I was recently thinking about what would a minimal, initial team for a software startup comprise of. Imagine you have a brilliant idea for a startup and you have some funds to hire an initial team. But like most smart entrepreneurs, you want to hire a minimal team first and only expand later, if and as needed. So, what would be the essential, minimum team for your startup? Of course, technically, the answer is one. Minimum number of people you need for your startup is you (and possibly a cofounder). But, I am more interested in exploring what functional roles need to be performed in an early startup that is just getting off the ground. You could be doing all roles yourself, or you could be having different people for these different roles, but in my opinion, following roles define an essential startup team:

• Content expert
• Analytics and marketing expert
• Designer
• Engineer

Update/note/disclaimer: As pointed out in comments, at extremely early stages, product/market fit is what you should be aiming at and for that matter “product manager” (which is founder in most cases) is the person who will test and refine the startup until that fit is achieved. The team I describe is relevant once you know you have discovered the right market and have a pretty good sense of what product is going to look like.

Let me describe these roles in details and comment on why I think these are absolutely essential for an early stage startup.

Content expert

What s/he does? This person owns every aspect of your startup related to content. Activities include: writing amazing posts on your blog; writing guest posts on prominent industry publications and blogs; copywriting for website and landing pages; managing and engaging community on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels; engaging your startup online (by commenting on relevant blog posts, forums, Quora, etc.); writing whitepapers, case studies, etc. (if yours is a B2B startup). This person also interacts with the analytics expert to A/B test and refine headlines/copywriting and supplies content for email newsletters. Essentially, this person understands and gets what compelling content looks like and also understands why good content is so important to the startup’s success.

Why is content expert important? Content does two amazing things for a startup: a) it is super important for SEO purpose; more content you have on site and off-site, more likely are you to be ranked highly on search engines; b) good content helps your startup gets noticed. Companies like SEOMoz, Unbounce, Mint, OKCupid, etc. have shown what wonders good content can bring. With our product Visual Website Optimizer, I am trying to do the same by writing weekly posts on I love Split Testing blog. From my personal experience, I can tell content helped people notice our product as a serious A/B testing contender. Good content attracts much needed attention towards your startup and consistently good content helps create a nascent community around your startup. What more could you ask for?

Analytics and marketing expert

What s/he does?: This person is responsible for everything related to analytics (and marketing) in your startup. The list of what work needs to be performed is huge: properly utilizing Google Analytics to optimize funnels and understand where traffic is coming from, taking care of SEO, A/B testing different pages to maximize conversions, designing and implementing user engagement strategies (through email/retargeting/etc.), designing strategies to maximize retention of users/customers, increasing engagement on pages, doing PPC and display campaigns which show ROI; designing effective customer feedback loops. This person needs to work with content expert and designer to make killer landing pages and website structure. And s/he should also work with engineer to design retention strategies (trigger emails or badges or to implement any other novel strategy analytics expert may think of). Bottom line is this: analytics expert is responsible to maximize your conversions, sales and retention in any way s/he can.

Why is analytics expert important? In early days of startup, there is a risk of settling down towards a “good enough” framework. You have a website and you get a few signups daily, some of your users are canceling and you seem to have a vague understanding of what your users are doing on your website/app. All this process/information can quickly become de facto in your startup. As a startup, your team may be busy adding features, getting press and responding to customer queries. With all these day to day activities, analytics and optimization can take a back seat. Imagine how beneficial would it be for your startup, if your traffic increases from 10 hits to 1000 hits a day, conversion increases for 2% to 8% and churn reduces from 10% to 2%. Isn’t all this worth having a person doing the analytics and optimization job?

Designer

What s/he does? Obviously, this person is responsible for everything related to design. Tasks include: designing website, landing pages, application, email newsletters, banners, mobile app/website. Designer works with content expert to create visuals/images/infographics to be used in the content. S/he is also responsible for layout and visual appeal in whitepapers, case studies, etc. Designer works with analytics expert to create effective landing pages and call to action buttons. Designer works with engineer and analytics expert to skin the application and make it usable. A good designer intuitively understands the importance and impact of good design on how a startup is perceived.

