This is what a startup is
When you hear people talk about listening to feedback and implementing, it could be something as simple as changing a sentence so it becomes clearer or something as as complex as yadah yadah (fill with some super complex task that requires the top engineering team to pull off side by side the marketing and management and PR team).
At SideProject, constant little tweaks have been very helpful. We’ve literally committed at least two updates everyday. The first one this morning was to the registration form, we had previously added the terms and conditions, went back to make it more visible,include it in the email, repeat same process for the privacy policy, experimented with where the account details should appear. Is it too “in their faces”? or should we move it down to the end of the form? Will it show we care less about it? How about collecting spouse information? Will people give out their date of birth? No kidding. They gave us just the month and day; no year! Something as little as people withholding their year of birth makes you second guess other “big little” things like home address, passport photograph and more.
A large part of what startup founders do it experimentation.
As we grow, experimentation reduces and we become more focused on exactly what sort of value we want our customers to get. This in itself is an experiment since different people want different things.
When we started Verilearn (another startup I run), we wanted to provide the extra layer schools didn’t have but they needed so they can become innovation beds for students But they all wanted different things! We brought them an online learning platform that uses artificial intelligence to compress complex lecture notes into bullet points, we also brought along robotics and programming courses. You would think that’s all that would be ever needed but no, some wanted French, some wanted Arabic studies, some wanted us to develop content entirely outside the curriculum since they feel they had the official curriculum pretty much figured out, some wanted us to train their teachers on ICT, some thought of us like a publishing house and wanted us to be just that!
Well, we cant meet everyone’s unique needs. If we attempted it, we would run out of cash and spend all our time trying to please one person. By all means, this wasn’t our mission.
This is what a startup is — experimentation, iteration, listening, taking a knee, looping in prospects, patting people on the back with nice words, closing deals, growing, doing, breaking things, second guessing every single decision you make, thinking if you should hire that guy with nice beards, calculating the ROI if you attend that conference…this is a startup.
