You must make sure that the product solves a critical pain point of the users — the needs vs the wants. In B2B businesses, the buyer should experience a minimum 10x improvement over the alternative to offset the transition cost and risk of failure. When conducting market research, ask the consumer if the experience you provide would fall into their top three priorities for the following year or if the product would save them enough time to justify trying the product.
Learn more at neuroactive at neuro-activate.com
What are your '5 things I wish someone told me before I launched my startup' and why?
1. Solve tomorrow’s problem today. Be prepared for a potential problem quickly, and not just a problem that is obvious at the moment.
The most powerful strength for any startup is being faster than the larger companies at executing new opportunities and building a brand before the bigger players catch up. Competitors will almost always have more resources and very smart teams. If you think you have plenty of time to build your startup idea into a big company, think again. Technology growth is incredibly fast paced. There is a small window of time to build your product, grow a large client base, and build a brand. Being prepared for potential problems is critical vs a quick fix and iterative improvement the year after you launch.
This is something that I learned during the course of my career. While building my last startup, we focused on adding features that clients wanted at that time without determining whether these features would still be valuable a year down the road. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. We were clearly too reactionary to client requests without having any foresight. As a result, the overall competitive space grew so quickly that by the time we launched, the market was far more difficult to penetrate and prospects found it harder to justify our product versus the many alternative options that had emerged.
2. When launching your brand, the timing needs to be just right for consumer need, speed of technology innovation and having the right team — all at once.
Becoming a successful startup takes get a lot of things right very quickly. There are numerous drivers of successful companies, but I have found TIMING to be the most important. You can have the best team and a very innovative technology, but if the market adoption hasn’t caught up, then the company will be short-lived. An excellent example of this is Uber. Ridesharing has been around for over a hundred years, but it took consumers’ acceptance of virtual connection, renting/riding with strangers (primarily pioneered by Airbnb), the growth in GPS smartphone technology, and the right team to all converge for Uber to obtain their unicorn status.
3. Build a team that truly wants to be part of a startup. Nothing is as easy as it seems on television.
Working at a startup has been glorified recently in television shows such as Silicon Valley, Shark Tank, and The Social Network. These shows portray startups as going from fun idea, to offers of tens of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding, to then suing each over the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The reality is that working in a startup is a highly stressful, labor-intensive, risky, time-consuming endeavor that requires relentless late nights and early mornings. Any startup wishing to succeed requires a highly skilled team that truly believes in the product with a frenetic passion. From my experience, hiring countless startup employees, I’ve learned to thoroughly grill every potential candidate to ensure they have an entrepreneurial, passionate drive. I have had to let many early employees go because they came for the glamor without the grit.
4. Talk to industry and (often more important) non-industry experts.
Spend time interviewing industry experts, and even more importantly find experts outside the industry who have used similar revenue models and acquisition strategies. There is a fantastic community of innovators in different industries who are willing to provide advice. Incubators such as 1871 in Chicago offer excellent resources. The simplest and cheapest way is to go on LinkedIn and find local leaders of companies you want to connect with and message them. You will be surprised by how many coffee meetings you will score and learn from.
In fact, when I was in the process of setting up my own sales team and monetization strategy, I wish I had taken my own advice and consulted more professionals in different industries to see what challenges they experienced. A lot of times these lessons can translate to your business, or spark a new idea you may have never previously considered.
5. Focus on the needs, not the nice-to-have features.
You must make sure that the product solves a critical pain point of the users — the needs versus the wants. In B2B businesses, the buyer should experience a minimum 10x improvement over the alternative to offset the transition cost and risk of failure. When conducting market research, ask the consumer if the experience you provide would fall into their top three priorities for the following year or if the product would save them enough time to justify trying the product.
Prior to launching SAVANT, we generated hundreds of pre-registrations and over one thousand listings after only a few social media posts. These early signups, along with surveys and interviews, validated that our target audience views the current methods of managing their sharing business as problematic. We engaged with early registrants by personally calling and conducting product demonstrations to gather feedback on priorities and features.
Yitzi Weiner conducted this interview with Jason Randolph (Co-Founder of Savant, Managing Partner at Neuroactive, and Co-director at the Chicago Founder Institute), where it was originally published on Medium's Thrive Global blog.
Jason is an entrepreneur and seasoned marketer of 13+ years that has built both companies and brands. He elevates great brands to become extraordinary brands through marketing and product development leadership that is unapologetically passionate. Jason has lead marketing and co-founded technology firms for almost 15 years, and focuses on the intersection of marketing and human behavior. Learn more at neuroactive at neuro-activate.com
