Michael Venn, founder of social video collaboration app Frames, shares his advice on how fellow startup entrepreneurs can take their apps to market.
From securing funding to testing your product before it’s released to consumers, here are seven top tips to help you get things right the first time round:
1. Solve a problem for your consumers
We realised that video creation and collaboration between friends was a function that users wanted.
We saw a gap and opportunity in the market. Consumers have been looking for new ways to easily produce highly sharable collaborative video content with their friends and followers.
This was a massive opportunity for users to get creative, in turn creating viral content.
2. Don’t ignore your competitors
Our competitors include the likes of Instagram and Snapchat.
It’s really hard to ignore a big company like Snapchat, they have grown massively and are really inspirational for a startup like us.
I have personally followed their growth and learnt that you have to start somewhere, just like Snapchat – and look how far they’ve come.
Of course, we needed to differentiate from what is already on the market, so we have our own collaborative niche and USP.
3. Get to grips with funding
Finance and funding have been a huge learning process for me.
I went from being a freelancer, working alone and doing everything, to a ten-person team, and managing them along with the finances and budgets.
Securing funding has been both exhilarating and stressful.
Be prepared to learn how to pitch your product to many different potential investors and learn to manage your time efficiently as you’re likely to attend countless meetings.
4. Learn about your brand
Try not to make assumptions about your target audience.
You need to test and research to learn who is reacting positively to your product.
Listening to your user base and implementing user feedback is extremely valuable for the growth and longevity of your product.
5. Don’t be afraid to take risks
We’ve had to take risks and launch new features or changed the UI slightly to see how our early user base would react to it. Some would be a hit other tweaks would be a miss.
Now we have a strong audience and user base, we take less “risks” and track user behaviour, so we know how to give users what they want.
When we launched we had no idea how users would actually use the product and how they would adopt it. We also have a large number of users in South America, which we never predicted.
6. Keep a finger on the pulse
Keeping your finger on the pulse is important.
It’s important to know what’s new and what new startups are up to.
7. Test, test, test
Before you launch, make sure you test, test and do a little bit more testing.
This will save you a great deal of time, and help you create a product your consumers will love.