Accelerated Startup: Everything You Need to Know to Make Your Startup Dreams Come True From Idea to Product to Company by Vitaly Golomb

Author:Vitaly Golomb [Golomb, Vitaly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Personal Finance
Publisher: Time Traveller Books
Published: 2017-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22: Technology as a Core Competency

In the early days, your company lives on its idea and the passion of the founders. You can build a series of prototypes to test your MVPs using pretty much any technology. I've seen successful MVPs that were a web form, a YouTube video, a simple WordPress site and an in-person interview. I’ve even seen a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, where founders straight up lied to their customers; under the hood, all the "technology" was done by hand. All of that is OK, as long as it gets you the answers you need.

At some point, however, your company needs to grow up and start utilizing technology to build and optimize the user experience. Having a deep understanding of the technologies that are available is invaluable, because I've seen and experienced some spectacularly expensive mistakes here.

Let me kick off with an example. One company I was advising was developing a marketing product, and they were doing pretty well. When the time came to come out of beta and start charging the customers, the company experienced a six-month delay. I was baffled. There are a number of great SaaS payment services available off the shelf, with fantastic APIs. Instead, the company decided to develop its own from scratch. When asked why, the CEO told me that the CTO had convinced him that none of the payment services did exactly what he needed, so they agreed to develop their own. I spoke with the CTO, and it turned out that there was a very small aspect of their solution that wasn't covered by the available payment services. "We would be undercharging our customers," he concluded. I sat him down, together with the CEO, and we built a spreadsheet. My suspicion was confirmed. Over the lifetime of a customer, the company stood to lose between 1.5 and 2% of revenue. "That could be worth millions of dollars," the CTO argued. I agreed, but pointed out that the six months of delay meant that the company might not survive for long enough for that to become an issue. The CTO was able to direct his team to roll out an off-the-shelf solution in just a couple of days. With the rapid growth of the company, the 2% in lost revenue due to the billing quirk was irrelevant. The six-month delay almost cost them a round of investment and the company.

I am an advocate for choosing the correct tools for your business. Choosing one accounting package over another could cost you a lot of time over the years. Choosing the right platform for your product is even more important, and I've been badly burned by choosing wrong. I made the decision to build a product on a platform that simply wasn’t equipped to do the heavy lifting it required. I hired a contract team and spent six months building it, and as soon as the product launched, it imploded. It turned out that, given the particular challenges in my business and the

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