Being founder of the consumer internet startup OrangeSlyce.com for the past 2 years, I’ve learned many lessons that I feel fortunate to be able to share with other entrepreneurs. Some have been lessons reinforced by successes, others have been learned from failures. Entrepreneurship is an area that is filled with so much noise that its difficult to distinguish the good advice from the bad. Not all advice is created equal, and we have certainly followed the wrong trail many times because of bad advice. In fact, I want to first offer a piece of advice on advice: trust your instincts. If the advice doesn’t sit well with you, don’t blindly follow it because Mr. Gray Hair with 40 years of experience says so. Chances are, his advice is for a tie period that is long gone and won’t work in today’s environment. Make sure the advice you follow is relevant and from people who are doing stuff now. Taking advice form someone with 10 years of enterprise software sales in the 90s is probably not the path you should follow as a consumer web startup in 2010.

Your first design will be ugly

All too often I find internet startups delay launching their site to “tweak the design” and improve the aesthetics. Your first design will be ugly. Several months down the road, you will be embarrassed that you even considered launching with the horrendous UI and color scheme. However, your first design shouldn’t matter. You should be solving such a huge need that users and customers will do anything to use your product to solve their needs. When your hair is on fire, the look of the firehouse doesn’t really matter. If poor usability or bland visual effects push away early adopters, then you haven’t actually solved an important problem (at which time you pivot). Early adopters will figure out your application. They will hack their way to using your service if need be. This isn’t to say to create unnecessary obstacles in your service, but delaying launching for design is never worth it.

Eat, sleep and breath your product launch

I find that most startup advice generally targets companies that have already launched but doesn’t really address entrepreneurs just trying to get an idea into fruition. If you are still at the idea-stage, everything you do should be focused around launching. I don’t have concrete data, but in my experience I see that most startups fail before they even start. Non-technical founders never find developers to build their product, and technical founders get caught up in features and miss the market opportunity after several years of development. As a pre-launch startup, you should eat, sleep and breath getting your product out. At this stage, there is no room in the company for anyone who doesn’t contribute to launching the product. Your business development person better close Excel and start testing, sketching mockups, and writing web copy. Simply launching a web product is a very difficult feat, and the whole team needs to be aligned to this single goal.

Stalk Your Customers

Rule #1 of any startup is to build a product that solves your own needs. The most successful consumer web startups are founded by people who personally experienced the problems they are trying to solve. 37Signals, Twitter, and even Facebook are a few examples of companies that developed a product that solved their own problems. Basecamp and Twitter actually started as internal company applications to solve contextual challenges. The 2 startups eventually realized that they could offer their solutions to the world. However, startups need to take this a step further because eventually you will probably evolve from being your own target customer. As a startup, you need to stalk your customers. You need to know what their passions are, what they do for fun, typical hangout places, their sleep schedules… You need to know your customers better than you know yourselves so you can always answer the question: What Would Customer Do?

More from OrangeSlyce Blog

Blog Margeting Related Posts Plugin For OrangeSlyce BlogAsk OrangeSlyce Blog To Recommend Your Posts Blog Marketing Related Posts Plugin Counter

Be Sociable, Share!