Why is designer important? Needless to say, visitors and potential customers will judge quality of your product/service from design you have. In an era of design made popular by Apple and other companies, the bar for good design has really gone up. No longer can you hope to slap a basic HTML/CSS skeleton on your application and expect it to be received well. More than ever, design has become a significant competitive advantage and startups that realize this will be more successful than the rest.

Engineer

What s/he does? This person is responsible for technology and engineering behind your startup. Responsibilities are numerous: choosing frameworks, programming, server administration, maintaining databases, testing, QA, scaling operations, etc. The person should be smart enough to not over or under invest in engineering. Engineering and codebase evolves as startup evolves, so the person has to have a long term vision and give your technology an appropriate structure.

Why is engineer important? Initial choices you make in your engineering will have a long term effect on your startup. The programming languages you choose will define what kind of talent you attract. The framework you choose will guide direction of your code base. Choice of server architecture will become semi-permanent. The concept where your choice of technology/engineering effects your future decisions and efforts is called Technical Debt. So having a right engineer with good perspective on things is very important for a startup.

Bonus: customer support expert!

Technically, you don’t need a dedicated customer support person. In early days, it should be performed in rounds by everyone in the team. It helps the whole team be closer to the customer and understand (and hence fix) her problems and needs. However, if you really have to hire a fifth person in your team, I’d say hire a customer support expert. Keeping existing customers happy with swift and intelligent responses is sure shot way to differentiate from competition. Customers today are generally immensely unhappy with support of most (large) companies, so if you manage to surprise them with a good customer service, you may win much needed evangelists for your startup. In early days (and even now), this is precisely how we got people to love Visual Website Optimizer. We aim to provide absolutely the best customer support people may have seen.

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Last week, I stumbled across a personal post from a founder on his thoughts after first month of his startup. He writes in the post that he hasn’t been satisfied with the traction received so far and wonders whether existing product is the right path to continue on. I had exact same questions when I was starting up Wingify and now that we have seen some traction, I thought I should expand on a comment I made on how to know if your startup idea is the right one.

When doing a startup, it is perfectly okay to wonder whether you are on the right track. It is not a sign of weakness. In fact, being too attached to one’s idea is a sure shot path to failure. Honest introspection into your startup should be done regularly to have a clearer perspective. After all, startup is a lot of effort and hard work. What good it is if you don’t know whether that effort is in the right direction?

Like many entrepreneurs in their initial stages, if you are feeling doubtful about your startup, ask these 3 questions to yourself (and your co-founder):

• Do you think what you are providing is creating significant value for anyone? Value should be so significant that people should curse you if you take that service away from them. Do you think it could happen?
• Do you think there is big enough market for the service AND the market is easy to reach (without spending bootloads of money)?
• Are you enjoying doing this? Do you see yourself doing this for several next years?

If answers to any of the questions is no, you better think hard about your startup before putting any more effort into it.

Providing value

As I wrote earlier, a lot of ideas are cool but they seldom provide value to anyone (and hence seldom make money). “Value” is not some abstract concept I am throwing around. Your product/service is valuable if a lot of people will become sad if it didn’t exist or if you take it away from them. Your idea has no value if nobody cares whether it exists or not. For example, you decide to open a cafeteria chain with iPad menus in college campuses. It is a cool idea, for sure. It may even get you on TechCrunch. But, frankly, would your target market bother if such an idea didn’t exist or if you open up one cafeteria and decide to shut it down? The campus crowd has other alternatives for cafeteria and that is why they won’t cringe when you shut it down. They would not bother with your cafeteria. An iPad menu isn’t a strong enough value to anyone.

But, on the other hand, if you decide to open a cafeteria (with or without iPad menu) in a remote locality where there are no cafeterias at all (and if they haven’t tasted coffee before), you are definitely providing significant value to a well defined market. And people will definitely curse you if you decide to shut it down for no reason.

So, as a startup founder, you must ask whether your product/service is providing real value to anyone. Value can be measured in terms of convenience provided, money saved, entertainment, time saved or other parameters. But litmus test for your idea should be this: if you decide to shut down your product/service for no reason, will people notice? Will people become sad/mad, or will they simply move on without much of a fuss? If your answer is no, you better move on.

