What keeps startup founders up at night?

By Lenka Davis

What are some of the most common questions we hear from high tech startup founders? They fall into the following categories.

1. Finding More Customers

2. Sharpening Their Messaging

3. Launching a Part or a Phase of Their Business

Can you help us find more customers?

Often startups have some customers or prospects, but they know they need to continue to find more. With little to no advertising budget you want to have other ways to find more customers.

Where you found your first customers is where you want to start looking for more. Send out regular communications via that same channel to keep them engaged. Know which one of your customers are associated with this channel. Know them as well as you can. This includes knowing what their day looks like, their problems, their lifestyle, etc, and what they are looking for in relation to your product or service.

If you have direct contact information, which is ideal, such as an email address then send them a periodic email or newsletter. Always have some call to action in your communication so that your customer can either share your information or ask for recommendations.

If you have followers on social media such as LinkedIn or through invite only or market specific online communities, then give occasional updates. Share knowledge, fun facts and company milestones with your followers.

Even though much of the business world is online, in person interactions are still very relevant. Industry conferences, networking events and professional connections will keep your network up to date on what you are trying to achieve.

What about using social media to find more customers?

The trick to social media is that you have to give it time and you need to be on the right platform for your business.

Can you help us write better messaging?

Writing your company messaging can be a daunting task for even the best writers. Having clear messaging will give you strategic guidance to multiple parts of your business.

The key pieces of information a business needs to have before they can write their messaging are:

• Written Business objectives

• Understanding your target audience

• Knowing what makes your product or service different from all the rest

Once you have the business objectives and the key product differentiators then you can begin to build messaging. Decide what tone you will use and what terms are important to describe your business. These will define and give you messaging it’s own personality that reflects what your business is all about.

Setting up a messaging framework will help your teams write content that sounds consistent to those outside and even inside the company. Having a framework will give you a foundation to build upon to create all the other written materials your business needs.

Describing what your business does is probably the number one worry that keeps early stage startups founders up at night.

We need help with launching a part of our business, can you help us with this?

At some point a business will have so much going on plus work to do and be in a phase where the next release needs to be closely managed for it to be successful. This is the point where a project manager helps the team get through this bottleneck so the rest of the team can keep the business running smoothly.

The times this happens are either a business is just beginning to build their MVP (minimum viable product), or it needs to add a major new product or service.

Depending on the complexity of the project here are a few points to consider.

1. How technical is the project?

2. What expertise do you have in-house to work on this project?

3. What other teams or partners need to be involved or can help with this project?

4. What is the budget and timing for this project?

Most projects contain a combination of technical know-how and subject matter expertise that is solving a solution to a problem. Look at the split and then fill the rest of the team with in-house team members and partners or vendors.

For example, adding a new service offered through your website could be built by a group that consists of three main teams: a vendor that builds the technology solution, a project manager that enables clear communications between all those involved and a subject matter expert that sets the direction of the solution.

Another example project is the research of the discovery phase and building phase of the MVP of a service product. The project would consist of three main teams. A technical vendor that provides a service that guides the team through the research phase, and a product owner that is the subject matter expert on the product and the market that it will be sold in and finally a project manager that enables smooth communication and documentation for the build.

Have other questions that are keeping you up at night that you want to ask? Contact us! We’ll help brainstorm ideas on various solutions.

Fun Fact

According to the journal Science, there is no real difference in brain performance, such as staying awake and being mentally alert, between early birds and night owls in the morning. In the evening hours, however, night owls were less sleepy and had faster reaction times than the early birds. Some believe that night owls make better startup founders.