Alex's Tech Thoughts

Every once in a while I hear about a company making sure their executives aren’t active on their competitors sites (think Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google). I think this is a terrible mistake.

If anything, you should be the most active user of your competitors’ products. You should understand what works, what doesn’t, and how you can continue to make your product better than theirs.

You can’t truly comprehend your competitor unless you are a user of their product. This doesn’t mean you need to publicly blast out promotion for your competitor’s product, but make sure you use it like a typical user would. One additional user is not going to make a difference for your competitor, but it will make a difference for your business.

After all the money raised, praise from press, congratulations from friends- building and scaling a company is always about the product.

I’ve been noticing a trend with many companies looking to leverage celebrities, athletes, or popular figures in hopes that they will help drive traffic, users, usage. While there are times when this works- it is typically a quick fix rather than a long-term solution. If you are going to build your business on getting the occasional celebrity tweet out to move your business forward your product probably sucks.

This is not to say a good celebrity endorsement can’t help elevate your company- they definitely can. It’s just that after that endorsement if you don’t have something that people love, it won’t be long before your active users begin to dwindle.

Instead of hoping that others (celebrities, etc.) can solve your problems- focus on your product. Why do people love it? What do people hate about it? What are the most requested features? Build that. Talking to users/customers will ensure your proper focus. Because really it always is and always will be about the product.

If you’ve worked at a startup then you know the ups and downs that you can experience. Startups are not for the faint of heart. In one month you can experience everything from panic, elation, gratitude, fear, anger, indifference, joy, grief, frustration, relief, pride, jealousy, generosity, and much more.

One day you have raised money from the biggest names in the technology space, the next day you announce on TechCrunch- riding high on all the buzz about your company. Then a week later the press is gone, the product doesn’t work exactly as you had hoped, and your active user-base is dwindling by the day. It takes a special kind of person to dig deep, hunker down, and keep focus on building the best product possible. Vin Vacanti just wrote a great post about The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunch’d. 

Bottom line: While startups have been glorified recently with everything from TV shows on Bravo to crazy parties — they are a lot more difficult than they may seem. Before you start or join a startup you need to remember that you will have ups and downs- but it is all worth it when you build a great product and positively affect people’s lives.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about doing product partnerships came from David Honig, of Vision Ventures. 

At the time, I was working at Aviary and focused on third-party integrations for the web and mobile editor. David told me that while it is great to close a deal (and we should celebrate our wins), there is a silent killer for product partnerships. And that is poor placement.

Poor placement in this case was in regards to where the photo editor should be placed when a third-party integrates. His logic was that if you close a product partnership deal and fail to get the proper placement it is deemed to fail. He even posited that if you can’t get proper placement, you should walk away from the deal. His reasoning was that if you end up doing the deal with poor placement your numbers will be bad and it will be a poor signaling for other partners, investors, etc.

Placement can come into play from anything like a photo editor, a payment button when checking out, a widget on a third-party website, and more. Next time you are doing a product partnership, be sure to keep placement in mind.

Every once in awhile you need to refresh your pitch.

This usually happens when you have some new products coming up on the horizon. In your pitch and with any materials you use (pitch deck, take away deck, etc.) you need to reflect both the existing and the arriving company offerings.

When dealing with upcoming products and offerings I recommend explaining what your thought process behind building it was and ask the prospective partner if this is something they would want for themselves.

For materials you always need to be updating and refreshing upcoming products. With every meeting you will receive more and more feedback. That feedback will continue to drive changes in the offering which will in turn continue to drive change in the pitch.