Realistically reaching a big target market

Just providing value is not enough for a startup. You may have the most valuable idea of all time (like introducing coffee to a remote locality), but if your target market is small, hard to reach or non-existent, then you should think twice about that idea of yours. To give a simple example, if your idea is to open a fast food joint that also serves chilled Cola in middle of Sahara desert, it is indeed quite valuable. You will be guaranteed a customer, every time someone happens to be crossing the desert. But the point is, how many customers would you be able to serve? How big could such business get?

Another example is of a market that is big but incredibly hard to reach. For example, an English teaching course for low-income, less-educated people in countries like India, China, Russia, etc is a brilliant idea and I am sure such a market exists and is potentially huge. But reaching out to such a market is a marketing nightmare. You must be prepared to spend lot of money on TV, radio, newspaper campaigns and establish local centres across hundreds of cities. As a bootstrapped (or even VC-funded) startup, are you prepared and capable of taking such a challenge? If answer is no, you need to move on.

Are you enjoying this?

Startup is a big commitment in life, and choice of your startup idea will determine how maximum portion of your immediate life will be spent. It is true that generally people work on startup ideas they generally like, but there are market-based approaches to find ideas that can be profitable (but not necessarily in line with what you like). You must realize that next few years will be spent on the same startup idea, so you must enjoy doing it. If your startup is about health, you must enjoy being in that field. If it is about marketing, you must like marketing. If it is about bingo cards, you must be passionate about bingo cards. I’m not saying you have to be crazily in love with your industry/domain, but you must at least enjoy being part of the industry. Otherwise, if you do a startup just for money, you will quickly bore and burnout yourself. So, even if your startup can make you a billionaire but you don’t like it (or can’t imagine making yourself like it ever), don’t do it.

Summary

Your startup idea is worthwhile if it is: a) extremely valuable to target customers (and not merely cool); b) has a big enough market that you can realistically reach out to; and c) something you can immerse in for many, many years to come.

Otherwise, simply pivot or redo the idea. It is never too soon or too late to change paths in life.

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I was fortunate to have been interviewed by Andrew on his awesome website Mixergy.com. The interview was about how we bootstrapped Visual Website Optimizer to over 1000 paying customers. The video is long (75+ minutes) but I hope if you watch it, you enjoy it! (If you rather prefer reading transcript, it is also available on Mixergy).

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My startup, Wingify, got covered in January 2012 edition of Inc. magazine. It tells about the journey from first version to final product (Visual Website Optimizer). Read the entire article below:

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I am happy to announce that we got nominated for not one, but two prestigious awards. The first one is Red Herring Asia 100, where they choose 100 companies from all over Asia who have potential to make it big. The other nomination is for NASSCOM Emerge 50 which choses 50 emerging companies from India in the IT field.

Red Herring is a widely recognized brand famous for spotting Microsoft during their infancy. On the other hand, NASSCOM is India’s top association of IT industry and is highly regarded for building India’s brand for IT services. I feel lucky to be nominated for these awards. The whole Wingify team (see below, yes we’re 8 people now) deserves to be recognized:

Please wish us luck for these awards. We have our fingers crossed!

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Many startups face problem of breaking the clutter. Nobody per se cares about your startup. They have their own busy lives and your startup is probably just another website they visited today. Making people notice and care about your product is perhaps the toughest challenge a startup faces. The challenge becomes even more difficult if you are a bootstrapped startup or are unwilling to spend thousands of dollars on press, paid advertising or sponsorships. So, what are the best ways to market your startup without spending any money?

Build a following by producing irresistible content

There, I said it! That’s the secret of marketing Visual Website Optimizer. We don’t have a marketing budget but yet we recently crossed 10,000+ signups milestone. How did we do it?

My primary marketing technique has been producing great content and then simply trying to spread that content. I write extensively about A/B testing and post it at a lot of places and that is what drives a lot of signups for our product. Some of the blockbuster guest posts I did are driving visits and signups even to this day (even months after of originally writing those articles).

Halo effect: how your startup gets marketed along side your content

In the content I produce, I don’t explicitly write about Visual Website Optimizer. People would only come to know about the product if they read the author bio. But that’s the best part: if you write good content, people will be naturally curious to read who wrote it and when they read about that, they will remember your startup. The key is to produce absolutely irresistible content that people cannot help but say “Wow, this is fantastic. Wonder who wrote it“. This is a big challenge but it is imperative that you invest time and effort into coming up with great content.

