Startup – moje doświadczenia w USA i w Polsce | Arek Skuza | Blog

Yesterday night I was talking to my colleague Yu-kai Chou. He is CEO of www.viralogy.com. One of his experience is getting venture capitalists on the board (getting their money involved). Yu – Kai is very successful with winning contests where start ups’ CEOs present their businesses in front of experienced venture capitalists. If somebody wins the contests it means that venture capitalists are willing to invest in winner’s business .

What I would like to share with you is a presentation which Yu-Kai published on his blog.

In my opinion, if you are going to convince somebody that your idea is great, Yu – Kai’s slides can be very helpful. I like the philosophy which is inside. Find the problem, build a solution, convince people that your solution can solve their problems.

I personally believe that start ups concentrate on products features too much and forget about the opportunity they need to create for users. Many start ups want to build solutions which have a lot of options, a lot of functionalities and a lot of choices. This is why they forget about several rules:

1. Web app must be fast

2. Web app must do one thing and be best at it

3. We app must solve specific problem

4. We app must have very simple and clear business model (even when it is the most innovative web app in the world).

Have a great day, keep smiling a lot

Arek

Last two weeks we were asking people for visiting our totutam project and providing us with their feedback. This is because we are big fans of Deming cycle.

Deming cycle (source: wikipedia)

I personally love “check” phase where all my dreams and vision are verified by numbers. It helps to keep company on the right track.

I would like to share a little information concerning how we are gathering feedback from users, so we are able to plan it to be implemented.

Firstly, we personally asked about 80 people to provide us with “their look and feel” feedback concerning usability, accessibility etc. Our Brand Manager, Mikolaj even started special competition where people can have free t-shirts (check your t-shirt here).

I can’t express how cool this experience is. We received 63 emails back with something what is incredibly important for us. We are trying hard to build this product for users, so we need to get to know their comments.

Afterwards we grouped all answers in the following segments (ah segmentation:):

1. First impression about totutam.pl

2. What users like

3. What users dislike

4. What are users’ suggestions

5. What functionalities users didn’t find or didn’t understand

We are planning meeting to take place next Monday. We will analyze feedback and compare it with our google analytics data.

Our technical part of the project is developed according to scrum methodology. For those who know what I am talking about it means that all product changes must be turned into tickets (jobs). So after next Monday meeting we will choose things to implement, turn them into tickets so users’ needs will see a daylight .

I want to say that this is great feeling when you are developing / changing something after customers suggestions. You feel like you build something important and other people take care too.

Have a nice weekend

Arek

Our Brand Manager has whole room of brand new t-shirts. If you want to win one visit here.

If you have questions write me an email

Check this out

Arek

I was smiling when people from my team recommended this you tube video

I hope it makes smile all start up lovers who:

- work > than 80 hours a week

- keep worying about their business models

- have hard time with investors

Have a great day CEOs, project managers and marketing geeks.

Arek