FiP #2 - Customer Success, Handling Criticism and the Creator Economy

Happy St Patricks day

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit 🇮🇪 - Can’t post on the 17th of March and not wish everyone a Happy Patricks Day!

I’m excited to share the second edition of the Founding in Public (FiP) newsletter. In this post, we will cover stats about this newsletter’s growth, following passions vs the money and why I killed a startup idea about customer success/support teams.

I am still working out the frequency of this newsletter but you can voice your preference via this form.

Things I Have Done

I.

Launched the ‘Founding in Public’ newsletter

Technically the first newsletter was when I launched but it hadn’t felt real until last week so I’m including it here with some stats and thoughts.

• 65 subscribers to date

• 3 posts, including, this one

• 4 in-depth follow-ups from readers about the content shared

• My thoughts so far are:

  • It has been eye-opening learning about how much goes into consistent content creation

  • The newsletter has already opened up a lot of great conversations with other people trying to do the same

  • Support has for the most part been overwhelmingly positive

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II.

Killed startup ideas #3 & #4 before getting to product development

After a round of follow up user interviews, I decided to put Customer Success and Customer Support problems on the shelf. I will share the case study on this in the coming months but in short, the reasons for killing these projects were;

• Problem/Founder fit was good but not great

• Problem/Pains found via research were frequent but users were not actively seeking solutions for them

• Audience proved to be a very hard one to reach. This felt like an early indicator that distribution would very quickly become a challenge

Happy to share my findings and data with anyone that doesn’t want to wait for the case study post.

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III.

Kicked off Startup idea #4 - The creator economy

I have personally been interested in the creator economy for some time now but never gave it much thought as a business. Then all of a sudden I found myself continuously getting drawn into it from conversations, forums etc. I am currently spending my time understanding the market and speaking to creators in this space.

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Learnings

I.

Factor in the source of criticism and feedback

One of the hardest things so far has been knowing which advice to take and which to acknowledge but ignore. When I first shared this newsletter I heard some unsupportive comments both directly and indirectly from my own network.

A new rule of thumb I follow is, unless it is constructive or coming from someone who knows first hand about the area, I will ignore it and proceed. Since hearing those initial comments I have had some amazing conversations with people which are IMO much more powerful indicators to continue rather than to stop.

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II.

Lean towards what you have a passion for versus what you feel you should do

I was engaged with some high value qualified leads for customer support problems; however, as I dug deeper into this opportunity I realised that it would require a company that was Sales led versus Product led.

After a conversation with a founder who has done both before, he explained that if you are not passionate about the type of company you are building you will find the hard days even harder. With this, I feel I have a higher chance of success building something that is Product led vs Sales led but I may very well eat these words in the future.

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A Question For You

How can I give you, the reader, a stronger voice in the direction of this newsletter?

• What do you want to see more and less off?

• What form do you feel most comfortable sharing feedback in?

  • Comments

  • Email

  • Communities (Discord/Slack etc?)

  • Other?

Feel free to share your thoughts anonymously via the feedback form link or directly in the comments below.

Responses to the last 1QFY

Question: What starting point do you believe is more important for building a startup?

• Market first

• Problem first

• Inflection point/Change event first

Response:

William Skinner, Founder of Helios, suggested taking the following approach based on Avichal Garg and Mike Vernal’s advice.

Screenshot of Williams response to 1QFY

Below is a very brief video where Mike Vernal talks about how you should evaluate your market size.

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Misc

This is a section that essentially abuses the structure I tried to commit to above.

Shoutouts and Gratitude

• I would like to share my gratitude for you. Thank you for all your support and for joining me on this journey.

• Also a particular shout out to Ali, founder of Project Up. Ali very kindly jumped on a call to give me feedback about ‘Failed Startup idea #1’.

What I am currently researching

• The creator economy

• Public omnibus style focus groups

My exploration backlog

• Better product analytic tooling for Sales and CSMs

• POS solution for specific cryptocurrencies

• Creator DAOs

Searching for

• Active creators trying to grow their reach

• Aspiring creators who wish to utilise their current skills to become masters of their own destiny

• Tech co-founders who are interested in exploring any of the above

Cool links and tools

• Reddit user research tools

  • Gummy Search

  • Olwi

  • Howitzer

• Twitter analytics

• Search companies by key values

• Companies publicly sharing revenue numbers

• YouTube channel that summarises complex research papers

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