Multi-pronged approach: occupy mindshare of your market through multiple channels

Your prospective customers usually hang out at similar places, they read similar blogs and they talk with each other online or offline. in fact, people that share common needs and talk with each other regarding that is the definition of a market.

When you initially produce a piece of content, some people notice your startup. If you produce some more content and push it via a different channel and some more people notice (and among them some of them are the ones who noticed you previously). If you do this enough number of times, eventually you start occupying a mindshare of your target customer base and people start remembering your startup as one of the key solutions in the market. And lo and behold, you have successfully occupied a slice of your market’s collective mindshare. That’s what marketing does and you did that without investing any money (or at least not a lot of money in direct terms).

As a bootstrapped founder, you have time but not money. If you use that time writing and spreading good content, that will be one of the best early stage investments you can make.

The key is to keep reminding your market that you are alive and kicking by constantly publishing great content from various different channels. These channels can be:

• Twitter and Facebook: share relevant industry updates and re-tweet most interesting articles (relevant to your industry). Become an indespensible source of information.
• Blog: use blog not to promote your product but to talk about industry and teach best-practices, publish customer case studies, etc. In short, use blog to teach your readers something that they didn’t know.
• Guest Blogging: seek widely read sources in your industry and contribute good content. (Don’t talk about your product or your guest posts won’t get accepted)

How to produce good content?

Now, that is the hardest part as it depends a lot on creativity. However, to give you a few broad themes on what has worked for us, here’s a short list:

• Writing in-depth articles (with lots of images) such as this and this
• Posting interviews and guest posts on our blog (from industry experts)
• Releasing free tools (such as A/B testing duration calculator)
• Doing a webinar with a complementary startup in same industry
• Making an infographic (we are yet to explore this tactic, but it works wonderfully)
• Crunching/compiling statistics and releasing them (people LOVE reading about statistics)

As a new startup, how do you promote your great content?

Producing great content is not the only thing you need to do; you need to promote that content too. Initially, when you have no readership, no followers or no fans — how do you get your content out to millions of eyeballs? For promoting Visual Website Optimizer, there are various methods I used, some of them are below:

• Reach out to industry influencers and ask them what they think of your article (they will tweet it, if they find it useful)
• Promote it on industry specific forums and communities (every industry has lots of forums online. You should go there and promote your content)
• Promote it on general social communities where influencers may hang out (such as Hacker News, Reddit, etc.)

Contacting people and asking them to promote your content if they like it is perhaps the easiest way to seed your initial readership. People are generally very nice. Just try emailing 10 industry experts today with a link to one of your contents and see how many of them reply.

Slowly, once you achieve a sizable number of readership, every new piece of content that you publish will be guaranteed to be seen by a number of individuals (who will share that content with their own readers/followers). So, it snowballs and your readership increases over time (given you keep producing great content, which is a hard job in itself). Each additional eyeball becomes easier to acquire. That’s the beauty of building a following.

Summary: produce great content, build a following and your startup gets promoted as a side-effect

I would love to hear about which tactics have worked for your startup so that I can update my list above. Please leave a comment below on what you think about this post or if you have anything to add.

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Yesterday, my startup hit a significant milestone: 10,000 total accounts (trial + paid). And last month marked one year anniversary of launching paid plans for Visual Website Optimizer. I think it is a good time to reflect what it means to me and the business.

Needless to say, I am very happy that we can boast of a small, smart team and big brand customers like Microsoft, Groupon and AMD. However, when I think about it — I was much more excited (and happier) about first 10 paying customers than 10 new paying customers now. Back then when I was launching it, there was an unknown territory to explore and I was a warrior ready to battle the unknown.

Questions and Euphoria

Whether it would work? Or, whether I would need to get a job? I still distinctly remember getting the first paid order and delirium it had caused. Even though I had read almost all essays of Paul Graham and absorbed myself into startup world (perhaps) bit too much, the realization that someone was ready to pay for my hacks was an incredible feeling. Then, within first month of launching paid plans, when the revenue surpassed four times my previous market salary, I was ecstatic. Who could have guessed that? The coverage on blogs, feedback from customers, demoing and closing Fortune 500 customers like Microsoft, 10% revenue growth every month, scaling beyond one 512 MB VPS (now we have 30 servers!). It was all new for me; it was exciting! I loved it.

