September = Finding Our Vision
Since Harry and I have been working together we’ve built a lot of different products — from a bitcoin wallet to a gesture-based iOS 8 keyboard to a tool that finds your most influential upvoters on Product Hunt. It’s been a lot of fun, but we’ve been all-over-the-place. It’s not even clear what our company does or why we exist… and it feels like we now need a better sense of company direction if we’re to reach our goal of becoming profitable.
If you’re like me, you might think it seems redundant at first. Just the words ‘vision statement’ conjure an image of a massive corporate with thousands of employees who are neither aware of nor fully understand their company’s verbose statements.
The problem is, without a vision statement it’s unclear what you should be building. We started reading a lot of blog posts on the subject, and we repeatedly saw a quote from Alice in Wonderland — and for good reason… it’s spot on!
So what’s the best way to look beyond the products you’re building and create a vision for where your company should go? We spent some time looking at other company visions and used two factors as a measure:
- Does their vision give a purposeful sense of direction that helps inform decisions about what to build and who to build it for?
- Is their vision compelling not only as a founder, but also as an employee and a customer? With the aim to build a successful company, this would certainly help!
… here are a couple of our favourite ones:
- Intercom. “Our vision is to be at the center of all customer communication for all kinds of Internet business, which increasingly every business is becoming”. Okay, so maybe the words alone aren’t very compelling… but when you put them in the context of an impersonal customer experience web-wide, it’s a completely different story. They’ve also got some great blog posts on the subject here and here.
- Deliveroo. “After moving from New York to London, our mighty foundeROO was surprised to find that it was nearly impossible to get great quality food delivered. So he made it his personal mission to bring great restaurants closer to their customers”. Imagine being responsible for product delivery here — whether you’re thinking about building a new feature or implementing a new food delivery scheme, your decision is helpfully guided by whether or not you’re bringing restaurants closer to their customers.
Our Vision
The most financially successful product we’ve made has been JournoRequests, and we’d like to build the company from this starting point. It’s a work-in-progress, but so far we like:
“To connect businesses with content creators”
We feel like JournoRequests is born of a change in the media industry. Editorial teams are shrinking and content creation is growing; so there’s an increasing need for journalists to gather quotes, conduct interviews, and turn stories around quickly. We’re serving this need, and we aim to continue connecting businesses with content creators decades from now.
What About Our Other Products?
We’ll be maintaining Hey Press and hope to do more development in future, but right now we have to focus on JournoRequests in order to reach our short-term goal of becoming profitable (whilst extremely popular, conversion is low and churn is high with Hey Press — our users are other scrappy startups ;) ).
As for everything else, development will grind to a halt. With some products this decision is very easy to make — where we only have a handful of users, it just doesn’t make sense to continue. However, Product Friends does have a small trickle of new users every day, so the decision to abandon development is a more difficult one to make, but one we think is right.
If you’re using Product Friends and something major breaks, please do tweet us — we’ll try to fix it if and when we can. Otherwise, if you’re a developer and would like to maintain Product Friends and/or make improvements to it, please send us a message (@edmoyse and @hyharryhuang on Twitter). We’d be more than happy to hand it over for free to a good home.
