What startups are looking for in services they use
Are you an entrepreneur or a company that wants to make some success in providing some service for startups? Get started by understanding what startups need.
Startups want to concentrate on their core features, any paperwork or supporting services they have to deal with, build themselves, and maintain is incredibly gross to anyone. This is a huge problem for a lot of startups: minimizing overhead busy work. Why would a company have to go through the mundane and standard processes of accounting, legal paperwork, and even technical features that are common everywhere? Either it be a technical feature that supports the core product or a completely unrelated element of maintaining a startup company, it needs to be something that can run in cruise control.
Be a company that creates a service that solves the problem of abstracting perviously unavoidable tasks by basically creating the notion of: "set and forget." The way I measure the value of a service provided for startups is how little people think about the service. If things just work, and frees up time for core product development, then that is a good service.
A prime example is something like Superfeedr. Julien of Superfeedr came to Dogpatch Labs to meetup with me, walked me through a lot of features I didn't understand, and really took his time to understand my problem. He assured me his service would be the answer. It took me a few days to setup, and months later, I haven't had to think about Superfeedr ever again. It just works. It's a feature that works so well I have had to dedicate no time into maintaining or tweaking it. Time and peace of mind is the greatest gift any company could give me.
It's a good sign when people ask me how well the product is working, and have a lot of questions on how I'm solving problems of my supporting features, and I have no clue. All I do know is that it works amazingly well, exceeded expectations, and never caused me to need to go into details of understanding why it works.
I'm also not advocating not doing your research and keeping an eye out for updates, better solutions, and so on, but there are plenty of times when it's of more value to be able to depend on a service that works well, might not be exactly the newest and cutting edge, but frees you up to really develop the aspects of your product that will get you users, get you rich. There's always time later to optimize, and if you chose the right products to go with, those guys are going to optimize for you.
So that brings me to another point, gaining the trust of startup companies to just set and forget. How do you portray that your service is going to be dependable to us? Ideally in the long run, the product is going to be tried by many companies and have a really good reputation. I have no problem seeing the all star products all currently using and advocating the use of some product and just committing to it. I trust everyone else did their research and have had good experience. But getting to that point is difficult.
The factors that are important to getting to the point of being trustworthy is to be human. Put a face and a team behi nd the product. Be completely transparent so we know that you're not hiding your problems or success. Be honest, you are making money too, and we want to know how and why. Don't try to seem like a completely altruistic group of people, because that just seems way too suspicious. I don't have any problem with a company making money off of me, as long as I'm getting tons of value and the prices are reasonable enough for me to continue on with business.
The initial partnerships or customers you have are really important. Choose companies that are popular, blog and talk a lot about cool supporting companies around them. The best I've seen go out in person to meetup, chat, and talk about their product. Personalized service and real face to face assurance really helps validate any product. It's hard to do, but worthwhile if you're talking to people that are heavily influential.
And when you are answering questions, don't position yourself as someone who knows more about the product and the features than the company you're trying to persuade to use your product. Don't be stubborn or egotistic. Listen to their feedback, their needs, and give in once in awhile. Let them know you've definitely been aware of any issues or features they want but are not yet built, and acknowledge that the fact that they are giving you the feedback substantiates the priority of those products. Constant and dynamic evolution of products are a good sign that it won't be left in the dust in today's pace of technological advancements. Also making any startup feel like they have played a hand as an early adopter in helping shape the cool supporting product will help further the startup's advocation and evangelization of your product. Asking for advice and feedback is one of the most valuable ways to keep networked with a lot of startups.
I have no doubt the majority of the companies out there have great products for startup companies, but the steps to actually getting into the hands of these startups as a viable product really hinges on the basic concepts of making life easier and enforcing constant trust is incredibly important.
Below is my plug for the companies that have made FanPulse progress so quick and has helped maintain such high quality throughout our development process. If I missed you, that's probably a good sign, but let me know anyway and I'll add you to the list:
- Superfeedr - Pushes feeds to our webhooks. No need to manage feed pulling processes ever.
- Heroku - Keeps our backend up and running all the time. Provides awesome addon features that just work and need no monitoring on our part. Also allows us to scale up in an instant, deploy new code, and more.
- Evri - Deals with our initial sports related Natural Language Processing. Works all the time, it's awesome.
- Chatterous - Helps the founders communicate easily, even maintaining history when we need to go back.
- Github - Repository to store code, place to find and track plugins and addons to help development, provides a pretty slick bug tracker as well that we don't have to maintain.
- Amazon AWS (s3, ec2) - Helps us scale, do backups, and more, with little worry or effort.
(first photo taken last week on a walk with my family through Lands End in San Francisco, CA)
