#97 | Startup lessons (part 1)

"We fear the future because we are wasting today." — Mother Teresa

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." — Aldous Huxley

I'm offline for a couple of weekends, cycling in Montenegro. Time offline can't ever be overrated. It puts life back in perspective. Like a foetus to a mother, I am attached to the vast bulk of humanity through the umbilical cord of a two-inch by five-inch device that scratches my attention every half dozen minutes. 

Some birth occurs when less connected. After kicking and discomfort, and without our devices, we are delivered into acute stillness, especially when sitting and doing nothing. As it turns out, 'no refreshing' is the most refreshing thing we can do. 

Time offline throws up all kinds of difficulties when publishing a weekly letter to my friends. Luckily, Substack allows me to schedule posts. So I thought I'd run through a few lessons learnt the hard way in the last couple of years, as Monty and I have been working on Yokeru. Reflecting, like unplugging, gives perspective. 

Lesson 1: A startup is not the finished product. When it breaks, it means it's used.

It's worth noting that Yokeru is not yet a unicorn, so you must take everything here in context. Nevertheless, things are going well through trial and error, not skill. But sometimes things go wrong, and it feels like the roof has blown off the house, and the rain will ruin everything. But this breakage is good: it means the machine is used!

I was at my friend's house in Nairobi a year ago, and my phone started ringing: our system was down, and our customers were not happy. This was the first (and only) major outage we've had. It was not ideal. When we look at successful startups, they have their shit together. Their uptime is 99.99999%, and they have great UI, a fantastic onboarding flow, and comprehensive help pages. Everything is polished. 

But Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, et al. are not startups - they are a new era of corporates. Startups are, by definition, unfinished. They are rough around the edges and scruffy. Have you ever seen a horse that's just born? Startups are like that: ugly. And that's okay. 

So when we're in a pitch and something doesn't show right in the demo, or when a customer WhatsApps to say they have just been logged out inexplicably, these things are routine and do not indicate disaster. It's a good sign because when everything breaks, at least we have users to break it! 

Lesson 2: We don't know anything, so talk to users.

Two years in, and still, we know nothing. Every time we forget this truth, we know even less. 

It's starkly apparent when, in every conversation we have with a user, they have more crisp product insights, and clarifying UX ideas, than we could ever dream. If I read 100 books about product management, I would assume I know something. I would be wrong: all of my assumptions are illusions, and talking to users is the only way of extinguishing the fires of bullshit that simmer the like a peat bog (slowly and relentlessly).

Unlike B2C products, our users are not the buyers: this is important to remember (and easy not to). Our customers (buyers) are the leaders of vast organisations; our users support a small group of vulnerable people. Talking to 'customers' / buyers in a B2B context is simpler. Just by selling, we learn something. Getting to the hard-to-reach users of any organisation is hard, but we should have attempted to do this much sooner. We'd have learned substantially more if we did. 

B2B products can hide from having bad UI because the buyer is not the user, and the buyer doesn't care about the user's experience. But UI is pivotal to the success of a product's utilisation. And every B2B product should be built as B2C experience. 

Lesson 3: The small picture

Big-picture thinking is about system change and missions. It's what investors like to hear: how will you change the landscape of your industry? Why bother if a startup says, "Oh! We won't!" And why would investors invest if you're not solving some fundamental flaw in how things work today? 

But all of this systems change talk should come after being very clear about the small picture. That is: how do you deliver value to a user? For example, Yokeru is valuable when identifying someone who needs support, either because they say so or because they pick up their phone.

Missions are essential for aligning the team and building morale. Still, we've found that focusing on that moment of value (and digging into how that comes about) has transformed our work.

My week in books

This will return on my return! Keep reading. 

Live well,

Hector