Artem Goldman is a serial entrepreneur, a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, and a Graduate of the Founder Institute Silicon Valley chapter. Born in Russia, Goldman began his career in project management and communications security working with Raiffeisen Bank Russia and the Russian Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, respectively. For the past 10 years, Goldman has been working with technology companies, including serving as the CEO of Legal Space, a platform that connects its clients with over 2000 legal service providers located in more than 150 countries around the world.
Through the experience he gained working closely with international lawyers at Legal Space, as well as through his own personal experiences in navigating the complexities of US visa applications, Goldman saw an opportunity to streamline the immigration process through technology. In 2015, Goldman co-founded Visabot, an artificial intelligence chatbot that helped more than 100,000 people to apply for US Green Cards, 0-1 work visas, and DACA protection. Earlier this year, Goldman became the CEO of CRYCASH, a dedicated cryptocurrency marketplace for gamers and game developers.
In a recent interview with Sputnik News, Goldman offered some advice for early-stage entrepreneurs getting started, about what it takes to become a successful founder of a technology startup today.
Put in the Work, and Build Something Real People Want
Basically you just need to work. That's it. That's the secret. You go and work.
While it might sound like an oversimplification, Goldman is certainly onto something real. Among the often-cited work habits of successful entrepreneurs, seemingly simple concepts are very prevalent, like establishing a dedicated routine, doing the hard thing first, and abiding by the simple mantra of ‘work, don’t worry.’
Asked how entrepreneurs should go about transitioning a product beyond the initial idea-stage, Goldman offered some advice that will be familiar to other seasoned innovators,
...The first thing you need to do, you need to build a prototype and try to sell it to the customer, because you need to make something people want. If you build something nobody wants, it can't be successful.
This is tried and true counsel. Absolutely critical to building a new product of any kind is to make sure you get iterative feedback early and often from the customers who need your product. Solving the problem that a customer experiences should be the core reason for a product or company to exist. First-time Founders often ruminate on their early product ideas for too long, because they are afraid of the feedback they will receive in the marketplace for a product concept that is not yet fully developed, or because they fear they could compromise their intellectual property: these fears are largely unfounded. Seasoned entrepreneurs like Goldman inherently understand the concept of Minimum Viable Product.
While a well-constructed M.V.P. can take various forms (see graphic above), the critical point to remember is that customer validation is (almost always) far more important than preserving trade secrecy. Instead, entrepreneurs need to get outside of their office or laboratory and talk to their prospective customers early, hear their feedback, and integrate that advice into how the product is developed from its beginning stages. The key concepts to building a strong M.V.P. are always customer-centric:
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Dedication to understanding the customer’s problem
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Listening to customer feedback and reexamining assumptions
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Willingness to pivot trajectory away from the initial startup idea or concept product
In addition to informing the core features of a product, having a genuine openness to feedback and willingness to pivot can save an entrepreneur enormous amounts of time and money, because obtaining early feedback is often invaluable for establishing the right trajectory of product development for a young startup company.
Measure Success through a Global Perspective
When asked about metrics for measuring a startup’s success, the Russian-born entrepreneur indicated that international market adoption can be a key performance indicator. According to Goldman,
If you have a product that international customers will use, then it's a successful product.
Incorporating a global mindset from the outset of launching a startup helps to set a standard and company culture for scaling the venture to actually reach that global market. You might notice that big brands tend to incorporate a message of globalization into their mission statements:
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Google: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
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Nike: "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world."
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Facebook: "To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."
The maxim ‘Act Locally, Think Globally’ can be applied very deliberately to this type of global startup mindset, where it is incumbent upon the Founder to both leverage the opportunities within arm’s reach, while never losing sight of the guiding vision to scale the company into wider markets. Reaching international customers can take time, even for the most technologically-enabled companies, so it pays dividends in the long term for entrepreneurs to be deliberate about the envisioned future of their venture from day one.
Without Customers, You Don’t Have a Business
The pivotal cornerstone to every successful business is paying customers. Goldman offered some shrewd advice for entrepreneurs looking to attract their first customers: try to avoid paying too much to acquire them. In Goldman’s words,
You just go where your customers are - and you can find your customers online, or offline, it's up to you. There are a lot of free ways of finding your customers.
While the barriers to launching a targeted digital advertising campaign today are lower than ever because of the tools made available by the giant tech platforms, ad costs can also balloon quickly without a strategic approach to marketing and customer acquisition. And as Goldman alludes to, sometimes the best type of customer (especially early on) is a customer with zero paid acquisition cost. The key is to deeply understand who the customers are in order to target them precisely.
Whether they realize it or not, most entrepreneurs follow a fairly formulaic strategy in the customer discovery process:
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Clearly define and segment Customer Archetype(s)
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List Key Assumptions
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Validate M.V.P. as a Solution to the Customer Problem
Analogous to getting out of the office and asking potential customers questions early on to understand their pain points and validate or reassess assumptions, entrepreneurs often need to be hitting the pavement hard and knocking on proverbial doors in order to land their first paying customers. Equally critical to success are persistence in reaching out those potential customers, and openness to their feedback.
No matter where you call home, or where geographically you start to build your business, hearing this tried and true advice from an international serial entrepreneur like Artem Goldman reinforces the importance of business fundamentals for entrepreneurs of all stripes and backgrounds.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.85BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.