It can be done!

Since then, inside me, a thought has been taking life of its own. The thought is an incredibly powerful one; the main essence is: it can be done! Today scaling servers, coverage on a major blog, additional customers and many other aspects doesn’t give the same kick like they used to give me. And, I guess, that’s because the question that I set on to answer via a startup has been answered (to a certain extent — of course, I know tomorrow is unknown). Paul Graham’s essays were theory to me, but Visual Website Optimizer is a practical. The initial euphoria of a startup was because it was a sudden transformation for me: from having a regular job to making (unpredictable and scalable) amount of money even while I am sleeping. Now, I guess, the theoretical question has been answered: it can be done! (And, apparently, it can be done by anyone — no special skills needed.)

What’s next?

Well, what’ s next best logical step for my startup? Of course, team will grow, product development wil keep happening (in fact, we are launching a new interface next week) and we may even introduce new products (have exciting ideas – wink, wink). But the theoretical question has been answered and a certain level of satisfaction has set in. What can be the next level of kick for my sweet-little startup? Perhaps doing something that requires another leap of faith and pushes us into the unknown.

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We had a horrible experience with Airtel, our Internet provider, today. Our Internet line hasn’t been working since morning, I registered a complaint and was promised it would be fixed by 6:30 pm in the evening. The time passed and when I checked the complaint status, it was marked closed. Asked for an explanation, a customer service representative put me on hold for — drumroll, please — full 15 minutes before I gave up. Their IVRS system is impossible to navigate and you are actually asked to dial a gazzilion numbers before. Internet is full of complaints about Airtel and they recently ranked as worst customer service company in India. I’m surprised how the highly paid bosses don’t realize this or don’t do anything to do this. Baffled, surprised and makes me punch myself.

Sadly, Airtel is not an exception. Many large companies have impossible customer service processes. What’s even more sad is that this poor customer service experience has become a norm and there are even funny (but true) comics based on this reality. Why can’t be world full of Zappos like companies who believe in delighting the customers?

Customer service is not cost of sales

I think the primary reason for endemic poor customer service is because management typically includes it under the cost of sales head. Unfortunately, cost of sales is something organizations see as an unwelcome item on their balance sheet. They want to reduce it or better still eliminate it completely. Having more staff in customer service centers means more cost, so they come up with (unintelligent and ultimately frustrating) ways to automate the customer service. They fail at this automation miserably and end up annoying the customers. All this is because customer service is seen as cost of sales, which is wrong in my opinion.

Customer service is marketing expense

Ironically, just because poor customer service is endemic, a company can get huge competitive advantage just by having a good customer service. Each customer service interaction leads to either a happy-and-satisfied customer or a frustrated-and-angry customer. Research shows that buying decisions are heavily influenced by peers, friends and family. Advertisements and marketing just creates awareness. It’s ultimately the recommendations that cause people to purchase stuff. And guess what drives recommendations? Product quality and features is one part. The other big part is customer service. No frustrated customer will EVER recommend a service, no matter how many features you cram into it or no matter if you run never ending national TV advertisements.

The right way to look at customer service is to see it as a form of marketing expense. If every customer service interaction creates a happy customer, it should be seen as an alternative to advertising or marketing. In fact, even if most organizations spend even 10% of their billions of dollars of advertisement budget on customer service, world will be a much better place.

Humble plea: if any of the big bosses are reading this post, please do your bit to make the organization embrace customer service!

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Again and again, people try to distinguish between two kinds of startups: growth and lifestyle. Broadly speaking, here’s how people categorize these startups:

Growth Startup

• Raises VC or angel capital
• Aggressive hockey-stick like growth
• Laser focused on an “exit-event” (acquisition, IPO, etc.)
• Focus on revenue (not profits) or other growth metrics

Lifestyle Startup

• Bootstrapped of Self-funded
• Slow growth or no growth at all
• No exit strategy per se as the business is part of founders’ lifestyles
• Focus on profits at all times (as they don’t have external capital)

With Visual Website Optimizer, many people have asked me to clarify whether it’s a growth business or a lifestyle business. I’m always baffled with this question because these two categories seem narrow and I don’t see my startup getting pigeon-holed into one of them. It is true that we haven’t yet raised any VC or angel funding. But does it really disqualify us from being a growth business? What if I tell you that our revenues (and profits) have been growing by 10-15% every month. We are actively hiring but we’re not in a rush to expand the team aggressively (sacrificing quality). We’re happy with the slow but quality growth in team and product features. Does it make us a lifestyle business?

