google Docs and the value-add features specific to Airstory.
Check and mate. 😉
We believe Marketing precedes Product
If you’re not marketing your new product (i.e., building a base) at the same time you’re building it, you’re doing it wrong.
Product launches where everything rides on making a big one-day splash are becoming far less common, and we’re happy to see that.
But we still see too much focus on building and not enough focus on developing an audience.
Where you intend to market your product, to whom and how, are great discussions to have before a single line of code is written. Even necessary.
Market development — the act of establishing trust with your target market before a product is launched — is the path we took with Airstory. First came Copy Hackers, including 5 years of building authority in the copywriting and marketing world. Then came Airstory, a product built for people whose challenges we intimately understand and who already believe in us.
It’s much harder to go in the other direction because there’s always a lag between launch and MRR. I mean, sure, it’s still hard even with a base built — but we’ve tried startups without a base to market to, and we much prefer it this way.
See yourself in some of our differences? You should join us on our journey of breaking the startup mold
We’re not trying to be different for the sake of being different. We just are.
The world needs to hear the real stories of startups and the voices in those startups, not just the version of startup that that TechCrunch editors have sold everyone on.
Our differences are our strengths.
Embrace what makes you and your startup different.
Don’t aim for the middle.
Be an outlier.
Treat your product exactly the same way.
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And we’d love to hear about how you’re different in the comments!