Why should there be a difference at all?

Why can’t a business qualify both categories: lifestyle and growth? Growth businesses typically take years before an exit event happens (if at all). What does the founding team do during that time? Raise multiple rounds of funding to stay afloat hoping to find the elusive exit event. Wouldn’t it be much better if a business has profit mindset of a lifestyle business but an ambition to become a large company like a growth business?

I don’t see any incompatibility between these two ambitions and in fact most great non-Internet businesses had started that way (McDonald’s, Walmart, etc). These companies became behemoths not in 5-10 years but over course of many years while always keeping profitability in mind. You wouldn’t call McDonald’s as a lifestyle business, would you? With most Internet and technology startups, there is such a rush to grow big at expense of profitability. Why can’t it be a slow but steady growth over a period of many years?

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I was at an Indian startup event today and did not enjoy the experience. It felt typical of what Indian startup scene has come to be (it is my perspective, of course. Feel free to disagree). There are two specific things which are wrong about startup scene in India: a) it’s a huge “ego-chamber”; b) most of early stage entrepreneurs are not solving problems for global market.

About “Ego-chamber”

Indian startup community is a tightly knit one and ironically it is also one of the biggest disadvantages. In today’s event, I saw entrepreneurs discussing ideas amongst themselves. One would say: “your idea is cool“. The other would respond: “no man, your idea is cool“. You see — perfect ego boosting so that nobody feels bad about their efforts. The tiny startup community in India has absolutely no connection to outside world and the actual customers are least bothered about these startup events. The worst part, in fact, is that since entrepreneurs talk to other fellow entrepreneurs at such events and no body wants to be the bad guy, they end up getting false hopes about coolness of their startup. The only solution to this is getting away from ego-boosting talk at startup events and actually testing your product validity with customers and being ruthless at that.

Another aspect to this “ego-chamber” is that there are lot of buzzwords that entrepreneurs keep hearing without knowing the full context. People will talk about persistence, distribution channels, cloud computing, social media analytics and what not. But where’s the story I can understand? Who is going to tell me why persistence matters or how distribution channels increased your revenue by 10x? The startup community would throw around all these buzzwords and sadly nobody disagrees or asks for clarification because no body wants to be the bad guy crushing the other entrepreneur’s ego. I say: crush each other’s ego. It’s the last thing you want to have when starting out. Seek criticism.

Being nice. Yes, that’s the biggest problem with Indian startup community. For example, if an entrepreneur is working on a social network around Bollywood movies, instead of saying it is cool why can’t you ask: how are you going to make money, without funding how are you going to find initial users, how big is the market, what traction have you got so far and how you honestly think it is the lamest idea ever.

2nd problem: solving a small problem specifically for Indian market

Internet in India hasn’t still fully matured. People still buy more books in offline stores than online stores. There’s no money in advertising. On Internet, you never have to meet your customers in person and mostly nobody cares if you are based out of India or Mongolia. All they want is a product that delivers value to them. So, why do I see many entrepreneurs solving following problems:

• Videos aggregator of Indian movies
• Job tracking system for Indian market
• ERP solutions for Indian SMEs
• Vertical search engine for India
• Event aggregator for Indian events

Notice that most of the problems are global in nature, so why specifically target Indian market (which isn’t even mature yet). Why don’t you launch your product for US, UK, Europe or Australia? An excuse could be that you haven’t got a product to compete globally but that’s a poor excuse. Improve your product and make it globally competitive. What’s stopping you? Another excuse could be lack of funding. Well if you are ready to launch without funding in India, why can’t you launch without funding in San Francisco? It costs practically the same to launch a job tracking system in US. All you have to do is to run some targeted AdWords campaigns. (Just an example but my point is that launching is nothing fancy. You have to see where most of your customers are and launch there instead of launching and remaining only in India)

Please answer me: why is Indian market special even though it is small and with much less revenue potential?

If you can’t answer this, better gear up your product to compete Internationally. There’s a vast market out there!

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